Here is a great big ramble spoiler plurk about G'raha Tia, so Callie my friends who do not play FFXIV but might be interested anyway can understand my latest obsession.
Because before we can even get to G'raha himself, we have to explain the history of Eorzea itself, yes I promise this is all directly relevant context.
So, the history of Eorzea is marked by a distinctive cycle where great civilizations rise and then are struck by a terrible Calamity that fucks the world up right proper. The division between the initial version of FFXIV and the current version was marked by the seventh Calamity, where one of the planet's
moons was dropped on Eorzea and turned out to have a very pissed off dragon god in it, just to give an idea of the scale here that merits the use of the capital c in Calamity.
Of these ancient destroyed civilizations, the one whose fallout we deal the most with is from a couple of cycles ago, called the Allagan Empire. These guys were wildly advanced in magic and technology, as evidenced by the fact that they are the ones who made a fake moon and put a dragon god in it to use as a battery.
Among the many Allagan installations that persist into Eorzea's present, the one most relevant to G'raha's tale is the Crystal Tower, which is, as you might guess, an enormous tower made of crystal, which the Allagans used to collect and store solar energy.
The Calamity that destroyed the Allagan Empire was a massive earthquake, which buried the tower, but aforementioned angry dragon god wrecked the landscape so hard that it resurfaced.
Naturally, this is something that gets the attention of historians and researchers, and an expedition is gathered to investigate the mysteries of the tower. We, the player, henceforth referred to as WoL for Warrior of Light because using first person feels awkward, are recruited to help with this
expedition as the muscle, because do you really think that the tower's defenses are still working literal millennia later? Of fucking course they are, the Allagans did not fuck around when it came to building stuff to fucking last.
The first security measure the expedition has to get past are these giant forcefields that obliterate anything that touches them, and to do this the WoL has to get some special shiny rocks so their engineer buddy Cid can make them reflect the forcefields' energies back on them and destroy them.
The WoL gets most of them without much issue, despite their rarity because these quests got nerfed some and used to be way more obnoxious but for the last couple, before the leader of the expedition, Rammbroes, sends the WoL off, he mentions that he already sent a researcher friend of his to look
into it a while ago, and hasn't heard anything from the guy since. The WoL gets more specific directions from a local who tells them that the rock they're after is really hard to get because the place it's mined is territory to a really mean boar who mauls anyone who gets close. The WoL has killed at least
three gods by this point and fears no pig, so off they go, only to find a dead boar and no special rock. A ~mysterious voice~ calls to them, all like, "you missed the show, I already got the rock, but hey, I know where the last rock is, it's in this enemy camp, we're going to race to see who can get it first"
So the WoL goes and kills some guards and gets the last rock, and the voice pipes up again like "I was so fascinated watching you that I totally forgot about grabbing the rock, so I guess I forfeited this one. Naturally you deserve a prize for winning, I left it for you over here"
The prize is, naturally, the rock from the boar, and the voice pipes up one last time to be like "I did the processing it needs for you already, see you soon!"
The WoL takes the rocks back to Rammbroes, and he's like, cool, we're ready to get this shit started for real now, when someone offscreen interrupts him to say basically the same thing but in more fanciful speechifying language, and it's a catboy with red hair and very distinctive heterochromia: one teal eye,
Rammbroes is just like, "oh, there you are. You couldn't keep me updated on your whereabouts???" and the catboy's like, "I was busy doing what you asked! I got the rocks, and I left them in the hands of a very capable courier." And then he smiles at the WoL like, "I told you we'd meet again soon" and it is
G'raha's really hype to investigate the tower. He specializes in Allagan history specifically and loves tales of adventure and just cannot wait to chronicle the WoL beating the shit out of whatever might be in the tower.
He names the expedition NOAH, which has some pompous anagram, Nominal Observers of Allagan History or something like that, but is really just the name of a famous Allagan scholar, while everyone else is like "ok sure" and off we go!
