Chapter Text
Ishgard’s king, in want of an heir, grew impatient. And so the queen, Ermentrude, grew desperate.
In a grotto dedicated to Saint Shiva she knelt and prayed—not for the first time—that some goddess or divinity might render possible that which seemed unfated. Her breath turned to ice as it left her lips and by the time the chill had worked through the many layers of her long skirts, Ermentrude’s faith did falter.
Then a voice like the crackle of ice underfoot spoke in her ear, seemingly carried on the wind.
A child I will give you, it spoke. And a choice.
Ermentrude looked imploringly to the carven likeness of the saint pedestaled before her and nearly wept in gratitude.
Break the ice and drink of the grotto’s spring, and you may have a daughter. Eat of the frozen flowers at the spring’s edge, and you may have a son.
Saint Shiva’s voice faded then, her offered blessing made clear.
But for Ermentrude, who had spent more than a decade absent of children, the choice seemed an unnecessary dilemma. Why should a saintly goddess be limited to granting only one child? If Shiva could provide one or the other, then surely both are within her power.
The queen’s youth was nearly spent, after all, and this was possibly her last and only chance at the children she longed for.
She drank from the spring. She swallowed frozen petals. She chose both.
By the size she grows to and the heaviness she feels, Ermentrude joyfully expects twins. For all the tales on the fickleness of the gods and their servants, Saint Shiva has more than delivered her promised miracle.
Naught goes amiss until the queen is on the birthing bed. There, crowded over by her ladies-in-waiting and the royal chirurgeon, Ermentrude’s first child is born: a dark-scaled wyrmling with a plump tail and large blue eyes that blink open, reptilian-like, to view them all.
The screams are instant. The nurses’ horror is only barely pushed aside for the sake of their queen, who already labors to deliver her second child. The midwife rushes to help her, the slippery wyrmling and its soft squeaking ignored for the moment.
To the relief of the room, this second baby is perfectly elezen from ear to toe. The babe is swaddled and placed in his waiting mother’s arms, four attendants fussing over them both.
With a worried pinch between her brows, the queen calls out for her firstborn. The midwife and the ladies-in-waiting share a look.
“Stillborn,” they assure her, though they will neither let her see nor touch the monstrous little wyrmling that slithered out of her. What a fright it would be—what a sinful, suspect mark upon their queen!
Ermentrude argues as she shifts in the bed, weak from exhaustion. She only manages a fleeting glimpse of the form that the midwife bundles up in a sheet. It’s dark and wet-gleaming, ridged and bumped. But it is hers.
The royal chirurgeon, having observed all on behalf of the king, makes an easy call.
“Get rid of it, quietly. Have one of the kingsguard take it out of the castle and kill it, lest His Majesty learn of this… cursed spawn.”
Ser Alberic is summoned. A wriggling bundle of blankets is pushed unceremoniously into his armored hands. There is no time for either questions or answers—not that it is a kingsuard’s place to ask.
At the edge of a dark, rarely used bridge in the Holy See’s dim lower levels, Ser Alberic lingers with his infant charge. Against the royal chirurgeon’s hissed warning, he peels back the blankets and peers within, afraid to find some poor, politically inconvenient bastard.
Instead, he stares at the scaly little whelp wrapped within, puzzled. There are still drakes and wyverns and biasts about Coerthas, yes, but how would the chirurgeon and midwife have come by one?
One so small, so freshly hatched… and so soon after the queen’s labor ended.
The knight peers over the railing and into the roiling, moonlit mist of the Abyss. It would be ease itself to drop the thing over and return to his post. But as Ser Alberic looks down upon the small, wriggling wyrmling cast out at birth, he finds in himself more pity than disgust.
With a sigh, he tucks the blanket around the small creature, draws the hood of his cloak up, and trudges on, down the Steps of Faith and into snowy Coerthan woods.
Winter here kills quickly, but Ser Alberic knows of a small hot spring not far off. He sets the wyrmling there near the edge of a warm pool, under a small outcropping of stone.
Knowing it may well die despite his effort to spare it, he offers prayers to Halone and Saint Shiva on the wretched creature’s behalf, pausing only when he realizes he knows what not to call the wee wyrm.
Alberic doubts anyone cared to give it a name, considering how quickly he was enlisted to kill it.
“Estinien,” he decides after a few moments, tucking the blanket around the wyrmling’s tiny, barely wriggling form. It seems a shame for the thing to be born and die with no name at all, so… yes.
