#others burn themselves up until there's just a powerful daemon made of the scourge they absorved left behind

[laryna6]

FFXV AU where there are two Lucis Caelum lines and ‘King’ is a purely magical/ceremonial position with no actual political power. 

See, Ardyn was pretty busy with the whole ‘saving the world’ thing so he was like ‘I’m never home and someone has to actually like, run the country and set up anti-daemon defenses around towns to stop people from getting infected in the first place, so I’m appointing my younger brother as my Regent and he’s in charge of everything that doesn’t involve healing or dealing with the Astrals.

So Somnus got all the power and respect he wanted and negative reason to betray his brother because then the Astrals might choose him to get jammed full of ten thousand daemons, no thank u. 

Ardyn and the oracle’s kids were very magic, and Somnus taught his kids how to do all the politicking, so he managed to wrangle his line holding on to actual power and hereditary Regents became the true rulers of Lucis, as per Japan having the Emperors’ line remain intact while Shoguns ruled.

In canon, when the kings sucked the people of Lucis were kind of stuck because like, divinely ordained, but since the Regents didn’t have that advantage, eventually a democratic revolution overthrew them (although they hung on to significant power as Dukes of Insomnia) but had no reason to change the arrangement with the kings because ‘if it ain’t broke’ you can keep getting your magical healings and divine blessings (it also threw the traditionalists a bone). 

In the modern times, King Regis (KIng King’s) son is Prince Ignis, named for fire to honor his ancestor Ardyn, and Somnus’ descendent is Duke Noctis. And like, people joke they were switched at birth because Ignis is a great organizer who started politicking young trying to see what he could do to preserve as much of his father’s life force as possible and is hiding that he already controls his magic to make his father’s continued life even more valuable, while Noctis spent a few years with his legs paralyzed after the attack that killed his parents and got very very good at warping to the point that Ignis’ shield Gladio got worried about him and started beating him into actually using his astral-damned legs, so yeah, people joke that the magic talent and political talents got switched. 

Since Noctis wasn’t a prince Prompto wasn’t intimidated and the two of them became friends way earlier and Prompto volunteered as a running buddy to help Noctis’ health but had no reason to give a damn about weight loss? So he remains round and friend-shaped and huggable and the amount of muscle in there means his hugs are Powerful. Noctis appreciates that Prompto can pick him up and carry him when he’s too achy to move~

Chibi Noctis was there for the attack on Luna’s home, and warping her and Ravus to safety was what unlocked his power, but Luna had to return to the empire bc people there needed healing from the Starscourge (Regis handles Lucis) and Ravus went with her to try to help. 

The peace treaty with the Empire is that Ignis marries Luna and the Empire keeps all but one child that’ll be a heir for Lucis, bc the Empire wants their own tame ‘king’ line to hopefully do something re. the wrath of Shiva (and get experimented on...) Road trip happens, with Noctis and Prompto coming along with Ignis and his shield Gladio as friends of his and also to see/meet Luna. Post marriage Ignis needs to build a power base fast in Gralea for leverage to get their children treated like humans, and then they find that Besithia is planning to create new-gen MTs with clones of Ignis...

[secret-engima]

Okay, but may I also point out that it's awfully convenient that Ardyn has hallucinations that push him into the 'right' direction to fulfill bahamut's prophecy when we've seen that Bahamut is very competent with illusions (Aera stabbing Ardyn, anyone?) And even more convenient that in that one hallucination of aera where she tells him to kill her (which, excuse me what) she tells him it's all because she defied the gods? Way to 'subtly' tell ardyn to do what the gods say or else 'aera'

Hmmmm hmmmmmmm okay. So ... yes you have a point, and I know that in Dawn of the Future the whole deal is Bahamut being the final boss but like-

I do NOT see it that way? Never have. I ... I get where they’re coming from and I’m sure they pulled it off awesomely, but I’ve never seen Bahamut has outright malicious or cruel or manipulative or the bad guy (until Square Enix tried to shove it in my face in a VERY hamfisted cutscene that also throws a huge plothole into the Kingsglaive thanks a lot Squeenix way to rip apart your own lore and timeline).