Destroying the forcefields goes off without a hitch and that brings us to the building that surrounds the base of the tower, the Labyrinth of the Ancients. The WoL and 23 of their powerful adventurer friends get to go in and clear the place of its many powerful guardians, and G'raha's super pouty about
Once the way is cleared, NOAH approaches the gate into the tower itself, only to find it sealed by a mechanism they can't figure out. Rammbroes declares that it's going to take time to figure out what to do with this door and the WoL should come back later, and G'raha's like, "and I'll take this time to
go practice my fighting skills so I can join you next time!!!" and Rammbroes is like "the fuck you will, we need your knowledge of Allagan history to figure out this door."
When the WoL returns, Rammbroes confesses that they're still completely roadblocked by the gate, but the conversation is interrupted by the arrival of two strangers, a man and a woman. They introduce themselves as Doga and Unei respectively, and claim to be scholars of Allagan history from NOAH's parent
organization, here to help figure out the gate. Rammbroes is like, hmm, nobody told me about this, but G'raha, who has definitely never met these people even though he absolutely should've if they're telling the truth, is like, I'm down for the help.
They look at him and they're like, "oh, your eye is like ours" because, sure enough, they also have bright red eyes, and he's like, "you know about the Allagan Eye?" because it turns out his one red eye isn't just normal fantasy phenotypes at work, it is a trait that appears once a generation in his family
and the only information that's been passed down through the generations is that the eye is tied to Allag somehow. Hence his interest in Allagan history in particular, he wants to solve the mystery of his eye.
And so, despite the fact that these gates have opened for nothing, not even when Cid turned a magitek cannon on them, Unei and Doga hold their hands up to it and with a little basic magic attunement, the gate opens.
While everybody is in slackjawed amazement at this, in rolls Nero, and god I do not have time to explain Nero. He's Cid's bitter jaded ex-boyfriend while Cid is unaware they were ever dating much less that they had a bad breakup. This is not factually correct, but it is emotionally correct.
And so it turns out that the tower is made to respond only to those with royal blood, but that's not super practical for day to day operations, so royal clones were made to act as living keys, but also Unei and Doga are special clones and here's where shit gets really wild with Allagan history.
The Allagan Empire was facing decline, so a guy named Amon decided that the reasonable solution to this was to raise the first Allagan emperor, Xande, from the fucking dead. And, with cloning technology, he did exactly that.
The original Unei and Doga originally supported Xande's ascent to the throne, but, unsurprisingly, turns out dying fucks with a guy, and while he did bring Allag to even greater glory, he was so hung up on the idea that he'd die and lose it all again that he just went, fuck it, I'll bring it all down
with me, and he made a pact with a demon of the void called Cloud of Darkness, where she'd give him great power, and he'd open a voidgate large enough for her to come to Eorzea and wreck shit.
This is why Allag even made a fake moon with a dragon god in it in the first place, it turns out, it was to get even more power for the Crystal Tower to open this massive gate.
Original Unei and Doga were like "oh shit, we fucked up" and imbued the clone Unei and Doga with their will to put an end to all that. But before they could do a murder or whatever, Xande had the power from the moon transferred to the tower. But the surge proved to be more than the tower could handle
EXCEPT, before the tower sunk into the ground, Amon cast a spell over it that froze everything and everyone in the tower in time, so they could sleep until the tower arose again. And now Sleeping Beauty, by which I mean Xande, is awake again, and it's up to WoL and 23 of their powerful adventurer friends
Which they do! With Xande placed to rest once more, Unei and Doga attempt to, by virtue of their royal blood, annul the pact with Cloud of Darkness and close the building voidgate, but CoD is having none of it. The gate isn't nearly large enough for her to get through, but it's enough that she can
So obviously now the WoL and 23 of their powerful adventurer friends have to go into the void and rescue them, and this time G'raha insists that he goes with them to help rescue Unei and Doga and also because ever since he met them, his eye's been acting up and he knows things without remembering
where he learned them and he has this weird feeling that he's forgotten something really important and he's trying to remember it, and they're the closest thing he's got to answers, and also, y'know, they're part of the team.
So after the WoL vanquishes CoD, they and G'raha find Unei, Doga, and Nero, and it turns out that because of their royal blood, CoD can't harm Unei and Doga directly, which is relevant, because CoD is immortal and despite her vanquishing, she's still together enough to throw killer lasers at people.