Estinien.
Neither snow nor ice stick to the ground surrounding the steam-clouded pools of the spring. There are numerous crevices and divots in the stone for a small wyrmling to hide—and, conveniently, to snack on beetles and wood grubs.
On occasion, a dark-haired man in noisy, clinking metal comes to scatter meat scraps across the ground, shouting out, Estinien!
The little wyrmling learns to answer the call, scuttling out from its hiding place to eat. The towering figure speaks gently and even sometimes scratches under his chin.
One day, the man is shadowed by others like him, all in matching armor and wielding gleaming blades. Their swords ring against his spear, the clatter making the wyrmling’s small legs tremble. They force the man who calls him Estinien to buckle to the earth, alongside the bodies of those he’d managed to strike down first.
Then the shouts and hurled spears come for the wyrmling—the beast, they howl, the monster—their many hands casting rocks aside and jabbing daggers into every hidey-hole they find. With a tiny heart beating as quick as its feet can run, it is all Estinien can do to scurry up over the rocks and flee into the wide, cold unknown.
Seasons pass, warm and cold and back again. Estinien grows little, stunted upon a diet of crickets and small vermin.
He knows to hide whenever he hears the voices of men or the barks of their hungry hounds. He is good at going unseen, belly pressed low to the ground and watchful eyes fixed upward. Anything that sees him can kill him, eat him, and take his skin.
But perfect vigilance is a grand task on an empty belly and weary legs.
While pitifully curled under the branches of a leafy alder tree amidst a cool spring rainstorm, a small elezen boy stumbles upon him.
Estinien scrambles from his small perch atop gnarled roots, knowing screams and bone-cracking blows are soon to follow. But the heavy deluge of rain that awaits and the surprising softness of the boy’s voice give him pause.
“Wait! Wait, don’t go! I mean you no harm.”
Estinien has overheard enough men to recognize their words—most, anyway. These are not ones he expected to hear.
“This is foul weather to be caught outside in. Here, let’s try this,” the shepherd with soot-black hair says as he crouches down low, bare fingers unfastening the buttons of his cloak.
With slow movements and a soft smile, he drapes the wool cloth over his arms and shuffles closer, sheltering Estinien from the rain dripping through the alder’s branches. The fabric is still warm where it brushes over Estinien’s wet scales.
“Now, isn’t that better?”
The feeling is foreign—the opposite of a shrieking shadow looming over him or a boot raised to stomp him down. Estinien can only liken it to foggy memories of a shining steel hand that once fed him.
He hesitates, neither lashing out nor scurrying away. The tremble that wracks him from nose to tail is only half from the weather.
“How long have you been out here for?” When Estinien does naught more than stare up at him with wide, unblinking eyes, the shepherd adds, “The storms are only supposed to get worse as the sennight wears on. That’s what the astrologians who passed through a few days ago said, anyway.”
Estinien blinks, unsure what to make of such gentle speech aimed at him. It does not quite feel like a trap...
He draws his clawed feet under his belly and curls his tail around himself, no longer braced to bolt.
“If you’ve nowhere else to go, you can come with me.” Rain falling down through the leaves dots his cheeks and draws the ends of the young shepherd’s hair into wet, fine-tipped curls. He scarcely seems to notice as he gradually grows drenched. “Where I am going is dry, at least.”
Dry? Maybe it will be warm, too. The mere idea is enough for a weary, waterlogged Estinien to extend a sliver of trust to this strange boy.
He does not bite the hands that touch so lightly upon his back and curve so gently under his belly—and how alien and vulnerable it is, being scooped up and carried in narrow, shivering arms, cradled close enough to smell the pinesap on the boy’s skin and the berries on his breath.
The shepherd pulls his cloak over the both of them before leaving the flimsy, leafy shelter of the alder behind.
The hissing patter of rainfall reverberates around them such that Estinien can hear little else but the quick beat of the shepherd’s heart and the breaths that move through him as they crest muddy hill after hill after hill. He is not dry—neither of them are now—but it is warmer to be held in the boy’s arms.
They arrive at a barn behind the largest stone house in the village just as the storm clouds above are turning black and thrumming with lightning. Inside, dozens of karakul crowd under the rain-curtained eaves. Chickens cluck. Rabbits snuffle in their hutches.
Up a ladder and into a loft, Estinien is carried and then set loose.
