The village had not been kind, when her father fled the Shroud.

Overnight, his name had been stricken from the lexicon, his bloodline a curse, and Eithne found even her own mother silent and detached. There was little to be said: to leave was as if to die, and Fionn had chosen death. No longer was Eithne their little kernel, eager to bloom into a Veena as great as their sire, as they had been a few years ago. She was small, her peers now quickly towering over her, and there was little she excelled at outside of “daydreaming”, as they would call it with derision. What was a kernel, but feed for the scavenging creatures in the undergrowth?

Eithne would speak of visions, Hydaelyn’s pleas distant yet desperate, the cry of the Elementals reaching a fever pitch on the eve of the last homecoming, when Bran had come to deliver her father’s goodbye.

“If it is so, then all the more cowardly for a warder to flee.” They’d sneer, and Fiahd would shush her, her firm gaze telling her to swallow the words and accept their lot.

Small, pale little kernel, always staring at the moon, her eyes distant and disconnected. Her father’s skill with a bow had not found its way to her, and she could scarcely compare to her mother’s crafting skill, her fingers neither quick nor uniquely adept to intricate work. A burden, is what she had become, her father’s features nothing but a painful brand to remind them all of what they had lost; no matter how thorough they might be when excising his memory.

They all knew. Just like him, they’d say, but their voices were no longer filled with the same pride they’d had before. She will flee her duty ‘ere long, they’d whisper as they trawled the brush for materials, unknowing of Eithne resting amidst the canopy. First she had been cursed to never trail the Shroud at the Elementals’ behest, and now she was cursed to suffer the loss of her standing, cursed to never grieve the loss of her father, lest the village dig their claws into her further.

It was easy, then, to deny him. To resent him and fill the spaces between his absence with scorn and malice. It fit well into the paradigm she had constructed of the Veena, of these cold and reticent people, unable to find genuine connection lest their traditions suffer. Traditions they held in far greater esteem than the people around them, the kits who dreamt of following them nothing but lambs upon the Elementals’ altar. If even Fionn the Cunning, the great warden of the Shroud, could leave nothing but whispers in his wake, what hope had his little untalented kernel of achieving anything?

In her heart burned a fire, Hydaelyn’s cries creating a yearning too strong for her to deny, a yearning further emboldened by her village’s attempts at suffocating it.

Still, regardless of her misguided condemnation, her heart would be laid bare under Dalamud’s all-consuming descent. Who else would she cry out for as the red moon breached the clouds, as her mothers held her and her brethren close? She could never forget how the forest shivered under its intense pressure, and the Elementals cried loud enough to bring them all to their knees. In that moment, she heard Hydaelyn’s call clearer than ever before, and in her heart she held his image, the feeling of his calloused hands on her head, as she prayed to the Mothercrystal for salvation.

O gods of my forefathers, she’d cry, keep him safe.