And, sure enough, G'raha takes a laser directly and it does fuck all to him, providing absolute proof that his red eye is a result of royal blood, weak and diluted though it may be. Unei and Doga decide to bolster his royal blood with their own (magically, so this involves pretty lights instead of
horrible gore), so that he can command the tower, while they stay behind in the void and annul the pact Xande made with CoD for good. This makes both G'raha's eyes red, and he escapes with the WoL and Nero.
I should mention here that NOAH collectively agreed after learning about Xande's voidgate-opening plans that they should seal the tower back up after they were done, because the technology inside was too dangerous to be set loose in the current state of the world. Because after everybody gets back from
the void, they all go back to camp to regroup, except for G'raha, who tells the WoL that he'll be along soon, he just remembered something he needs to take care of real quick. And then once everybody's gone, he chases the remaining researchers out of the tower so he can seal it up.
When NOAH hears about this, they all rush back to the gate to see G'raha still inside, warning them to not come any closer because the gate will be closing soon. Naturally, they are like, G'raha, what the fuck are you doing??? And he explains. He remembered that thing he was trying to remember.
After the earthquake that sunk the tower, there were still Allagan survivors. And they remembered the Crystal Tower as the centerpiece of their civilization, the thing that made their lives possible. It was their fervent wish that someday the tower would stand as a shining beacon of hope for all mankind
once more. This wish reached and resonated with the last surviving member of the royal family, and she used some leftover Allagan technology to imbue her most trusted aide, G'raha's ancestor, with her blood, that this dream may someday be realized.
And now G'raha is the last person with this royal blood, and once they seal the tower up, who knows how long it'll be until civilization advances enough to open it again, and by then, it's wholly possible that the royal blood will be gone, and then there'll be no way to use the tower, and the wish of
all those people will go unfulfilled. So instead, he's going to do what Amon did, and put himself to sleep within the tower, to awaken only when the world outside can reach it themselves, so he can be there to help them.
NOAH bids their farewells, promising that G'raha's nap is going to be way shorter than he thinks it'll be, just you wait!!!, the gate shuts, and so ends the first part of G'raha's tale.
So, after all that, it's about 200 years later that the tower is finally opened, and what G'raha finds is that the world has gone to absolute shit in the meantime.
Turns out, just a couple of years or so after he sealed himself up, our local evil empire, Garlemald, released a chemical weapon called Black Rose upon their enemies. A gas that killed indiscriminately, it spread wildly out of control, killing most of the world's population. Including the WoL and most
Cid was one of the lucky few who had survived the Calamity, and he was the one who thought up the plan that would eventually lead to the tower being opened and everything that would come after, using the knowledge gleaned from other adventures he'd joined the WoL on after the Crystal Tower.
Most specifically, the fights against the mechanical god, Alexander, which had mastery over time travel, and the alien robot, Omega, which could traverse the emptiness between planets.
Once, where the planet where Eorzea exists is, there was just one planet, but in time mythological, there was a fight between two gods, during which the planet was split into 14 shards. The characters first knew this as myth, the origin of the... ten heavens and three hells, IIRC? But it turns out it's
all true. The world Eorzea on is the central world, the Source, and it turns out that the various Calamities that have afflicted it are not random happenstance, but are caused when one of the other shards is so overwhelmed by a single element that it collapses into the Source and the surge of that
So the plan Cid set into motion is, they're going to take the immense energy collected by the Crystal Tower, and they're going to use it to turn the Crystal Tower into a time machine so it can simultaneously transport itself back to before the eighth Calamity and over to the First, the shard whose
collapse into the element of light caused said Calamity. Once there, G'raha would use magic to call the WoL from the Source to the First, where they can prevent the apocalyptic disaster that caused said collapse.
G'raha lands the tower on the First about 100 years before its collapse, the flow of time being screwy between the Source and the First. But it's just as well. For one, he needs time to prepare his summoning spell, and for two, the First is already in the midst of apocalypse.