Lemme explain my POV (gonna stick it under Read More because oh boy is this long).

One- Ardyn is an unreliable narrator. Ardyn is THE unreliable narrator. He’s not only been chilling in total isolation for 2k years (which is seriously bad for human mental health) he’s infected with Starscourge, which is known to make its victims mindless and permanently screamingly furious at EVERYTHING. His memories are not reliable, his grip on REALITY is not reliable. He could STRAIGHT UP NOT BE HEARING what Bahamut is actually saying when they converse, or his mental state is twisting it to a malicious/cruel bent when it isn’t really and we would have no way to know for sure because we only ever see this particular scene from ARDYN’S POV.

On the hallucinations- I really, truly believe it’s the Starscourge doing that, even the Aera things, except MAYBE MAYBE the one where she stabs him, but you only get that ending after Ardyn basically tells Bahamut, the guy in charge of guarding the world, that he’s going to intentionally go BURN THE WORLD and imma get back to that in a minute on why I think it’s not even Aera doing the stabbing.

Anyway, on the Starscourge, which really is the lynchpin to the whole story- it is ... how do I put this. In the INTEREST of the Scourge to make sure it’s hosts are always angry, always crazy, always lashing out and infecting others. That’s how it WORKS. Daemons are mindlessly furious and hungry and infect any animal or human they come across. Now, for most, once the transformation is complete that’s it, memories are gone and hate is all that remains but not ALWAYS and not just Ardyn.

Going back to the Naga and her baby thing- it does not matter what you say to her, she IS going to attack you. She IS going to think you stole her baby and are lying if you say anything otherwise. It literally doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter that Prompto is not a baby and definitely not HER baby, or that Prompto is RIGHT THERE when she asks “where is my baby?���. She’s stuck in a loop of “baby-gone-baby-missing-find-my-baby-make-themPAYWHEREISMYBABY” basically. You can’t even know if she’s HEARING what you’re actually saying, or some twisted version that makes her think you’re lying. So she attacks, and attacking means a chance of infecting, which means spreading the Scourge and making it stronger. It is REALLY CONDUCIVE for the Scourge to have some kind of hallucinogenic effect that twists reality to being against you and being something deserving lashing out at and this would apply even more strongly to Bahamut and Bahamut’s magic (LC and Oracle) ie the one thing that can stop the spread of the Scourge. Not to imply sentience, cause I’m not really saying that, but any virus/organism/WHATEVER if it’s alive it’s going to try to multiply and the Scourge multiplies through infection via ATTACK.

And since it’s already in there, wrecking brain chemistry of the victim, wrecking it in a way that twists up what is being said or acted or even seen is 100% plausible.

This is strengthened by the fact that ARDYN CAN DO ILLUSIONS. I can’t recall atm if Bahamut EVER directly uses illusions, but Ardyn? We seem him use them multiple times. He uses them on that train to make us think we’re chasing him and not Prompto, then again to make us think we’re fighting alongside Prompto rather than Ardyn, again to make us SHOVE PROMPTO OFF A TRAIN and lastly to make us think a dead MT is actually an unconscious Prompto until we get close enough. Heck, even his Scourge-face thing is probably him just dropping an illusion of normalcy rather than any kind of transformation. We SEE the Scourge do crazy realistic, reality-warping illusions. It’s not LC magic because Regis and Noctis never use anything even close to similar and no historical LC is mentioned as an illusionist. But Ardyn? Ardyn is the only fully sentient Daemon ever, if anyone could take the Scourge’s natural inclination to create illusions to warp the perception of the infected and instead warp the perception of others it would be him.

So this means while ARDYN is hearing “this was always your fate, do this or suffer more torment” what Bahamut is actually saying could easily be more along the lines of an aloof, only vaguely apologetic “so this happened and I can’t fix it” (remember, the Crystal, Bahamut’s nexus of power, could not purify Ardyn even BEFORE he daemonified Ifrit, so of course Bahamut can’t help) “but if you wait, the Chosen King is coming soon and he’ll fix everything and give you peace and also get to avenge you by killing the Scourge through your death, so just wait until he comes to cure you and let you pass on to the afterlife”.

