#esmerales

Esmerales tried to yank his hood down over his face, but the fellow Ascian dodged back behind her. She groaned out a sigh, not bothering to chase him. "You can quit moaning about your ever inferior position as one of the Sundered, Fandaniel."

"Oh, but it's such a waste!" Fandaniel said. "To be robbed of all opportunity to achieve my own goals. What about our dreams, Azem? Are we forever doomed to strive for a world we scarcely recall?"

"You've been shown the same awakening as I," Esmerales said, still glaring down at the streets. "You know this is the path to salvation."

"And what if... I didn't want salvation?"

Esmerales squinted. She started to turn. "What are you—"

A sharp, piercing pain cut through her. Esmerales gasped, ragged, as her eyes adjusted to the scene before her. Fandaniel, standing cold and smug, and in his hand, from which a stream of suffocating aether speared into her...

White auracite?

"F-Fandaniel!" Esmerales hissed out. "Wh-what is the meaning of this? Release me!"

"Oh, my dear, lovely Azem," Fandaniel said, his voice dropped deep in that cool, cooing tone. "I simply can't do that. I made a promise to someone very special to me—or, special to this body, at least."

His grip on the auracite tightened, and Esmerales choked out a pained gasp. "E-eurgh—! E-Emet-Selch will—"

"You really don't know yet, do you?" Fandaniel pouted, feigning sympathy. "Emet-Selch is dead."

It was as if the star came to a halt. "What?"

"Obliterated with a hunk of white auracite, just like this one." Fandaniel hummed with a shrug. "And poor Elidibus met a similar fate in trying to extinguish the Warriors of Light in retribution. Don't you see, Azem? The Unsundered are all gone.

"And I am free to chase my dreams—of complete destruction of this wretched star."

With a crushing vice, Esmerales cried out. The pain was unbearable; she felt her very being funneling out of her, siphoned by the white auracite. She writhed and screamed, but its grip was inescapable.

It soon swallowed her whole, and all she knew was an abyss of crystal white.

How long had it been before she was released? Hours? Days? Years? She couldn't be sure. Not until she was ejected into a torn carpet, one that rolled out ahead of her, all the way to the foot of a familiar throne.

There sat the usurper, Zenos yae Galvus.

Esmerales tried to rise, only to feel that agonizing chokehold on her being again. She managed to look back, and glare up at Fandaniel, standing above her with the white auracite still in hand.

"My lord!" he cheerfully called up to Zenos. "I have delivered her as promised!"

Esmerales's eyes snapped back to the shift of moving steel. Zenos stood, slow and steady, like a bored, caged lion. "It does not look a thing like her."

"My deepest apologies, my lord," Fandaniel said. "The variation between Shards of the same soul can be nigh limitless. Besides that, our friend here has long abandoned her original form. You might recognize her from another era?"

"I do," Zenos said.

He stepped closer, one heavy step at a time. Esmerales flinched, but the auracite held strong to her aether, forcing her to lie still again as Zenos kneeled down in front of her.

He smiled, a cold and lightless thing, and took her chin in his hand. "Hello, great-grandmother. Rinae yae Galvus—is that not what you called yourself, when you and Solus sunk your claws into Garlemald's heart?"

"What do you want, brat?" Esmerales hissed.

"Why, nothing. Nothing at all—at least... not from you."

He released her, harsh and quick, standing again to retrieve a scythe from the arm of the throne. Esmerales glowered and scoffed.

"Don't make me laugh, little boy," she said. "I wielded mastery over the way of the reapers long before you were a concept in your father's head."

"How fortuitous," Zenos said, approaching again. "Then you must know what comes next."

He held the blade of the scythe under Esmerales' chin, where his gauntlet had clutched her moments ago. Esmerales took a sharp breath in, but laughed it out.

"You would make me your avatar?" she mocked him. "Have you any idea what sort of power you trifle with?"

"Fandaniel has told me plenty," Zenos said. "How to harvest the life of my victims, and feed it to a warped monstrosity of a beast...

