Ghosts On The First

𝑇ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑤𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒 - 𝑅𝑒𝑑𝑢𝑥

save me, brave hero.

what's funny about the ending of endwalker is that, depending on who you are, it CAN be the likely-intended all-out victory of saving the universe and how even if none of the people who started this conflict are still around, you evoke your own will to survive and you finish it because your lives are worthwhile and anything that can exist is worth saving.

or it can be about how there's never gonna be a sunset to ride off in, and how the fight is never going to end because it's baked into the fabric of existence, and how given time and distance another hermes will ask another question and another meteion will fall to the depths of hopelessness and another You will have to rise up and kill them and it's all such a fucking waste, isn't it? because eventually the other You is going to lose. and even though your friends are worth the fight, your enemies are worth the strained empathy, and everyone you've never met can fit in your heart, isn't it exhausting to hold them there?

especially with the context of the thirteenth story right after. this fugly-armor jackass is proof that no matter how final your victory seems, tomorrow someone is going to wake up and kill their neighbor and someone is going to wake up and start a war. it's never over. you never rest. there's never peace. and you have to believe that it's all worth it despite that, and you CAN believe that because you couldn't have killed the endsinger otherwise, but isn't it tiring? don't you want to rest?

or it can be about how the only person who could possibly have surmounted those trials has to breathe them like air in order to live. you've been desensitized to challenge so much that you can dance through a war and come out unscathed, and all it elicits from you is a sad sigh. your ability to produce serotonin has been limited exclusively to saving all life in the universe. everything else is dull. and you didn't even get to bury him this time.

or it can be about how no one should ever have shouldered all that, and how there's no other way to return except broken. the scions pray you back to life and you kind of wish they hadn't. and now there's a glint in your eye that you can't see in the mirror but you see reflected in the faces of everyone you know that says you're a hairsbreadth from snapping clean in two. you should be locked away, you're too strong and too close to the edge, but who's left to lock you up? you killed your masters and gods and then you killed the thing your gods couldn't kill. you're alone at the top of existence and who could possibly trust you with that summit? you don't want to, but one day, like a beaten mutt, you're going to bite a kid and they're going to have to put you down. you're just too close to the end of your rope.

or it can be about operating a colonizer's paradise on a private island full of robots. i guess.

Memory

smash. who said that

Day III: Devotion

Thinking of G'raha Tia, only 24 years old and simultaneously beyond and behind his peers because of how the archon accepted the fate of locking himself away in the Crystal Tower. Thinking of him, with the optimism of a 24yo and the attention span of a 24yo and the life goals of a 24yo who just realized that the world is a lot bigger than all the books he studied and slept on could ever describe. Thinking of him, telling his new friends and his old friends and his scared inner self that he's not going to die, that he's just going to sleep, knowing full well that he will likely never wake up.

Thinking of G'raha Tia, only 124 waking years old and carrying the memories of people that never lived because of what he did after waking in the Crystal Tower. Thinking of him, with a heart shattered by experiences and with the careful plotting that comes from experiences and with a pure self-destructive goal forged by those experiences who just realized that he is going to have to live in a world that never was but is now and is greater than all his hopes and fears ever conspired to put together. Thinking of him, telling his old friends and his new friends and the one person that he is scared of losing that he is going to be okay, that he is going to not sleep on life, knowing that this is the world he was ready to die for, knowing that he will likely never discover everything about it but is ready to die trying.

Thinking of that moment when G'raha Tia the 24yo meets G'raha Tia the 124yo in the landscape of their unifying mind. Thinking of them, when the life goals of a 24yo collides with the life goals of a 124yo and how the century of experiences between them makes them completely separate people. Thinking of them, telling his younger self that the ambition was fulfilled and it's time to wake up, telling his older self that there is still ambition more and the dream has just begun, telling each other that this is not a type of death but just a change and both of them knowing full well that they are going to die to each other so that G'raha Tia may yet live for one more adventure with their friend.

Thinking of G'raha Tia and that moment of ultimate surrender of self to self.

Thinking.

they're talking about the important things in r/ffxivdiscussion for a change

Bask in the spotlight and burn, baby, burn!!!! 🔥