The boy lights an oil lamp, its flame bright enough to shed some faint warmth. He strips off his wet clothes and puts them on a hanging line to dry; once dressed in a long, heavily patched shirt, he settles down cross-legged and holds his hands before the lamp.
Estinien has come this far… why not a few ilms further? He slinks over to the lantern, giving the boy occasional glances, and settles there with his feet tucked underneath himself.
“Better than being out in the rain, is it not?” The shepherd’s voice is hoarser than it was earlier. “You’re welcome to stay here with me, little one… just don’t go trying to eat any of the lord’s chickens or eggs. And don’t ever let anyone else see you, alright?”
Estinien lets out a noise halfway between a growl and a squeak, which gives his host a laugh.
The boy plucks straw from his own bed to make a nestlike pile beside it. It is soft, warm, and dry. And though he is not alone, Estinien’s heart is calm and his weary little bones are at ease.
For the first night in all that he can remember, he sleeps peacefully.
The vigilance that had once shielded Estinien like a second suit of scales quickly chips and fades into a relic—a thing he almost forgets how to don.
The shepherd boy is ever-sweet. Though his lodgings are humble, he shares them freely; in return, Estinien hunts the mice and rats that try to nest in the boy’s bedding. He shares spare morsels from his own supper to feed Estinien and then forgives when the wyrmling snaps his fingers in hunger. And when he takes to the field to mind the flock, he lets Estinien coil atop his shoulders and curl around the back of his neck, hidden under the cover of his oversized cloak.
The wyrmling grows accustomed to slumbering nestled beside the shepherd, often falling asleep to the touch of fingertips on his scales. He perks at the sound of that voice, listening attentively as the boy tells him stories about the karakul he tends, the letters he’s taught himself to read, and all the things he wishes to one day do: become a valiant knight, a learned scholar, a baker, or even join the Halonic priesthood, though he complains of the local clergymen often.
And he wants to find his mother and father, if they still live—if they want him back, maybe, now that some years have passed.
“If I ever do get to go back to Ishgard, I will bring you with me. We’ll stick together no matter what,” the boy assures while running a finger down Estinien’s scaly back.
One winter afternoon, the lordly master of the house sends Aymeric to collect butter and cheese from a tenant the next village over. He brings Estinien with him, of course, and it is full dark by the time they begin their return to Ferndale, walking the narrow countryside road with just the light of the moon and its reflection off pale, snowy hillsides.
Estinien, now the size of a hefty housecat, sits heavy in the shepherd’s arms. The boy’s nose and cheeks and ears are nipped a bright red from the cold; he laughs as the wyrm’s small, pointed tongue pokes out and peppers licks along the side of his face.
Halfway home, the pair hear crunching on the road ahead, just around a bend. The shepherd stops still, squeezing Estinien tighter. The night is dark and there are wolves and bears that sometimes descend into the valley.
But the figures that round the bend are not four-legged. More surprising still, they are armored—temple knights, polished metal glinting under the light of the moon and their lanterns—aside from the stern-faced man at their head, garbed in voluminous white robes and cloaked in pale grey fur.
The sound of boots on icy, snow-crusted gravel halts. A tremble shakes the young shepherd just as the village priest’s eyes widen in horror at the scaly wyrmling clutched in his arms.
“What is that?” one of the knights in back says.
“A bloody whelp!” another shouts. “A drake or a biast, maybe? Damned if I know which.”
“Where did the little bastard even find one?”
The priest, his face a dark and purplish red, commands, “Relieve the boy of that thing at once!”
As the knights approach, several unsheathing their swords, the shepherd boy makes a stumbling attempt to escape.
There is nowhere to run, though, hemmed in on all sides by snowdrifts and outpaced by the longer legs of larger men.
Three pairs of hands quickly pry at the boy’s arms to loosen his hold on Estinien, who frantically snaps at their fingers to protect his friend. He latches onto a metal gauntlet, fangs sinking in between a gap along the thumb joint and drawing blood. Having tasted it, Estinien crunches down harder, earning a shriek and a sharp jerk that sends him flying through the air and into a nearby snowbank.
Dazed and lost in a smothering depth of snow, Estinien can scarcely move at first. The muffled voice of the shepherd guides him.
“No, that’s my friend! Please, please, he has caused no harm!”
At the sound of a sharp cry, Estinien burrows faster, his small toes numb as he claws frantically through ice and snow.
