Residual
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Not yours. Never just yours. For as long as you can remember, your aspirations have been those of other people, taken on to keep that spark of joy on their faces a little longer. Believing that shared passions would be all that you needed, that they needed of you. It was never enough.
Weeks after the events on the glacier, Ikrie takes a moment to reflect.
Series
- Part 1 of Residual
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Aloy is just passing through. She is always just passing through. Life draws her everywhere and nowhere, anchors her to no place but the road. Few things can change that, maybe none.
And certainly not her.Ikrie goes on a hunt, alone, wishing it would be different.
Series
- Part 2 of Residual
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Weeks had passed before they saw each other again, and by then, her loss had seemed little more than a distant memory. It wasn't until they started hunting together, in their spontaneous, almost accidental way, that Aloy realised no matter where they were, Ikrie had never left behind that mountain, or her pain. The fear that she would have to do it again.
For her.Following a meeting with CYAN, Aloy braves a snowstorm instead of returning to Song's Edge, for reasons she can't entirely discern. Supplies, she tells herself, the promise of a good hunt; but there is also something else, something deeper: the hope of a glimpse of a young Banuk huntress, whose absence on her most recent trip into these frozen lands has left her surprisingly empty.
Series
- Part 3 of Residual
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Disjointed pictures pass her by, devoid of any meaning: endless white, broken only by a few specks of grey. Smoke rising idly from a warped silhouette. A broken arrow with orange fletching, the vanes winding along the shaft—Carja style, she thinks, what’s a Carja arrow doing here?
Ikrie gets injured on a hunt.
Series
- Part 4 of Residual
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Time forsakes all meaning in solitude. The horn gives cadence to verses of being left and leaving, and each call carries the hope for isolation’s end. Her promise: I’ll be back. She will keep it. She has to. You have to believe that she will always, always return.
Ikrie waits for Aloy to come back.
Series
- Part 5 of Residual
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They know she holds the pieces, have seen her use them, but to understand it all would require her to talk of Elisabet, of flowers and a tiny, weathered globe and that peaceful resting face, her own face, and she can’t. She has a purpose, assigned at birth and acknowledged inside All-Mother, with all those hopeful gazes trained on her. Their eyes were those of her friends, just as threatened no matter how far away, and she made that choice, for them. For GAIA. For Elisabet. It feels good to remind herself there was a choice.
Before setting out into the Forbidden West, a journey she fears she might not return from, Aloy has to say some final goodbyes.
Series
- Part 6 of Residual
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Better than most, you know: the Cut is unforgiving. It keeps many things. Here, you cast no shadow. You make no sound. Your footsteps are swept away before anyone could follow.
Who will sing of Ikrie, ice-hunter? Her failing, fading werak of one?
Because that’s what you are, isn’t it? Discordance. From your first breath, the clashing notes in other people’s harmony: unclaimed infant, undesirable girl, uncompromising woman. The one who returned but did not survive the glacier.
Tell them I was lost.Remaining in the Cut, Ikrie struggles with Aloy's absence and her uncertain future.
Series
- Part 7 of Residual
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And she has come back, hasn’t she? No matter what kept her, it couldn’t keep her from you, and you’re ashamed to find her faith in you is greater than yours in her. Aloy braves this wilderness for you, and in your selfish hurt you repay her with doubts you’re too much of a coward to admit.
Waiting for Aloy to wake, Ikrie watches the dawn.
Series
- Part 8 of Residual
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The right words are always there, lingering at the back of her throat, but how can she share them if they slip from her tongue even when she only practises them to her own face? They seem simple enough, yet banded together they threaten to strangle her, and what should be natural becomes an impossible task.
One day, Aloy promises in silence and gently brushes the loose strand of hair from Ikrie’s forehead, smiling at her sleep-drunken, unintelligible response, one day I’ll tell you. I’ll find a way.Following Ikrie's decision to accompany Aloy into the West, the two of them travel to Meridian.
Series
- Part 9 of Residual
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They painted her like they would the oldest legends, fading marks on craggy cliffs up in Ban-Ur, retraced so often they have become part of the rocks and barely remember the hands that have put them there. Her glory, eternal in pigment; and gaze darting between her captured likeness and the woman at her side, so very oblivious to the honour bestowed on her, Ikrie wondered, not for the first time—does she love, or worship? What is the difference, where the fine line to tread but never cross?
Ikrie uses a Focus for the first time.
Series
- Part 10 of Residual
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Her fingers had tapped the intricate rhythm of the drums on her knees, earlier, when they had sat together overlooking the bustling village below—Mother’s Heart, she had called it—and she had explained the tradition: festivities, culminating in a blessing ceremony. The following morning, the Proving, and suddenly Ikrie had understood: Aloy hadn’t returned for the place, or the occasion, hadn’t joined them not for her discomfort in being revered. She had come for the pain, and the guilt she carries with her.
Aloy and Ikrie return to the Embrace for the Proving.
Series
- Part 11 of Residual
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“They’ve found an outlander in No Man’s Land, down by Stone’s Echo,” he says, prodding the still-sparking remnants of a Scrounger with the butt end of his spear. “A huntress, hair red as crimson bloom. I—I thought you might want to know.”
The words trickle into your mind one by one, like the first hesitant snowflakes of an oncoming storm leaving dark stains on half-frozen ground, acquiring sense in the delay. Outlander. Red hair. And—
“Found,” you echo flatly, the letters burning in your throat. Not met. Not hunted with. “Is she—”
A spark lands on Kian’s bare shins, and he flinches, a sharp breath drawn through his teeth.
“I don’t know,” he admits once the shock has passed, giving the machine corpse a kick in retaliation. “They didn’t say. But you’re going to find out, aren’t you?”After the massacre at the Embassy, Aloy takes off alone. Ikrie sets out to find her.
Series
- Part 12 of Residual