"A beast who, in some small, distant way, is also my long lost friend."

"What are you talking abou—a-AUGH—!!"

She could only hear Fandaniel's gleeful cackling, over her cry of pain and the splash of her vessel's blood. Zenos sunk the scythe deep into her, and to her horror, he was actually claiming her being.

"N-no!" she yelled. "No! How are you—?!"

The auracite! Saturating her raw aether, until it was of a consistency soft enough for the wretched blade to lay claim to. Panic began to set in.

"L-let go of me! Let go! Zenos—!!!"

But it was no use. Zenos stared, dead-eyed, as the scythe dispersed Esmerales's form and drank of her shattered aether. He took in a deep breath through his nose, raising the blade to his cheek when it was finished.

"Do you see now, my lord?" Fandaniel giggled. "Watered down to her most essential components, she's not so different after all, is she?"

Zenos slowly, contently sighed. "You have done well, Fandaniel. It is so close to the real thing... to my enemy. She will comfort me in the moons ahead...

igeyorhm, harbinger of the 13th's demise, sought any fruit at all for her labor after mishandling the 13th and rendering it unusable for the rejoining. she recruited many 13th souls to the ascians' cause, including cylva and unukalhai, but she also found esmerales—a shard of azem. seeing an opportunity to save her skin among the paragons, igeyorhm took esmerales before the unsundered, and they chose to restore most, but not all of her ancient memories; what they withheld was anything they believed led to artemis's desertion of the convocation. they erased her lover, hecate, and her adoptive mother, venat, however left her involvement as hydaelyn. her twin brother apollo was spared, as was hythlodaeus, as they too fell in line with the convocation's plan.

without the memories that sparked artemis's decision to forsake the convocation and zodiark, esmerales only had a lifetime of admiration and aspiration in the convocation to derive from. naturally, this manipulated her perfectly into accepting a place among the paragons, her seat renamed to 'esmerales' to complement her new role in the broken world: she would infiltrate lands and lives, and use what she learned to advance the rejoining. no longer was she a shepherd, but a wolf in sheep's clothes.

she did this almost as long as the world had been sundered: 10 thousand years. with her own world destroyed, she felt nothing for the lives living on reflections, and she believed that once the rejoining was complete, she could find the restored souls of connla and scathach and they could live as complete persons, never again to be destroyed.

artemis had been very close friends with emet-selch prior to her desertion, and esmerales was similarly drawn to emet-selch—not to mention he was obsessed with her, desiring to reform his lost friend into her 'perfect, unlost' self. it was he who wielded the memory crystals, and he who controlled what esmerales did and did not remember. she would eagerly join nearly any of his projects, most notably allag and garlemald, the latter of whom she posed as solus's wife, empress rinae yae galvus.

esmerales was merciless in garlemald. she garnered favor with the impoverished by introducing the powers of the 13th to them, effectively creating the garlean reapers. her focus on the people made her beloved by them, despite that she knew, with the introduction of magitek, that the reapers would be ostracized and cast into the fringes of society. esmerales 'let' rinae die directly following the battle of silvertear lake, where it was implied the grief of losing so many soldiers had stopped her heart; this was used to further radicalize the garleans. everything esmerales did was to benefit the destruction and chaos garlemald's manipulation would bring upon the source, preparing it for its 7th rejoining, just as igeyorhm had sown seeds of discord in the 13th for the first rejoining. esmerales knew this, had played a role in several previous rejoinings already. she did not care for the lives she ruined and ended.

she hounds l'aiha from the moment she arrives in eorzea, pre-amnesia, as j'nhala eiha. esmerales seeks to eliminate j'nhala, another known shard of azem, because if left to her own devices she may, again, seek to reject the convocation. esmerales is, in fact, the reason j'nhala dies in carteneau; she manipulates louisoix's teleportation magic and forces it to fail, leaving j'nhala to be struck down by bahamut. when j'nhala inexplicably regenerates using a nearby corpse, just like ascians do, esmerales and lahabrea realize hydaelyn has given j'nhala certain ancient abilities, including the transference of the soul. knowing she thusly cannot be easily killed entirely, esmerales's new objective becomes to blockade j'nhala, who wakes with amnesia and takes the name l'aiha, from finding the circle of knowing or remembering who she was before carteneau.

