TW: mention of rape
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Arenvald’s Adventure
-We start the patch story in Rhalgr’s Reach. There are a lot of other unlock quests that popped up here too! One quest is about finding Omega. Another especially intriguing one mentions Eureka, an FFIII endgame area.
I plan to check those out after the main patch story stuff is complete.
-Lord Hien leads the free Doma. Ala Mhigo doesn’t have any such immediate answer. Lyse led the Resistance, but that’s not the same as her leading the nation politically in peace.
-Theodoric was the last king of Ala Mhigo, and he was terrible. No more monarchy for this nation.
-Arenvald (a Scion) approaches with a proposal. He wants me and Alphinaud to join him on an adventure.
-He recounts a story. King Theodoric crushed the monks of the Fist, destroying Rhalgr’s Reach (their home base). He saw them as rivals.
-Theodoric also executed everyone with even the slightest hereditary claim to the throne of Ala Mhigo, including his own family. Holy shit. Rumor holds that he hoarded the treasure of those murdered royals.
“The M** King’s Trove.” That’s what Arenvald’s after.
-Hee! That initial quest gave me the “Box” emote, where Ququshu shadowboxes in place.
It’s a nice snapshot of Arenvald’s enthusiastic and energetic character.
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The Darkness Below
-The liberation of Ala Mhigo and Doma has sparked rebellion throughout the Empire.
ALPHINAUD: “I hear the imperial province of Dalmasca has already risen up in rebellion…”
DALMASCA EEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is that gonna be in the patch content?? Are we gonna help some scrappy group of young sky pirates drive the imperials out of Rabanastre? He said this just as an aside, but no way is this some throwaway without follow-up.
-I head to Ala Mhigo to investigate what people know of the king’s cache.
-The king’s old scribe, Ernold, says the court thaumaturge unleashed a curse on the remaining royal family members that turned them into monstrosities. Theodoric cast them into “the darkness below” the palace.
-Arenvald admits now that this adventure is personal.
His father was a Garlean soldier, his mother an Ala Mhigan. [TW: rape.] Naq ur fgebatyl vzcyvrf gung uvf sngure encrq uvf zbgure qhevat gur vainfvba:
“As I grew, [my mother] would check my brow over and over, convinced that a spot on my skin was an emerging third eye – like the kind you see in pureblood Garleans. My mother did not care for this taunting reminder of my heritage, and took up a knife...”
This explains the war paint over Arenvald’s face, and maybe even his bangs covering it up.
-In the end, she kicked Arenvald out onto the street. Left to his own devices “through begging, cunning, or worse.”
It’s way out of my lane to judge how accurate his feelings and reactions are as a child born from rape. That caveat said, this hits me as heartbreaking.
-He eventually joined some refugees crossing the Wall into Eorzea and started adventuring. A path that led him to the Scions.
ARENVALD: “I drew steel on ordinary folk for a measly crust of bread. With Theodoric’s gold, I could spare my countrymen the shame of living like that.”
This isn’t just a fun intermission romp. The treasure hunt is Arenvald’s attempt to restore some kind of wealth to his country. Good man.
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The M** King’s Trove
-We head to Loch Seid, outside Ala Mhigo. A great flood at the end of the Sixth Umbral Calamity created these lakes. Beforehand, in the Fifth Astral Era, the ancient city of Skalla existed here.
-The ruins of Skalla are still down there. Alphinaud thinks the “darkness beneath the palace” from Ernold’s tale was the Skalla ruins.
Ah! Alphinaud’s thinks the King Theodoric put the transformed monstrosities there not just to punish them, but also to guard the trove.
-I swim deep beneath the Loch and find the ruins of a city. “The Drowned City of Skalla” is a 4-player dungeon.
-Underwater dungeons in FFXIV are some of my favorite places, which feels weird to say. Usually, underwater areas are awkward, have weird movement but beautiful, colorful, almost alien aesthetics.
XIV skips the movement nonsense and just embraces the aesthetic. The music is great too! A light, tinkly piece.
-I’m level 70. This is one of my first endgame dungeons, and it has one of the telltale MMO endgame dungeon signs: a tank who runs through a few waves of trash and groups them up to AoE down.
It’s faster, and it’s doable when the tank is well-geared.
-The first boss is my favorite looking one of the bunch, a sea-pony named Kelpie.
-One of the trash mobs is a buried creature whose head and hands are the only visible parts.
[Non-rhetorical question: what game was this first from? FFVIII?]
-The door leading to the boss room looks a lot like some of the Yu Yevon imagery from FFX, though it’s probably just coincidence.
