Together we will see a new dawn

Never Gets Easier

(Heartache prompt) - on Ao3 as well.

Edmont had found himself walking the city often; sometimes with Artoirel, discussing matters his son wished advice on. Sometimes with Ser Aymeric, if only to ensure the young Lord Speaker did not spend all his time in his office. Rarely with Commander Lucia, who could also use time for herself more often.

But mostly, he walked alone, through the Pillars, and sometimes into Foundation, depending on the whims of his restless feet and wandering mind. This evening was one of his lonelier walks, as the skies turned crimson and gold, passing clouds and the islands far overhead casting shadows over the streets before the last light faded. It had been a beautiful day, and promised to be an equally lovely evening.

He was having difficulty appreciating the fine weather, or the happy chatter and laughter, the bantering and debating, of seminarians as they scattered out of Saint Endalim’s Scholasticate with the tolling of cathedral bells.

Tomorrow would have been Haurchefant’s nameday.

However.

which inevitably leads to me going "goddamnit I wish the Binding Coils of Bahamut were more accessible beyond just unsyncing it at a ridiculously high level because this is the final chapter of the Seventh Umbral Calamity"

this is the OG Alisaie growth arc, because I love my darling gremlin ready to fight lil' sister but she was just as spoiled and snobby and sure she knew better as Alphinaud when she first arrived in Eorzea, she just presented it differently

Coils is where Alisaie learns to stand on her own feet and not in her grandfather's shadow, to form her own opinions about the world and how to live in it and how to help others; if you don't do Coils before she returns to MSQ in Heavensward patches, the dichotomy between her more worldly confidence and her initial appearance back before level twenty is incredibly jarring

as far as I am concerned, Binding Coils is integral to MSQ, wrapping up major elements of 1.0, and SHOULD BE MANDATORY CONTENT GODS ALL DAMNIT

On the one hand it makes sense because space is the place where you can get the timescales to meaningfully do this. Species that arose and went extinct long before humanity even existed - yeah you can imagine those in space. The speculative appeal is strong. On the other hand, this is not how archaeology works anywhere on Earth. There are always people there no matter where you're digging, and USUALLY they will have some connection to the stuff being dug up. The actual on-the-ground politics of that relationship are very different where you go in the world, but anywhere there used to be people there still are people. And that is almost never true in sci-fi archaeology. And obviously sci-fi allows us to speculate, but it's the pattern you see again and again. No one's interested in speculating an alien archaeological site where those aliens' descendants or anyone related to them are still around in any meaningful capacity. In sci-fi, descendant communities just do not exist. Everybody Died. This place now belongs to no one anymore, except the archaeologists.