See, the balance of the elements in the First was already tipped too far in favor of light, causing a Flood of Light that destroyed all but a small portion of the world, and would have already caused a collapse and Calamity were it not halted by earlier story stuff, it is once again complicated and not
(I appreciate getting called out personally on this plurk that was made 4 hours ago and is still going strong with pretty much just you at 78 comments)
directly relevant to G'raha's story so I will gloss over it. The point is this world G'raha just landed himself in just went through a calamity of its own, and its people need refuge, and so G'raha creates a safe zone around the tower that the monsters now roaming the land cannot breach, and he gets a
town built around the base of the tower and allows them to salvage tech from the tower itself and, though it isn't quite how he pictured it, the Crystal Tower once again stands as a beacon of hope for mankind.
Naturally the people of this town, which comes to be known as the Crystarium, have a lot of questions for this mysterious guy who just appeared with his mysterious giant tower, but G'raha dodges all of it like a champ, and eventually people just learn to, just not ask. He's not from around here, and
that's all that needs to be said, asking for more is just impolite. Even asking his name, it's apparently just fine to call him whatever, so they come to call him the Crystal Exarch, and he becomes ruler of the Crystarium, whether he likes it or not.
By this point, I should note, G'raha has partially fused with the tower to both extend his life and more effectively call on the tower's power for his magic, making him partially crystal himself and the Crystal Exarch title particularly fitting.
The Crystarium grows into a pretty stable little bastion of civilization by the time G'raha's ready to carry out his summoning of the WoL, and he also adopts a daughter of his own in this time period, an orphaned rabbit girl named Lyna who's grown up and captain of the guard by the time the WoL shows up.
The summoning doesn't go perfectly, though. In trying to call forth the WoL in both body and soul he ends up grabbing just the souls of some of the WoL's closest friends before he manages to get them.
And because time is wonky between the two worlds, from the WoL's perspective it looks like all their friends all falling into comas over the course of like a week, but from G'raha's perspective, this takes five years.
5 years ago, he accidentally grabbed Thancred, then 3 years ago he grabbed Y'shtola and Urianger, last year he got the twins, Alphinaud and Alisaie, and then finally he pulls in the WoL themself.
Of these, he decides to confide in Urianger about the bad future he comes from and what his plan with the WoL is, and gets Urianger to act as his co-conspirator in this plan. Urianger claims that on his journey through the gap between worlds, he saw a vision of the bad future, and hearing about this
Otherwise G'raha remains generally mysterious if ostensibly benign with the Scions (that being the name of the WoL's posse), leaving them with differing opinions of how trustworthy he is. Very understandable given that he did kidnap them, however accidentally, and won't even show them his face.
He keeps his hood up to hide his face and identity and will continue to do so until otherwise noted, for Reasons that will be covered when we get there. Also at least partially to preserve the OOC twist of his identity, but, like, once the WoL arrives and G'raha mentions that the tower is open,
one of the dialogue options is to be like, "what about G'raha Tia?" and G'raha's like "G'raha Tia? I don't know anyone by that name, when we opened the tower it was empty" and by my understanding most people were immediately like "buuuuuullshiiiiiit" at that.
So, once the WoL is successfully summoned, G'raha's in full mysterious sage mode, and sends them off to first go find the twins and get a feel for the state of the world and things, and then once he's sure they're down to listen to him and save the world, he explains what actually needs to be done to
do just that. The world is beset by light-aspected monsters known as sin eaters, and each major area of what's left of the First is dominated by a particularly powerful sin eater known as a Lightwarden, which has dominion over the lesser sin eaters and keeps the skies flooded with light every hour of the day.
It's possible to kill a Lightwarden but when that happens, all the light energy they release overtakes their slayer and turns them into a new Lightwarden. But the WoL is so known because they have the Blessing of Light, which should keep them from getting corrupted, and, indeed, does.
They successfully slay the Lightwarden for the area around the Crystarium, and for the first time in a hundred years, the night sky is seen on the First. The people of the Crystarium are stoked, but the other major city-state to survive the Flood, Eulmore, that's ruled by a guy with the mysterious power to
control sin eaters, and he's pretty pissed about it. (Spoilers, he's a Lightwarden himself.) So Eulmore declares war on the Crystarium, and the WoL gets to spend the rest of their quest killing Lightwardens while dodging Eulmoran troops, fun times for all.
