#his adoptive family helped him raise her and outfit her whilst treating him as blood family

[shivasdarknight]

For Seraphin

🌳 - What’s their extended family like?

🐾 - Do they have any pets?

🌳 - What’s their extended family like?

Mega hella dead - both adopted and bio. Seraphin's bio family was the Evrardoux of the Velodyna Clan, which lived on the border of the Shroud and the fringes of Gyr Abania (gestures at the Velodyna river and why it's named that). Beyond his parents and siblings, any extended family was killed in the Garlean onslaught. They mostly kept to themselves and weren't as proud as Seraphin's father, but Seraphin couldn't tell you much about them even if he tried since was like four or five when that happened. He's one of the only survivors of the massacre, the other being Iolaine but she's...weird.

On the adopted side of things, he has a few aunts and uncles that are still alive but they're older and lost their children to conscription. They're kind, sad, and deeply distant from losing their homeland. This is the Eldridge side of things, of Ala Mhigan highlanders who had as long a history with the land that the Velodyna clan did. They weren't nobles by any means, but they eked out a life on the fringes and maintained a lot of the original religious practices that King Theodoric tried to ban. So Seraphin does what he can for his adoptive family, but also spends a fair amount of time around Little Ala Mhigo trying to do what he can to ease the pain of his older extended family - family that lost their children on foreign lands, and would never be able to bury them, or lost them to the Crania Lupii's recruitment thanks to Gaius.

🐾 - Do they have any pets?

Technically, yeah! Seraphin's got a true griffin he raised from an egg named Camilla - he was about 7-9 at the time, so they've been life long partners. He found Camilla's egg while playing where he really shouldn't have been in Southern Thanalan, and wound up witnessing an ambush of an Ul'dahn merchant's cart at the hands of Amalj'aa. The reason? Typical black market shit, the asshole - now dead and in multiple pieces - not only managed to swipe some drake eggs, but Amalj'aa as well. They were just getting back what was theirs, especially since it was their children caught in the mix. Among the eggs were other things this merchant had planned on smuggling into the city, including a true griffin egg. They weren't really sure where he found it, but they were just going to leave anything that wasn't theirs.

Until they spotted Seraphin.

One of them wanted to get rid of witnesses, because that's how you get the Immortal Flames on your ass. The other told them off, recognizing that Seraphin was not only a child, but one of the refugees from Little Ala Mhigo. They had no qualms with the refugees, as this Amalj'aa recognized the common adversary they shared. This Amalj'aa cautiously approached Seraphin and offered to at least get him most of the way back home so he'd not get killed by wildlife or reanimated corpses, and realizes that a gesture of good faith to the Ala Mhigan refugees was sitting right there. They give Seraphin the egg and tell him to take good care of it, before helping him get back safely.

Yeah, so that Amalj'aa would be known as Hamujj Gah, the leader of the Brotherhood of Ash.

So, Seraphin raised the griffin at Little Ala Mhigo and became deeply attached to her - his parents even worked to get him riding gear for her and the two are inseparable. That gesture from Hamujj Gah helps build up better sentiments between the two encampments, and it's also what pushed Seraphin into his dumb heroism as a Warrior of Light years later. So beyond Camilla being a dear companion - a very sweet griffin that has separation anxiety - she means a lot on a wider scale in that she was a gesture of good faith between the Brotherhood of Ash and the refugees of Little Ala Mhigo that would eventually turn into an allegiance against Ul'dah's bullshit .w. Very fitting she wound up being a true griffin, considering their significance to Ala Mhigan culture.