ghost in the dunes (new radiant dawn fanfic + notes)

[kradeelav]

after a failed assassination attempt on rafiel, nailah asks zihark to find the would-be killer in the heart of hatari. set 12 years post radiant dawn. for queenlua .

fandoms: fire emblem tellius
characters: nailah, rafiel, zihark
relationships: nailah/zihark, nailah&rafiel, implied nailah/rafiel
tags: hatari, murder mystery hijinks, nailah tops every named dude, misuse of vulenaries

~8k, here on Ao3

(also hi i guess i write fanfiction now oops lol)

• i still laugh at how this came to me, violently, wholesale in two exact halves of (a) reading lua's nagamas prompts ( :D ) and realizing we have a 1:1 venn diagram of wishlist tropes/prompts down to truly guilty pleasure material and that i should just write the damn thing already, waiting for the exchange be damned and (b) being startled at night by this enormous cat silhouette in the bed that night (aka grandma's fat black cat) and going 'man cats would be fantastic assassins' and then 'man i need a plot ..... wait, cats eat birds, what if somebody tried to off rafiel in hatari, YEAH...."
  
  • bam, slam dunk, i speed-run the thing in like, four, five days while being absolutely posessed. lord do I wish they all came like that.

• "something about the combination of morbid humor + profane grief even in stuff as stupid as fanservice is really ticklin' the neurons rn" was underlined in my journal/written elsewhere, and while that had more to do with the recent art pieces being drawn now, it made me think how the one thing about stephen king's writing that's stayed with me for decades is that he uses the emotions of grief with sex (and vice versa) in an all-american peanut butter + jelly seamless mix for an incredible sharper, more mature taste to flavor his adults. i love it, and the headspace works extremely well for writing the dynamics here.
  
  • re the smut i promise you this story was gen at first, and that I was going to do a separate something (likely art) for the nailah/zihark smut except life uh, finds a way ;D;  halfway through i realized nailah would 100% be so brazen to just, straight up appear in his bedroom and it was pretty easy to link that with the sparring plot, and... l o l

• on that note, what got me off my butt to write this was a bit in lua's prompts (bless u) about "something about zihark that *didn't* focus on his old laguz girlfriend -- how he interacts with people, what's his vigilante stick, what does he do peacekeeping wise etc etc"
  
  • the mentality i was going for here was sure, he was absolutely *marked* by the experience, and it reverberates in the psyche, but it doesn't rule every single decision in the aftermath. here it sort of just fell into place that one of the arching themes was about hired killers, how tf do people reconcile "peacekeeping" with "more killing" u know? so there was a nesting set of themes here waaaaay beyond one particular old ghost.
  • also the whole parallel religion thing of handling 'what do you believe in after killing *your goddess of the whole land". like, huh! wow! that's a pretty big thing to wrangle with post RD for literally all of the characters!  i'd love to see somebody who's into theology really grapple with it from a sociological-theological standpoint, but here that religious doubt was a real shot of characterization i couldn't resist prodding at. left it pretty vague but ironically the shrine-coin scene is my favorite right behind the post-coitus one. felt like there was a neat mixture of *very complicated* unspoken emotions in both of those.

• confession: i did horribly cheat with zihark as the main pov considering I've worked with his voice long enough for it to be ... sheesh, like driving with one hand on the steering wheel of the car? he needed barely any prodding, all i had to do was to hand over the mic. nailah and rafiel having super specific voices made dialogue enormously easy between 'em to the point that descriptions were far harder, when normally it's the reverse.
  
  • what else is in my journal notes ... "zihark strikes me as somebody very cerebrally warm/intense and very sexually warm/intense but the middle emotional layer is just a shot dead tombstone that he's not really eager to tap into anytime soon - imo somebody who writes him well understands that the missing areas matter more than is what actually being said."
  • "nailah activates him strangely because she's not afraid to push past his resistance/boundaries and tap into the chemistry that she knows/sees is there. what nailah wants, nailah gets." (which, ironically, the last line got used in the fic itself because it was pretty succinct, all things considering)
  • also something i very rarely see done with zihark in fics is his genuine sense of dry humor - like, he jokes around and seriously winds people up in both PoR/RD in almost every other line when there's not something serious going down, and it was an absolute blast letting him have some rope to go nuts there. it also helped solidify the tone as this very ... like, old-timey the Mummy adventure hijinks era? there's some mystery fun, there's some crazy action, some spice, and a very specific kind of 80's action movie humor and male objectification throughout.
  • it's a super minor thing, but the one throwaway line to his black robes is his RD unused color palette, as seen here. Little bit of a genius bonus if you've read/have the art book, since i can't see the beorc characters wearing the same things twelve years on. ;)

• the other half of lua's prompts was specifically exploring nailah's blunt side that creates all the friction especially in hatari politics. needless to say nailah did not have a single problem telling me what she wanted to say :P
  
  • speaking of her, it's neat to explore laguz in a different time frame than the games because then you start to really see how the laguz' lifespan start to create friction against beorc's. nailah's (and rafiel's) are basically unchanged from both games, meanwhile zihark's gettin' on in years here, not old per se, but has collected a bunch of physical and emotional scars that start to slow him down. it's stuff like this i wouldn't have the life experience to write at all ten years ago so it's actually really neat being able to honor the characters as such.

• alternative titles for this scrawled into my notes was:
  
  • nailah treats zihark like a very literal chew toy the whole god damned time and he is into it
  • take a shot for how many times zihark gets metaphorically clapped over the head by a lawn chair, congrats, you're drunk
  • krad discovers she kinda maybe has a thing for whump (oops)
  • ~ hungry like the woooooooolf ~ (note do not use as title, and especially do not sing it at max volume off key while writing)

• desert areas specifically fill me with SO much pure joy (deserts are my favorite biome) so there was definitely a lot of vibes lifted from DA:I's desert (specifically the Still Ruins; the shrine is a copy+paste of that level), my trip out to Phoenix ages ago, several zelda desert dungeons ...

Comments

[flowersforgraves]

can't wait to read this with ZERO canon knowledge whatsoever! :D

[kradeelav]

aw, just knowing you're here and supportive regardless is enough, thank you so much for the kindness. <3

[queenlua]

so fun to read these notes after reading the fic :) i totally got those 80s action movie vibes (i might've caught a whiff of Indian Jones), LOVE where the inspo for the fic came from (kitties...!), love the alternate titles... YAY DESERT SHENANIGANS

[kradeelav]

hee hee i got your comment on the fic too last night and was so excited it's residing in my journal now ~ :D

you are 100% not wrong with indiana jones, LOL the whole 'chase the serial killer kitty' kinda just neatly started to be staged exactly like one between the action beats and it was fun to just let it goooo~ something really "tactile" and present with the earlier ones of those movies.