even esmerales's final living act, which occurs after the unsundered are dead and fandaniel restored the remainder of esmerales's ancient memories specifically to launch her into madness, was not for the betterment of the world or the people living in it now. fandaniel had forced esmerales's soul into the lunar device designed to destroy zodiark's bonds, and thus merged her into zodiark upon his return. when fandaniel is again encountered in the aetherial sea, esmerales's soul is still entwined to his. she can't escape unless something stronger pulls her out—and the only thing stronger is another shard of her same, original soul. l'aiha.

esmerales rejoins to l'aiha not to help her, but simply to weaken fandaniel and get back at him. (her rejoining nevertheless DOES help l'aiha, rebalancing her astral and umbral aether so she can use magic again, and become considerably less endangered by the lingering light corruption from the first, but this was not anywhere in esmerales's intentions.) once he's destroyed, esmerales simply closes her consciousness off within l'aiha. like ardbert, esmerales is still there, still herself in some way, but she utterly refuses to work with l'aiha on any direct or intentional level. esmerales despises l'aiha, and frankly hopes she rots.

even now, with the opportunity to save her own star, the 13th, esmerales refuses to act. she has no love left for the world. she's returned to the state igeyorhm found her in: crippled with grief and hatred. whether or not she ever, for the first time in 10 thousand years, decides to do a good thing remains to be seen, but personally i'm more inclined to leave her as unwilling to help in any capacity.

the POINT of her is that she was indescribably harmed, and she chose to harm others, uninvolved, in return. the POINT of her character is to explore how someone can be consumed in their own trauma, grief, anger, etc, and become precisely what ruined her own life. she's an exploration of mistreated wives who mistreat their children, bullied kids who grow up to commit mass shootings or become nazis. she isn't MEANT to overcome this, that is a story for l'aiha, for ardbert, for the original soul of artemis of whom esmerales originates from. she IS the 'bad end' shard of azem.

and she's meant to showcase how insane that is. how twisted and wicked and POSSIBLE it is for someone to be wronged and then choose to commit wrongs not even against their abusers, but again people weaker than them, people they feel they CAN exert that power, as if doing so will fix them, as if they will heal through tearing down others the way they themself were torn down. through and through, she's the epitome of a character who went through pain, undeserved, unthinkable, but has since forsaken any compassion or sympathy she could've been owed by hurting others. real people turn into this, so she's meant to explore why that is never truly in service of healing or righting wrongs, and for her to go to these lengths and still come out doing good in the end is ALSO a thing that really happens, but it's not the narrative i created her for. she's here to be wrong to the bitter end.

u know. i like her in a strictly fictional sense because she's bombastic and powerful and frankly deranged, but in a real life setting (and in fact even in her fictional setting) she's literally a victim of genocide who chose to commit genocide against not even her attackers, but people she actually thinks she can succeed over. she seeks power and control by robbing others of it, rather than taking it back from the people who have her own. sure, she wants to rip fandaniel to shreds, but he isn't the source of all this—igeyorhm is, and the unsundered are. but not only are they dead, esmerales still loves them, and given the chance, she would pretend she hadn't learned of how deeply they betrayed her, she would erase the memory from her own mind, just to be with them again, just to have power again.

sorry i talk about her so much because i have a recurring thing where i want to explore this development in a character. i think it's important to remember evil people are still just people, not because we should excuse their actions, but so we can be vigilant against BECOMING like them. any human can do it. any human can decide, temporarily or permanently, to take out their pain on others, to steal control for themselves from others. that's what esmerales is. a woman who grew up good, and lived to destroy the lives of others after she was wronged.