I really, really don’t think Bahamut’s plan involved creating an Accursed sacrificial lamb. It doesn’t make SENSE. The point was to kill the Scourge, even when Bahamut is the final boss in Dawn of the Future (from what I read on the wiki anyway) Bahamut is basically going “the Scourge can’t spread if everything is DEAD”. Why would he wait and manipulate events to make Ardyn Even More Of A Problem then the one he already has on hand when he could have just ... let Ardyn take out the Scourge in its early stages??? It is very, very likely Ardyn’s infection is TWISTING the intent of Bahamut’s words or even the words themselves to make Ardyn fight back against the one thing that could stop the Scourge from spreading.

As for the “Aera stabbing scene” again, Ardyn just said “I’mma burn the world” to Bahamut’s face, of course punishment is involved, but it is also very likely that it’s not AERA doing the punishing. Bahamut has never hesitated to come smite people in person before (see Bahamut vs Ifrit and Bahamut vs Ifrit round 2) so at worst it’s probably just like- one of Bahamut’s Messengers doing the punishment stabbing because Ardyn JUST MADE HIMSELF THE ENEMY. This isn’t a torture of a disobedient sacrificial lamb, it’s tactically weakening an enemy who just rejected your hand of sorta-alliance and also minutes ago tried to kill the Chosen King’s dad before your Chosen King could be born.

But Ardyn’s brain, which has already hallucinated Somnus taunting him in the place of freaking out Kingsglaives mind you, is putting Aera there because that’s what will make Ardyn the angriest, that’s what will make him lash out the most. The same goes for Aera telling Ardyn to kill her because she defied the gods, what better way to direct Ardyn’s fury at the one thing that could stop the Scourge than to BLAME THE DEATH OF ARDYN’S LOVER on them? And for either of these, Bahamut wouldn’t even know it’s happening or why it’s significant, because Bahamut doesn’t ... GET humans and that leads into my second point:

Why I think Bahamut isn’t actually a horrible, intentionally cruel dude:

Okay so- I do not condone a lot of the stuff Bahamut chooses, because hey I like Noctis and Ardyn too and yeah Bahamut’s plan sucks and could have been way better from our POV, but I genuinely do not see him as malicious or manipulative in this. Not like Dawn of the Future, Episode Ardyn, or some fanfic authors make him out to be (for all that’s a very valid position and can be excellently written) and here’s WHY.

Bahamut is not human. For all he can speak to humans and is humanoid in shape he IS NOT HUMAN. He does not think like a human, he does not perceive time like a human, his POV is entirely alien to humans. Ifrit and Shiva were the closest to humans because they intentionally tried to figure them out, but even THEY don’t get humans entirely, for all Ifrit used to love them and Shiva still does. Bahamut on the other hand, never had or took that chance. He’s the big picture guy, the head of the pantheon. He’s in charge of keeping the entire freaking planet from being killed somehow, which is why he stepped in and was the final one of the five to kill Ifrit the first time and not, say, our local cranky sea snek of pure rage.

Bahamut isn’t cruel, he just genuinely does not understand that his plan is messed up. Worse, at his core, he’s a Strategist without an emotional anchor or someone to keep him in moral check. It’s either Fanon or actual canon that he’s the Astral of War, and while War can be a lot of things, in mythology a “god of war” is usually one of two things: rage monster or STRATEGIST. The one in charge of making the hard choices. The one who looks at the battlefield and says “if I do nothing, all my men and the people I protect will die. If I move these two units in to attack the enemy flank, a lot of those men in those units will die BUT it will confuse the enemy into letting me defeat them with the main force, thereby saving the majority of my force and everyone I’m protecting”. Minimal losses for maximum gain. It’s not nice, it’s not pretty, maybe it isn’t even moral, but war is a lot of things and moral tends not to be one of them, so that kind of strategy is NECESSARY in certain moderation.