And while this is going on, we've got Emet-Selch existing at people. Emet-Selch is an Ascian, which is the group of heretofore mysterious and inexplicable Big Big Bads we've been dealing with all game. They're immortal and have a habit of possessing people and they're the ones going about setting off
Calamities because they want all fourteen shards to be one world again, it turns out, and Emet-Selch is tired of all his carefully laid plans getting fucked up and the WoL murdering his co-workers, so he's like, I will try cooperating instead and then maybe you will be willing to see things my way
and so he follows the WoL around being smarmy and occasionally actually helpful, but also, man, he really wants to know what the fuck is up with G'raha, because none of that makes any fucking sense, Emet-Selch helped create the Allagan Empire and he knows the Crystal Tower doesn't have anything in it
that would allow it to jump to the First, so how did it get here and who are you, mysterious Crystal Exarch!!! To which G'raha mostly just politely tells him to fuck off.
Anyway, you know that part where I said the Blessing of Light allowed the WoL to absorb the light energy of slain Lightwardens without turning into a Lightwarden themself? I lied.
The first couple, they're fine, but that light energy is building up, and by the time they've killed four, they're starting to feel it, but we've got to see this through and there's only one left, Eulmore's leader, because we've finally figured out that's what he is.
G'raha actually accompanies the Scions as they journey to this final confrontation, even though it's rough on him to be so far from the Crystal Tower for so long. He just really wants to be there to see this all reach its end.
He has a nice quiet moment with the WoL here as they are both encouraged to rest, where he talks about how he always loved stories of adventure and he has this friend who inspires him and he wished that someday he could go on an adventure with them and it 1000% sounds like he's talking about his crush
The WoL defeats the last Lightwarden, absorbs their light energy, begins showing signs of turning into a Lightwarden, and then G'raha comes in and binds them and reveals his ultimate plan: he's going to steal all that accumulated light energy, and then teleport himself with the Crystal Tower out into
the space between worlds, where he will release it all and then die. This is where his hood falls down and his identity is revealed, and this is why he kept said identity hidden: he didn't want the Scions to be attached and try to stop his sacrifice.
Anyway, none of that works because Emet-Selch shoots G'raha in the back and absconds with him, telling the WoL where to find him if they would like to turn into a monster in peace and then they can go destroy the world as originally planned, hunky dory.
The WoL does indeed chase down Emet-Selch, but to beat his face in and rescue G'raha instead. Despite being pretty beat up, G'raha manages to summon another seven people to serve as your party members for the final boss and it's sick as hell, and conveniently, the WoL expends so much light energy killing
After the boss, G'raha stands before the Scions and is all awkwardly like, "I suppose I owe you all an apology. You, most of all." And you get a couple of dialogue options here, like "I'm tired, I'll lecture you later" or whatever, but the only correct choice is "it's good to see you awake, G'raha Tia"
FUN FACT: after clearing all this, you get a little G'raha Tia minion, the lore of which is that the Scions' secretary made it for fundraising, and you can show it to G'raha and he's surprised and mentions that he never met said secretary, so she must've gotten the idea of the subject from someone else,
and he tries to puzzle out who and decides it must've been Rammbroes, and he can totally imagine Rammbroes smiling to himself as he imagines G'raha coming across it in the future. But, really, he's not sure how to feel about it, that was all so long ago. But it's nice to know those guys are
So, now that the apocalypse has been good and proper prevented, it's time to figure out how to get the Scions back home to the Source. G'raha's original plan was that his death would annul the summoning spell and send them back, but that's obviously off the table now, if he dies, they'll kill him.
But the WoL can go back and forth with all their possessions and everything, as the actual proper subject of the summoning spell, so the plan becomes to get a special kind of crystal and store the souls of the Scions in it so the WoL can just. Carry them home.
