Chapter Text
We might not be as fucked as I thought. That was the professional opinion of a few dozen skywatchers, a corps worth of aetherengineers, and myself, was that we were fucked. But I think I’ve figured out how to un-fuck us. Maybe.
I should probably give some background. I’m Aydria Fireheart, currently presiding Director of Research for the Garlond Ironworks. Yes, that Aydria Fireheart, the “Warrior of Light.” I don’t know who will end up reading these someday, if anyone, but if you’ve found records that I died in the Calamity - they’re wrong. People thought I (and all the rest of the Scions) died to Black Rose when it was first unleashed by the Garleans two years ago, after a civil war caused us to be able to push them back and lead to desperate Garlean commanders unleashing their bioweapon on us. If you haven’t read the records on that…well, you don’t really need to. Suffices to say, this star lost a lot of its best people in a matter of hours - that’s all there really is to it.
I should have been among them, and honestly, I still haven’t figured out how I’m alive. By all rights, I should be dead - my aether is Light-bleached to hells and back, and it doesn’t move. If you’re anyone else, that kills you pretty much instantly. If you’re me, though, seemingly all it does is turn all your hair and eyes white.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, future reader. “But Aydria,” you’re thinking, “surely if you can survive it, you’re walking around with the key to some kind of cure?”
And to that, I have this to say: what do you think I am, stupid? That’s the first thing I studied. For weeks, all I did was take constant scans of every single part of my body trying to figure out how the hells I was alive - I’ve got nothing. Every aetherologist I’ve talked to has got nothing; every medical specialist is shocked and a little bit horrified I’m even able to walk around. So we’ve kind of given up on that one. Chalk it up to Hydaelyn weaving some more of Her magic or something and deciding that I alone get to live through Black Rose.
Anyway. It’s been two years since then, which got marked by the survivors as the 8th Umbral Calamity. I worked with what remained of the crumbling city-states and gathered with other survivors in Sharlayan, where we’ve been holed up for the better part of a year now. It’s been hard, but it was stable enough, especially compared to the completely inhospitable state of the mainland.
Note I said “was.” This brings me to why we all thought we were fucked. Black Rose, if you somehow don’t know, quickly took on a self-perpetuating life of its own after it was deployed, in the form of roiling clouds of Light-infused gas. We took to calling them storms, because they blow around the continent almost like they’re part of the weather now. They halt all aetherflow in anything they touch, which, as I mentioned earlier, is pretty quickly lethal to anything living. To our dismay, the weapon worked far better than the Garleans could ever have anticipated, and saps the land, too - making growing any crops in the soil impossible. As a mercy, once the storm moves on, the star is still able to equilibrate itself, so the aether does return to the land, albeit too slowly to do any reliable farming even if you did move all your plants out of the way of the storm.
And so, the reason why we thought we were fucked is that a storm we were tracking left the mainland and started making its way over water towards us. The whole reason we evacuated to the island city was precisely because the storms hadn’t done that, but no real sense in figuring out the why right now when we’ve got a crisis on our hands still. We all figured we’d have to abandon the island, get back on ships, and get out of the path of the storm, or just die to it, which understandably nobody was looking to do. The problem with up and leaving is food. We can’t store enough provisions for an extended trip on the ships we have, and unlike the last time we put most of the surviving population of the star on boats, we don’t have a viable destination for somewhere we could start growing more food.
We started to load up the boats a few days ago anyway, stubborn as we are, but everyone had kind of silently acknowledged that doing so was fighting a losing battle against time. Wedge (or was it Biggs?) joked about just filling one of the ships with dirt and making a mobile farm, which certainly wouldn’t be enough, but it got me thinking. There’s a massive, unfinished project airship of sorts down deep underneath Sharlayan, at the center of Labyrinthos, which is where most of our farming is taking place right now. The ship currently can’t fly, but it’s huge - more than enough space to house the few thousand people we have left with room to spare. And that room to spare? We can use it; it doesn’t just have to go to waste - we can convert whole floors of the ship into gardens of sorts, and boom, there’s our food problem solved.
Which sounds great, right? We’d be taking all the needs of a society and putting them on a mobile platform, which would pretty much permanently solve any concern of storms, and, more importantly, keep us all alive and out of the way of this one without having to resort to slowly starving ourselves. And it is great - it’s a great plan, except for the tiny problem of the ship being completely immobile right now.
C-V01 and I took a look at the aetherburner design the Sharlayans had installed, and while it probably worked fine before the Calamity fucked the aetherflows all over the star, it’s basically a giant paperweight now.
We’ve got about 76 days before the storm actually makes its way all the way to us, which means I’ve got 76 days to design, build, and install a thrust vector for this ship and get it airborne, or we’re all toast.
Well.
Not me, I guess. I’d live. Not sure it’d be worth it, though.