Normando and Friends

The official side story itself can be found in Tales from the Shadows here: link

The story itself begins set in the past, pre-sundering, and features Emet-Selch talking to Elidibus about Azem and their grape-saving concept-borrowing antics. Then moves to the present and Emet's last ever conversation with Elidibus.

That bit is cool and all (and I'm a massive sucker for any morsel of lore on Azem the devs deign to give us), but what I really want to talk about is the poem at the end.

The story's publication is from post-Shadowbringers, but before Endwalker's release, meaning at that point readers had no idea about any of the EW storyline with Elpis or Ultima Thule or the Aetherial Sea.

The poem at the end, designed to be from Emet-Selch's point-of-view, goes as thus (in the English localisation):

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,

Which is most faint, as is my breath

That quavers here at brink of death.

'Twas e'er my fate to wager all

For that which wrought my brothers' fall,

And thus the aether beckons me

To depths of black eternity,

To dream of things long lost and gone,

And futures which might yet be won─

Though not by me, lest you mistake,

For others wait, the stage to take,

And while their worth is far from sure,

I bid the falling curtain─pause.

Let "encore" be my final word,

Their epilogue to death preferred.

Now at the time this could be interpreted as Emet-Selch passing the torch on to the Warrior of Light and the Scions, but with the knowledge and hindsight of Endwalker, I couldn't help but marvel while re-reading it.

First of all, the break from the rhyming couplets with that "pause" is just beautiful poetry and I love it so much. *chef's kiss*

When the story first came out a lot of people read it as simply talking about Emet-Selch's appearance in the Elidibus trial, and interpreted that as being the "epilogue" referred to.

But we can now read those final lines as a hint at what was to come: Emet-Selch watching from the Aetherial Sea, narrating the story of EW in the cutscenes, and then having one final encore both in Elpis and when summoned back in the confrontation against Meteion.