This is, of course, easier said than done, and the plan requires some adjustments for technical difficulties. Of particular note is that memories and souls count as separate data in this regard, so they have to figure out how to also get memories into the crystals. They have the Allagan tech used on
G'raha's ancestor as a guide, but that relies on blood, which G'raha observes "inanimate objects, notably, do not possess." He does deadass try bleeding on the crystals at one point in the experimentation process, even, but that "accomplished nothing except making me feel rather faint"
Eventually they figure out how to use some of his crystallized essence as a conduit, and he makes enough crystals for all the Scions and one for himself, too, so he can test that it works first. Doing this is very taxing on him, and more of his body starts visibly turning into crystal, but when
And while he's been working on this little project, the Scions have been dealing with another Ascian named Elidibus, who has been going around encouraging people to become wandering do-gooders like the WoL, which is very confusing to our heroes, because, like, it's good? Like, it's kind of inconvenient
Because a lot of people are quitting their jobs to go wandering but.. they're still doing good??? And to grossly simplify that entire plot because it is, again, complicated and not directly relevant, Elidibus gains power from people's belief in salvation, so the more people strive to do good and defeat evil,
the stronger he actually gets. Except he finds that he's still not strong enough to defeat the WoL, so he decides the reasonable thing to do is that he needs to learn how to summon people like G'raha does. So he attacks G'raha so he can kill him and take his corpse, but G'raha escapes and seals Elidibus
within the Crystal Tower. But the crystal he stored his memories in as the test run got left behind, and Elidibus gets the knowledge of how to summon from that, and then he goes buck wild summoning heroes. Not in full, just enough for their belief in salvation and desire to crush evil to make it through.
The spell still uses the Crystal Tower as a conduit, though, even if G'raha isn't the one summoning, so now G'raha's turning into crystal extra bad and it's not a pleasant experience. The WoL finds him, and he explains what happened with Elidibus, and they go off to the tower together.
Along the way, they run into Lyna, and though it takes a bit of nudging, he takes the time to remind her of happy moments from her childhood and reassure her that even though he has all this other history she knows nothing about, the time he spent here with her was no less real and important to him and
So G'raha and the WoL are running up the Crystal Tower's many stairs, and there's this brief moment where G'raha looks up at the WoL's back before him and his eyes go wide with the realization that he's getting that thing he always wanted, and then, bam, his legs turn into crystal on him and he can't
run anymore and he falls over. He talks a bit with the WoL here about how the first time they explored the tower, he had to stay behind while the adventurers cleared the way and he hated it, and he's glad he could be some help to them this time, before sending them off while he holds off Elidibus's
So the WoL beats Elidibus up, but Elidibus is like, fuck you, I'm immortal, until G'raha shows up and binds him and is like, you were so fixated on my memories of the future you forgot to take the past into account. The Crystal Tower was made to harvest and store the boundless energies of the heavens,
not unlike [the kind of crystal we're using to store souls]. I will have your misbegotten power, soul and all!" and then he has the tower absorb all that delicious Ascian soul energy, om nom nom.
And then he falls over, and the WoL brings him his soul crystal, and he asks them to promise to take him with them on their next adventure, and then before he finishes transferring his soul, he pauses, stands up, positions himself in a suitably central position and declares that while his soul will go
with the WoL, his body will remain here, standing as a monument to the fact that hope is eternal. And then he completely crystallizes and thus ends the Crystal Exarch.
Getting the Scions back home to the Source works as planned, and then the WoL takes G'raha's crystal over to the present-day Crystal Tower and shoves G'raha's soul into his younger self's body, and since there's no memory discrepancy, the two blend just fine, though it takes him some time to adjust.
G'raha joins the Scions officially, and there is a very cute scene where he's basically reintroducing himself to them all awkward and stumbling over his words, and while there are a couple of dialogue options, the one I picked is just "G'raha, please." and that makes his ears twitch at the sound of
Calliemy friends who do not play FFXIV but might be interested anyway can understand my latest obsession.because these quests got nerfed some and used to be way more obnoxiousbut for the last couple, before the leader of the expedition, Rammbroes, sends the WoL off, he mentions that he already sent a researcher friend of his to look