Now, the Astrals can’t fix the Scourge, likely because their war with Ifrit not only robbed them of a key member (recall that in most mythology fire is PURIFICATION) but also severely weakened them. They went to sleep for a reason, they were trying to recoup their lost power. But when it takes so long to recharge and the Scourge keeps getting worse in the meantime, it’s a war of attrition the Astrals could win, but humanity and the planet wouldn’t so another method is needed. Bahamut doesn’t know humans, and considering their role in Ifrit’s fall (aka the start of the whole Astrals Can’t Fix This issue) he has no reason to trust their teamwork or obedience skills. The one time he DOES in the form of Somnus and Ardyn … well. Look what happens.

So, Bahamut has to make a plan to save the world. He does not understand how humans think, he does not TRUST humans enough to be anything more than temporary troops at best, and he needs to do something. So in his mind- either he can let the world burn, or he can sacrifice 116 (counting Ardyn and Luna) humans to a plan that will save the world and only requires most of those humans to be essentially living batteries. It doesn’t matter what the Lucii did in life, after death their magic went into the Crystal, no responsibility or teamwork necessary. The only two who need to Do A More Complicated Job is Noctis, who needs to gather power and then sit on a chair and die, and Luna, who needs to wake up the other Astrals. That’s it. 116 people and the world’s simplest instructions (to an Astral anyway) and boom, entire planet and billions of lives are saved. Billions of lives Bahamut is in charge of guarding, billions who he knows just as well (or in this case just as not well) as the LCs and Oracles. People living and loving and hoping and dying all in the same blinks of time as the LCs that we love but to Bahamut are just - strangers. Useful strangers. But strangers.

To summarize, Bahamut is stuck in the world’s biggest version of that railway switch scenario in Psychology class: If there are five people stuck on one railway track and one person stuck on the other, and a speeding train set to kill all five, would you stand back and let the five die or would you flip the switch to the alternate track and sentence the other one person to death? Only in Bahamut’s case it’s: will you sentence 116 people to live and die for a prophecy (past Oracles don’t count as they don’t expressly need to die for the Prophecy, they aren’t even living batteries, only Luna needs to die for the cause) to save billions across multiple generations to stop a plague, or will you sit back and watch as they ALL die.

And that’s not even touching on the Time thing where, to Bahamut, this entire plan might not even TAKE that long. Sure to humans it’s 2k years and however many people getting turned into daemons, but in the original plan (Ardyn being Chosen King) that wouldn’t have happened and in this backup plan (Noctis being Chosen King) what to us is centuries could, for Bahamut easily be closer to an annoying but expected wait in the doctor’s office. He sentenced Gilgamesh to wait until the coming of the Last Shield but considering how long the Astrals live and have lived that’s easily just the world’s most stern and aggressive Time Out to his eyes, especially since the whole “living on in a suit of armor rather than original body” means very little to beings who can and have been shown to react to death by sighing, making new bodies, and then going about their day like usual. Those thousands, maybe millions, who die to the Scourge in the meantime? Well no he doesn’t like it, but there is still X billions of living humans he needs to safeguard and it’s not HIS fault that Chosen King One went and got himself infected and then stabbed by his brother now is it? Ardyn comes to him all infected and crazy and Bahamut is essentially going “I can’t fix this and you were supposed to be Chosen King but now you’re the Accursed. Bright Side, you can still find peace in the afterlife and have the bonus of taking the Starscourge out with you (Vengeance is, after all, one of the few things humans and Astrals share a concept of). All you have to do is let the new Chosen King stab you.” He’s just saying it in the vaguest, nastiest, I-will-not-admit-that-my-plan-blew-up-in-my-face way that the Scourge then twisted to an outright “this was my plan all along now do your job and die stupid mortal” kinda way.

So … yeah stupid long ramble but TD:LR the Starscourge shows illusionary and manipulation powers far more often and more thoroughly than Bahamut ever did and while it is Totally Valid and Plausible that Bahamut is a terrible, manipulative person, he has and always will strike me more as a non-human Strategist trying to do his job and being Really Arrogant and Vague about it when his plan goes off the rails and he needs to resort to Plan 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Of course, if Manipulative Bad Guy Bahamut makes more sense to you then cool. But this is just the perspective I take in like- all my ffxv AUs and I felt the need to finally put it out there since the topic finally came up.

