Nouri Tahb.
the lover, eternal.
background.
Born in Loch Seld in Gyr Abania — though she remembers very little of it. Her home was always instead the great big oaks of the East End, the burning red in the autumn and cooling greens in the summer, colors that painted her childhood in vibrancy.
Nouri chased sparrows and splashed in the rivers of her home with her siblings, the big grinning twins Tabir and Shamsir. Her eldest sister, Sakina, had already gone by then, ten years older with a frown for a face and a broken heart that only understood how to remember the grief of their homeland.
Still, despite her unyielding joys, Nouri did not grow up sheltered as her parents, watching every day as the violent steel of Baelsar's Wall came to be, wanted their children to understand how to survive, both in heart and body. After all, this world of theirs was beautiful, but not kind.
Nouri's father, Roshan, taught her the names of the plants and the animals around them, while Nouri's mother, Rahi, taught the girl how to hunt. Both of them taught Nouri how to break, how to heal. They made sure she understood that grief only exists because love exists, and that Love, Love, is the inescapable All.
a realm reborn.
Near after the Calamity, Nouri leaves her home at twenty-two summers, travelling into Gridania proper to join the Botanist's Guild. She flourishes under the tutilage but also as the great personal headache of Fufucha, who helps grow Nouri's native plant knowledge into a scientific and world encompassing discipline.Though Nouri is not the best of students, her head too in the clouds to learn the newest iteriation of the genus of a flower she's always just called a friend, she does come to call Gridania her new home.
Most of her easy early days are spent travelling under the apprenticeship of Jospaire, who Nouri would count as her first love, if she wasn't instead someone who would happily name the shape of the trees and sand as the first time her heart swelled with love instead.Prone to flights of fancy and flights of folly in general, she joins the Adventurer's Guild to earn enough coin for a new pair of boots, and then she does not continue her work as a botanist. Instead she hears, and she listens.
She feels. She was asked to so kindly, how could she not?
The simple and clear as water Nouri changes with her meeting of Yda and Papalymo, and later the rest of the Scions. Minfilia, as well.But Nouri was not made for responsibility and rules, not made for a role. She, who thought the whole world was her kin, finds now that sometimes cruelty exists for cruelty's sake. She has to learn this, and it is a hard lesson. She trusts. She will never, ever tell you that it was wrong for her to trust, for it was not. But still, at the end of it all, her heart seeps into the sewers of Uldah.
She trudges through them, ever forward.
heavensward.
Nouri, the bearer of spring in her laugh and her hair, escapes to Ishgard with a bitterness on her tongue that she learns to reconcile only when met with the awe-inspiring stories of the dragons and the Ishgardians and the heretics, the lives they lived like great metaphors that shake her entire being. The world is much bigger than Nouri could dream, she who is a dreamer by birth and blood.
She embraces Thancred to bury her face in his loneliness, she grits her teeth anytime she speaks to a Temple Knight as if she can taste the chainmail in her mouth. She dances with the moogles and the Vanu Vanu and the Gnath and the hunters at Tailfeather. She remembers a little bit more, that she is Nouri, the light and the spring. She meets Avalo, love of all loves.
She warms her hands. She sits and she eats. She heals. She listens, mostly, very much and very often. She is very small, and very mortal when she speaks to Hraesvelgr. She weeps when she hears how Grief gave his eye to Revenge, how we lose ourselves to our own broken hearts.She tries to learn how to carry water, because water means the ice has melted, but instead all she has is her own heart, overflowing. She can't hold it, she could not hold Haurchefant, she could not hold Ysayle, she cannot hold Minfilia. She can't. She reaches out for them anyway. Their ghosts reach back.
She grieves. She does. But she does not give her eye away, not even to her kinsman, Ilberd. Instead she holds the hands of those that live, and she remembers that she lives as well.
stormblood.
Though she's always known herself to be Gyr Abani, Nouri has no memories of her homeland and finds the skin of kinship uncomfortable to wear. She will learn here.
She will learn that her blood is the salt of the Lochs, and that she will bleed for them. She and Lyse place their heads together and their tears run together and now they remember they are kin to one another, this land that bleeds salt and blood. They call each other sister and when their hearts bend, it’s with a flexibility that proudly defies all that would separate them.
She does as Hien asks, she does as Lyse needs.
If Heavensward held Nouri's tears, Stormblood holds her blood. She sheds it, she learns violence as an art. Avalo, the healer of wounds, stitches her back together until she feels like a doll stuffed with straw. She tries very hard not to run, even when she smells blood in her hair. She refuses to kiss Avalo, for if that too tasted of iron - what would she do?Nouri does not run from Zenos. She waits. She tells him that she is not, nor ever will be a beast. She is a hunter, as her mother taught her, in this homeland that her mother fled and she has returned to.When the songs return to Ala Mhigo, her voice is in the chorus, not leading, but of them. Of her people. She presses her lips against Avalo's and says good night, with the understanding that dawn will come. She dreams again.
shadowbringers.
But sometimes a dream goes on too long. It’s easier, really. In Shadowbringers, Nouri dreams not because of love but disbelief. It’s not something to be believed after all. Another world. Another time. Another her — Ardbert. She hears his footsteps and has to curl her toes because she’s sure she started walking. She hears his inhale and holds hers to make sure she has to exhale. She wonders, idly, if any of the blood on his ax is hers.
She smiles and laughs and dances but as someone who does not think she can die. That should just make her wake, no? She eats the meol, because no food is real enough that it matters.She’s cut down by Philia, she is chased by sineaters. She doesn’t acknowledge that her limbs are turning to stone with the light.
It’s not til the fuath drown her that she wakes. And in that waking is the realization — she can’t die. She can, of course, but she is not allowed to. Not for those still living, not for the honor of those who died for her. She lives. Here, Nouri lives, because she is needed. She slays the beasts, she rescues the maidens. She does not mind that she cannot bend the marble of her fingertips.
She bleeds light until she is blind. She digs her nails into Emet-Selch and he drips his own venom into her mouth as a gift in turn. But she is the light, the searing of all wounds. Emet-Selch is burned away by her brilliance.
She kisses Elidibus in Ardbert’s face so gently. She goes home. He can not.
endwalker.
Endwalker is a love letter to the Nouri Tahb that loved rivers as if they were her sisters. The Nouri that was born to love Hydaelyn, that was loved by Venat all her life even when she had not met her yet.
Thavnair is a home to her that she did not know — her father’s homeland, now a place she will mark her birthright in with her blood.
Elpis is. Elpis is Venat. This is a story that is for them alone.
In Ultima Thule, Nouri finds her end. Not in death, but in a finale. After her struggle with Endsinger, after she loses all personhood to instead be the hand of mercy that returned every soul to the cycle of rebirth.
She is depleted of all her aether, just a wisp of dynamis held together with the love of those who have placed their hopes in her. She cannot leave Ultima Thule.
But. It’s Nouri.It’s Nouri, it’s woman who was the lover to god and the beloved to the world. We can’t let her go, can we?