Chapter Text
This is the tale of Vynathr, the Warrior of Light. Or rather, the beginning of it. Many bards sing of great feats and greater heroes, but most begin their ballads when the true tale is nearly at its close. Few heroes give their first great act without any preamble, or any personal hardships or failures before it. Vynathr Alria was not one of those lucky few. And while I will not give you every moment, from the first breath to the last, I will show you a more detailed picture. Pure brilliance without the shading of mistakes and hardships is only a blank page, after all.
We start in Coerthas. A land of mountains and frigid air, where the isolated theocracy of the Holy See of Ishgard wages war against the dragons of neighbouring Dravania. Where now the snow buries one to the knee, there once was grass, albeit often frozen over, and it was during one of the warmer days when a young Ishgardian nobleman by the name of Anselmont de Bourraeu travelled out to Camp Dragonhead looking to survey the state of the soldiers there. He found matters to be well, and travelled further south on simple whim, there meeting a young Duskwight woman who had recently made her way north from Gridania. She had been shocked to find a fellow Duskwight —f or that was what he was, albeit one of slightly snowier skin that might seem more acceptable to the Wildwoods — in possession of a title of nobility, and he had offered her sympathy for the plight that had driven her north, and offered her a place to stay away from the freezing mountain air.
Thus was a love born — a very short-lived one. The moment that the woman was found to be with child, the nobleman consigned her to a room away from his own, fearing he would be found guilty of adultery, for he had been married to another, and he was unable to leave his family and home for a child born out of wedlock. When the child was nearly born and the woman’s stomach impossible to hide, the affair was discovered and the mother was cast out from the house entirely, brought south once more to the Observatorium not far from Camp Dragonhead where she begged to go no further on account of the racial hatred she would face in Gridania below. House Haillenarte agreed to take her, and she gave birth in a cold, bare room by the hearth with nought but a single maid at her side for comfort. She held her child close and cried over her, trembling voice and hands bestowing every blessing she could think of in hopes the baby would make it. She named her child Violette, for the short-lived love that had brought her, and for the violet hue of her skin in the dim firelight, flushed with the effort of being born.
The child could not stay with her forever. House Bourraeu could not have a child of their blood, no matter how diluted, out with the commoners, and thus the old Count bade his son go and fetch his bastard spawn. The woman tried to keep her child, clutched onto her with all her spent strength and shed many tears, but the baby was taken, never to know her mother’s name.
Unfortunately, Anselmont was not interested in raising his mistake, and he made as much known. The Count ensured he was forced to spend some time around her so as to better learn his lesson, but whenever possible, he instead largely left her to the care of the servants, who could never much be bothered themselves save to ensure her clothing was fine and to reprimand any shows of poor manners, which came often. The so-called girl grew up strange from this neglect, and her peers never much knew what to make of her due to both this and, before long, her unusual height. To make matters worse, the girl began to insist she was a boy, though no one paid him any mind. Over the years, the ostracization from his father and peers caused the boy to develop a tendency to hide in hidden places and avoid his lessons. It could only be expected that one day, something would go wrong.
At the tender age of five , the boy was taken out by his father to Camp Dragonhead for a meeting, and there, he wandered away into the woods. It was a heavy winter, and the wind whistled through the branches that dimmed the forest floor. There, against all odds, the boy met a dragonet. And while most children would run, this boy did not. The dragonet was large, frightening, and angry, but it was wounded, lying trapped in ropes, and the boy knew that it would not survive there. More importantly, he knew that it wasn’t fair. The dragonet did not deserve to die alone. It was not even grown. It was like him. He approached, and he freed the dragonet — just in time to be seen by a patrolling sentry, and just in time for the dragonet to escape. When the shouting began, the boy said nothing to defend himself, only scrambled back in fear.
The sentry branded him a heretic, and dragged him back to the outpost for his punishment to be decided upon. The boy had always been rumoured to be a changeling, or even a dragon in disguise as a child for his height and the way he still could not read and did not speak or look into others’ eyes, and this combined with his action caused the crowd to begin to stir, suggestions of punishments that would normally never be proposed for a child flung wildly without a thought. When his punishment was decided to be banishment, his father did not defend him. He looked away, anger in his eyes, resentful of the innocent child that had taken so much of his time, the innocent child whose heretical action now would forever deem him suspicious to the Holy See if he could not bury his existence well enough.
The boy was cast out to the wood where he found the dragon, and he walked through the day and into the night,wandering deep into the mountains, where he dug himself a hole to rest in the snow. When he awoke, the dragonet was there, and at its side stood its mother. They took him to their home in the Dravanian mountains, and let him rest by their fire, and eat their food. When they asked him his name in their strange tongue, he understood them, but did not speak, and they did not pressure him, allowing him his quiet. The boy went nameless save for the syllable “Vee” or the nickname of “Little One” till the next spring, when he spotted a passing mortal patrol and screamed in sudden rage, lobbing his hand-carved spear alongside sharp stones and chasing the men from the forest in a fit of wrath thought impossible for a boy so quiet and kind. Then, sweet Violette was named Vræiðr by the dragons, a name befitting the rage he expressed.