[blackjacketmuses]

hc; ardyn 24

So I just noted a post that said something about the Caelum family having powers of their own. Okay, I can work with that. And it works with another headcanon I have about Eos, too!

In the time of Solheim and before, there was a phenomenon its people called deus tetigit -- god-touched. The people who were touched by the Astrals, for the most part...it was not a good thing, a double-edged sword that was a blessing and a curse. 

Touched by the Hydraean? The sound of the waves and the frothing surf in your veins, the wild sea in your heart and all the rage of the goddess of death drove one mad. Some strong-willed men and women lasted long enough to do great things with the wild and untamed passion it gave them, the ferocity and the pull of the tides -- but they all went mad, and most ended up consigning themselves to the sea for their Tidemother.

Those touched by the Glacian froze. Their hearts and minds and all else iced over, they could only see with a cruel and clinical eye, could not feel save for logic and the most sensible, most rational path. It calmed their souls and trapped passion and fire away, and they all died of the chill in their veins, despite most being very accomplished scholars and masters of the ice they could command.

Bahamut and Titan drove their touched battle-mad -- the god of war and the god of the earth whipping those they touched into frenzies of combat and battle. They were certainly able warriors, with command of the earth and skin like stone, or light bleeding from their eyes and their veins, but they were berserk, uncontrollable, and lived for combat until combat ended their lives. Some were heroes, but not many.

Ramuh liked his humans, touched only a few, but the spark he gave them was lightning in their veins and a hum of energy in their chests, and Ramuh’s touched were those that built towers high and puzzles complex, engineers and inventors who used the thunder at their fingertips and endless vigor to make great and wonderful things, break all the limits of possibilities --- but breaking those limits almost always led to disaster, flying too close to the sun. He did not touch any after Solheim’s fall, not really, worried that the spark of creation he gave would cause another Solheim.

And then we come to Ifrit’s -- the fire-touched, kissed by the sun, the ones that had flames in their chest and liquid fire in their veins, eyes like embers and passion and will and deep and burning love and devotion. Ifrit’s touched were heroes all, brave and courageous and full of fire and all that the Infernian had once loved in mortals...but fire can burn as well as warm, and the fallen Astral’s blessing can turn to a curse, that fire destroying all the blessed once loved, turning passion to the rage and anger of the the Infernian.

House Caelum was one of Ifrit’s favored -- everyone knew they were, the red of fire being common in their hair. They had magic, too, magic mingled with a marriage generations back between an Ifrit-touched and a Bahamut-touched, and it became something new --- Somnus, the younger of the sons, was best at the more battle-aligned magic, what would become known as warping and the Armiger.

The older brother, Ardyn Lucis Caelum -- the brilliant light of the sky, his name means --- was better at the other sort of magic, one he pulled from the fire in his veins. He loved fiercely, felt passion and burning devotion to his people and his loved ones, had that spark in his chest and fire in his veins, fought with everything he had for the world he loved, the people he loved.

The blending of these blessings in House Caelum was why the gods chose their line, in the end, and in the end it was decided that the one with more of Ifrit’s fire in his blood would be the designated villain, the darkness that would smother his fire. And for a time it did --- the Adagium rotting in the darkness --- but then he made his covenant with the Infernian himself, turned him to a daemon and absorbed his memories, and that spark smothered in the Scourge became a raging fire, blessing turned to curse, and it is this that fuels much of Ardyn’s unstoppable, ever-burning rage against the heavens and earth both, pouring gasoline on the hate and madness already there from his betrayal.

His descendants still carry that spark, too, the blessing of Ifrit still there two millennia later -- Ravus, burning with love for his sister and the passion to do whatever it takes to save her, fire in his veins that was far too familiar for the gods to allow. Luna, her own spark iced over by the Glacian in fear of what she too might be like. And even Noctis, of Somnus’s line touched more now by Bahamut and the Crystal than by Ifrit, still has a spark, a desire to protect, a fierceness in his love.