Estinien emerges from the drift in time to see the white-robed man striking the young shepherd’s back with his wooden cane, the blows only ceasing when the boy is crumpled on hands and knees in the middle of the road.
“You dare,” the priest sneers through shriveled lips, unmoved by the small figure curling in on itself, “keep such a vicious beast under your lord master’s roof? And after he so generously took you in! After I vouched that if nothing else, you might at least make a competent farmhand! Disgraceful.”
His shepherd! His friend. Estinien would run to him, if not for the knights who bar the way—if not for his own smallness, his weakness, his helplessness against men of this size and number. After spotting him, they plunge their swords and spears into the surrounding snow with such vigor that it is all Estinien can do to avoid being skewered.
With one last glimpse at the boy who’d kept him warm and safe and well-fed, Estinien flees once more.
He cautiously ventures back to that same barn the next night, but there is no sign of the shepherd boy he knew.
A new boy resides in the barn, just as young and scrawny but with different hair and eyes and ears. Bearing enough guilt to make his belly slither across the ground, Estinien leaves before he is seen.
He makes it as far as that same alder tree before the sick feeling inside of him pours itself out. He retches. He whines. He trembles from nose to tail, and no hand comes to comfort him. When he finally feels empty rather overfilled by loss, Estinien curls there and whimpers until he can sleep.
Having no reason nor desire to stay, he soon retreats from the roads and villages of men and into deep mountainside forests—far from the shepherd boy’s kindness and the cruelty of men both.
With no gentle hand to feed him, Estinien can rely only upon his own strength, meager as it is.
But survival warps him to fit its cause, and the prey here is more bountiful than mice.
Dense muscle thickens under his scales. The short stubs along his shoulder blades elongate, forming long-spanned wings. Over the course of a few years, horns emerge in spiraled curves from the crown of his skull and a mane of white fur sprouts along his neck. He grows long and tall and, in short order, goes unchallenged by even the forest’s greatest beasts.
No matter the changing skies and seasons, Estinien clings to memories past. He knows hands once held and touched him, even if the sensation itself is long forgotten. He remembers when he was small and yet felt safe, held fast in a shepherd’s arms and lulled by the steady rise and fall of his narrow chest. He dreams of it, even.
One morning after such a dream, Estinien wakes to find himself small again.
Terrified, he studies the backs and palms of his pale hands, each five-fingered and possessing only short, shallow claws. White hair spills around his scale-studded shoulders. And between his fingers he feels his way up long, pointed ears that remind him of his lost shepherd.
Estinien knows not how or why he is suddenly so man-like—only the stomach-knotting fear that this will be his new shape forevermore, soft-skinned and vulnerable, after having tasted the assurance of being a wyrm full grown.
On two lean legs and bare feet, he rises and sways. His tail, so much thinner and shorter than he is used to, whips side to side while he finds his balance.
In the glassy reflection of a still, dark lake, Estinien looks upon his own likeness.
The face that meets him is strange and severe. While angling his head this way and that, he skims the pads of his fingers along high cheekbones and down the curve of his jaw. He thumbs at his lashes and pinches his bottom lip. His tongue runs along short, thin, dull-edged teeth.
There are still traces of the familiar, though: horns crown his head and sparse black scales spot otherwise delicate skin. His canines remain long and sharp. His eyes are still slitted. Even now, with the shape and diminutive size of a man, he could never walk through some countryside town and pass for a merchant or farmer.
Not that he wishes to. Barring one or two, what have the people of Coerthas ever been but monstrous?
His frantic heartbeat gradually slows to match the gentle lapping at the lakeshore. The last warm fragments of his dreaming start to fade. And once calmer, somewhat settled into the strangeness of this skin, Estinien finds it is not so alien after all.
His aether feels unchanged, if concentrated in this new shape. His wyrm self is still there within reach, if temporarily out of sight. He's not damned to this. He can't be.
As he kneels there in the mud, peering into his own reflection, Estinien’s mind naturally wanders to what the young shepherd boy must look like now.
His hair would be just as black, he imagines. His eyes… Estinien knows their shape and bright color and the dark border of his lashes. The set of his ears, the width of his smile, the light scent that always lingered under the smells of karakul and musty hay.
His aether stirs almost of its own accord, dark wisps of it seeping from the scales rapidly rising along his forearms. As his form swells and his reflection changes to one of long teeth and sweeping horns, his relief is further buoyed with this: if he saw the boy again, he would know it.
But Estinien wonders… would the boy know him?