But the dragons could not keep him forever. They did not know how to care for a boy, how to clothe him, or even how much to feed him. So they cooperated with the local Coerthan Ixali tribe, who granted him a name of their own, following their traditions: Aoroli, for the child had wished to have names of two genders, and Vræiðr was masculine while the oroli suffix was feminine. The Ixal nurtured him, feeding his love for freedom, and taught him to sow, gather, and carve, while the dragons taught him to hunt and look upon old art and stories to find the truth where mortals forgot it. And both taught him to fight. But Vræiðr Aoroli could never forget that he was a child of man, no matter how he loathed it, and wished to be some winged, feathered and scaled beast to fit the families who had truly loved him.
When Vræiðr was ten, he bore witness to the Battle of Silvertear Skies from the safety of his mother Dragon’s shoulder. Strange airships of steel and ceruleum fire flew over Dravanian skies and encroached on Silvertear Lake, only to witness Midgardsormr, the great ancestor of all dragons, rise from the lake and call upon his kin for battle. The battle was waged over only a single night, but it was violent, and the explosion that followed as Midgardsormr crushed the greatest warship in his coils filled the sky and land with aether so powerful that the prayers of the beings around it gave form to Primals, aetheric false incarnations of their deities that tempered the minds of their accidental summoners, bending them into something strange and new. But it was not a primal that bent little Vræiðr’s mind —i t was the sight of seeming stars, fragments of aether and broken steel from ships, falling from the red sky. It awoke something in him. Something that touched his soul — something he would not know the name of until he was grown. The Echo.
The Garleans, as Vræiðr would later learn the men piloting those strange and violent ships were called, were defeated, but at a great cost. M any dragons fell, including Midgardsormr and Vræiðr’s dragonet sibling he had saved five years ago. Five years being an impossibly long time to a small child, it felt as though some rule of the world had been violated to little Vræiðr, and he swore to himself to take revenge on the men who had slain his brother. Vræiðr took up his spear, tied back his hair, donned his war paint, and began to fight the men of Fallgourd Float that encroached north into Ixali territory. He was never recognized by the men, but he was feared, his arrows flying into mortal throats with violent anger. He did not understand the difference between these men and the ones who had killed his brother, and the Ixal hated them, so he did not care. When the Garleans began to strike again, Vræiðr turned his bow on their ships, too.
When Vræiðr was eighteen, the Gridanians took up arms, and the Ixal, frightened and uninformed, summoned their goddess Garuda in the form of a Primal. They were tempered, and Vræiðr ran, frightened at the loss of his family. He ran to his dragon mother, feeling not unlike he had been made a small abandoned child again. There he remained with her, though always pulled, inexorably, to the battles of men, fearful of what would happen next. The moon crept lower in the sky, and one day, a mere year after the summoning of Garuda, all life in the forest went silent. That day, Vræiðr's draconic mother told him something that he would never forget.
‘The men are at war in the valley. Run, child, and hide.’
These were her last words to him before she was injured. He would spend the rest of his life wondering if she would still be well had he obeyed.
Vræiðr did not run and hide. He ran to the Carteneau flats where the battle took place, and he watched with fear gripping his heart. He knew, somehow, that this was no normal battle. Something was very wrong. The people — the Eorzean people — fought with a desperation Vræiðr had never seen before, crying out, fighting to reach something amidst the hoards of Garleans beating them down. Bodies were flung by explosions from Magitek fire, and still the men did not retreat.
They never reached what they had scrambled for. The smaller moon of Dalamud had been descending, the sky turned red with its glow, and suddenly, it began to crack, something thumping against the inside of it. Vræiðr watched, paralyzed with fear, as strange glowing monoliths of technology rained upon the earth and the ground keened with the violent eruption of aether from within the collapsing prison. In the next moment, Vræiðr was on the ground under his dragon mother’s wing, now broken by the massive hunk of shrapnel she had shielded her mortal child from. Vræiðr cried out, and clung to her, even as she roared in pain and her tears hit the earth, the both of them deaf and blind to the running masses of mortal soldiers scrambling for their lives amidst the rain of fire and death.
Bahamut, the Elder Primal, had been freed.
None remember what followed. Even Vræiðr only held snippets — an old man, a bright light, symbols in the sky and a wave of aether. What he knew was that when he could think again, the whole world was different. His mother was comatose, possibly dead. The Ixal were strangers to him. Vræiðr, terrified, alone, and concussed, stumbled his way south, with the rest of the shell-shocked victims of the Calamity. There, for the first time since he was five, he was treated with kindness at the hands of mortal men and women. They tended to his wounds, cleaned the ash, blood, and tears from his face, and supported him when he began to cry anew. They did not judge his failure to speak their language, allowing his babbling, and through his slurred speech and the general noise of the crowded infirmary, attempted to patch together his name, managing a butchered and scrambled “Vynathr Alria”. Vræiðr, now Vynathr, only nodded and allowed his tears to continue to fall. Why hold onto a name given to him by people he had lost? He would accept this strange name of man and beast combined — a garbled mix of the three cultures that had made him.
Thus was Vynathr Alria born, the future Warrior of Light. And in another five years, his true story would begin.