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Binding Coil of Bahamut
-My friends and I started doing an old 8-person raid from “A Realm Reborn,” call Binding Coil of Bahamut. There look to be a few parts to it and we did the first part.
-The premise is that deep below the earth, signs of a titanic primal were heard. Alphinaud and I (and my real life party) investigate.
-It’s an ancient Allagan structure. A ship maybe? Hard to say, but there’s a giant engine. Then things get terrifying.
I’ve talked in the past about my deep fear of giant creatures. In real life, this manifests as fear of being in the water with whales and sharks – i.e. NEVER – but in fiction, it comes up all the time. Including this series (e.g. Sin in FFX).
It’s also a fun fear for me. I enjoy the sense of dizziness and vertigo I get from imagining being near one of those titanic creatures, since I’m experiencing it from a place of safety.
All this is to say: Bahamut’s here.
-It’s unveiled slowly. We walk into a room and see a giant crystalline structure. It’s a wing.
Bahamut is closely tied to the origin of A Realm Reborn. He was summoned from the moon, Dalamud, to obliterate the world. Alphinaud’s grandfather, Louisoix, tried to imprison Bahamut. It didn’t SEEM to work, but something eventually happened and everyone flashes forward with little memory of how exactly Bahamut was stopped. Louisoix disappeared too.
-This dungeon throws all that history into confusion. Bahamut isn’t conscious, but he didn’t dissipate the way primals do when defeated. He’s in a kind of crystallized stasis, in pieces. The wing is the first part.
Deeper down, we fight a boss (Twintania from FFV) on his MASSIVE RIGHT CLAW. A part of his body is the frigging boss arena!
For scale, I’ve circled Ququshu looking down on the claw from a platform above.
Again, it’s not like Bahamut is just chilling down here. He’s clearly dormant and literally broken apart. But still.
-Weirder still: Louisoix himself (or someone who looks like him) himself follows us as we descend.
-At the bottom of this part of the dungeon, we find his head. Bahamut’s severed head, with some kind of crystal heart connected to it. “Louisoix” is operating some kind of machinery near the head.
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON
My current theory: Louisoix successfully trapped Bahamut but it was a delayed reaction. Now Bahamut is using his immense power to control Louisoix into fixing and freeing him from Louisoix’s magic.
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The Second Coil of Bahamut
-Dalamud was constructed to gather the sun’s rays and channel them into the Crystal Tower (an old raid I haven’t done).
-We leave and regroup. We may be able to banish the elder primal Bahamut if we deactivate the devices holding him captive.
-There’s another fragment of Dalamud impaled in a different part of the world. Our next target.
-Alphinaud is worried about his sister. Alisaie is obsessed with Louisoix. His “rediscovery” has shaken her.
-As soon as we enter the vicinity of the next section of Dalamud, crystals become visible everywhere.
-An Imperial blocks our way. The ghost of the “White Raven,” Nael deus Darnus. He’s the guy who devised the whole Meteor project from before “A Realm Reborn.”
-He’s tempered to Bahamut.
”O Lord Bahamut! Thy name is as sweet water to parched lips! How my heart swells at Thy sacred touch!”
And he’s dead so I think he’s a spirit, but not 100% certain.
-The bosses in this coil are tricky. A Lamia boss constantly petrifies us and puts debuffs on us that have us petrify each other.
-The next boss is a warmech called “The Avatar.”
It wipes us hard with a one-shot ability. There are five of us kind of winging it, and we can overpower most bosses, but sometimes there are complex mechanics to deal with that can still kill us.
The next chamber is a holodeck of sorts. It transforms into an image of the final days of pre-ARR FFXIV, with Dalamud hanging in the sky.
-Nael deus Darnus, greets us, in full Bahamut-thrall mode.
”Bring unto mine enemies crushing defeat, that they might know despair without end! And claim thee thus the victory which thou wert once denied!”
She gets CREEPY. Her face cracks and bleeds red, and she transforms into a Garlean/Bahamut hybrid.
-The fight is brutal. Even with our party overpowered and overleveled, it takes us multiple tries and some last second luck to defeat her. This content is old, but it was intended back then for top of the top raid guilds. My friend group and I are… well, we’re not that lol.
-Defeating her frees her spirit. We get to see her proud, untempered to Bahamut once more. She’s insulted by the very idea that she could ever kneel to an eikon.
…but then the memory starts to come back.
“Ohhh… that I should fall prey to the very influence I sought to purge from the land. The irony is galling.” After all, the Garlean Empire is hardcore anti-eikon.
AND SOMEONE LANCES HER WITH LIGHT, OBLITERATING HER! It’s the (probably) tempered Louisoix.
-Our next glimpse shows Bahamut regenerating fast. He’s not just a head and heart now.
Bahamut’s body is still regenerating, but we now deactivate one coil.
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Alisaie’s Resolve
-We report back to Urianger. Poor Alisaie, having to fight the enthralled shade of Louisoix.
-Alisaie is so personally tied into her grandfather’s goals, his past, that Alphinaud worries whether she’ll be able to separate out the man she knew from the Bahamut-tempered thrall they met.
-Nael van Darnus was the one who used Dalamud as a weapon to end pre-ARR FFXIV. Bahamut tempered her when she attempted to communicate with Dalamud.
(They keep calling Nael van Darnus “he” – what am I missing here? It seems like Urianger and Alisaie are just being weird and shitty about Nael’s pronouns, all “Well, that was no shrinking maid, so let’s called Nael ‘he!’”)
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Next time: the end of the Bahamut raid.