-The final boss is BRUTAL. It’s a giant winged bull monster with some really tough area effect stuff to dodge. Even nastier are his abilities that lack visible ground telegraphs.
Like, he’ll laugh and it means you have to move away from his face.
(I got hit by a lot of stuff.)
-When he dies, he reverts back into human form. Poor guy. It wasn’t his fault Theodoric cursed him.
-The boss’s room is filled with the King’s Trove. Alphinaud and Arenvald crash through the ceiling to join me. They lacked my Kojin infinite swimming blessing, and so they had to find an… alternate path lol.
-The trove itself is glorious. It’ll take a few trips to bring this to the surface.
-At the center of the trove lies an unsmiling portrait. I’m betting this is our first glimpse of King Theodoric.
-Victory for Arenvald!
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The Butcher’s Blood
-Lyse is delighted to hear about the hoard. It’s a huge national windfall.
-Trouble. A mob’s gathered outside of Fordola’s prison. “We demand vengeance! Today we butcher the Butcher!”
-This desire for mob justice goes against Lyse’s vision for Ala Mhigo. It’s tough. Fordola and her Skulls actively committed atrocities against this nation.
-Raubahn arrives. And what a speaker he is!
“It is our responsibility to give these prisoners a fair trial, that they might answer to all of Ala Mhigo! The Garleans called us savages, and I’ll be damned if we prove them right!”
-This is when they choose what kind of nation they’ll build.
-Raubahn is a great candidate to lead Ala Mhigo. Would he leave the Sultana?
-Lyse worries about the slippery slope. If they kill Fordola, do they also kill collaborators? Non-resistors? A mob’s not an easy thing to sate, especially with blood.
-Arenvald is glimpsed Fordola’s past via the Echo. He wants to speak with her. We head to her cell.
-Fordola acts bitter, angry. Just wants us to kill her already. Arenvald sees past this façade.
-Echo time. A vision of her past.
-LIL FORDOLA! She and her parents are on their way to an imperial banquet when someone in the street calls them “filthy tin-head lovers.” They were despised as collaborators.
-This shocks her. She’s only seen her parents in a positive light, not as traitors.
-holy shit, citizens in the street start chucking rocks at Fordola and her father! He protects her as best he can, huddling around her as a living shield.
FORDOLA’S FATHER: “It’s all right, it’s all right. They don’t understand. But they’ll see in time. They’ll see that this is the only way to survive.”
-A huge rock eventually hits her father’s head, killing him.
-An imperial soldier watched all this impassively. “Let the savages have their fun. They’ll be more compliant once they’ve tired themselves out.” Even the collaborators are just disposable tools.
-Scene change, forward in time. Fordola’s signing up for the imperial legion.
-She just got a facial tattoo, horrifying her mother (who wants Fordola to blend in).
FORDOLA: “Can’t you see? Citizenship means nothing to them. If you’re not a pureblood Garlean, you’re no different from any other savage. So I’ll play the part. I’ll join the legion and I’ll make them respect me.
“And when the mob see that, they’ll think twice before throwing their stones.”
She’s leaning into it. And she’s inspiring her friends along the same path.
“It’ll be hard. Humilitating. They’ll try to break us – send us crawling back to our ‘own kind.’ But we won’t, no matter what. We’ll bleed for them – die for them if we have to. We’ll do whatever it takes to be free!”
This is FASCINATING. She’s not resisting, but she’s not just a straight-up imperial “tin-head lover” either. She’s fighting for the Empire by embracing a part of her Ala Mhigan identity.
It’s a doomed path, and yet I see its appeal for her. I see what she was trying to do.
-The Echo ends. Back to the present.
ARENVALD: “So, you mean to play the part one last time, eh? The unrepentant traitor, whose death will serve to unite the people?”
-She could’ve killed herself in prison but didn’t. Even now she wants to help Ala Mhigo in her own way, by making her death a unifying spectacle.
-Another Echo hits… but it hits Fordola, not me. She sees MY past in a flash of images.
It floors her. “All that power… all that pain… it’s too much for anyone!” How am I still unbroken after all the combat, death, lies throughout my playthrough?
-We leave the prison.
I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA where this Fordola plot is headed. A repentant life in prison is possible. An angry Ala Mhigan murdering her at trial is possible. Also possible that Lyse uses Fordola to try wrangling former collaborators and Skulls into helping the newly-independent Ala Mhigo.
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Next time: Probably Lyse’s summit with representative from across Ala Mhigo.
