It's time for a (slightly late) FFXIVwrite2025 Appreciation Post to celebrate just some of the excellent writing produced by the FFXIV Community for the event!
Ethos. An inspirational piece from @houserosaire - what will Silvaineaux hold onto when he needs that last ounce of willpower to keep on going?
Muster. Still in Ishgard, but this time at the breakfast table rather than the battlefield... A fantastic set piece from @housedeaubemarle.
Fate. A thoughtful and reflective piece by @starrysnowdrop on determinism and the freedom to choose one's own actions.
Calling by @midnightmagicks. A difficult linkpearl conversation between old friends.
Training Day. A new life requires new tactics, especially when dealing with metaphysical monstrosities. A great piece of character development from @avampyone.
Shade by @soulshards. A short, but strikingly descriptive piece, that will stay with you after reading it.
Soul. A beautifully ethereal piece of writing by @ahollowgrave. Faith and love and something else besides.
Friable by @dane-ffxiv. An exploration of persistance and determination in the face of a steep learning curve.
Brave. A touching story of a fateful meeting and the beginnings of a new connection. By @chocoblep.
Form by @ainyan. A slice of family life, involving practicing slicing with weapons and some wistful coming of age dialogue.
Dense. An unexpected encounter in the Black Shroud startles a wary Viera woman and leaves her with some unanswered questions. An atmospheric piece by @wandererxiv.
Prank by @scrollsfromarebornrealm. A touching piece, simultaneously both endearing and sad, with some intriguing backstory for a certain Paladin.
Obviously this is just a small selection of pieces from a small selection of writers, but I think these examples are definitely worth checking out. I have posted the masterlist of my own FFXIVwrite2025 stuff elsewhere on this blog, but I can say for certain that nothing I wrote came close to the quality of these fantastic writers!
The night before she weds Zenos yae Galvus, she lies awake and wonders about the lives she might have lived.
If she had said yes to Aunt Florence all those years ago—ten summers old, shoes in hand, staring across the wharf at the dark waters stretching toward Limsa Lominsa—would they have let her go? Would she have boarded the ship, vanishing into a future not lined with iron and cold stone?
Would she have found friends—not the scholars who weighed and measured her and found her lacking—but a companion like a sister, bound not by blood but by choice? Would she have stood on some distant shore, horizon unbroken, and tasted freedom on the salt wind?
She remembers well the day that Eorzea fell. She was twenty-four: old enough to understand the implications, but young enough to still be stunned by it coming to pass. The great nation of adventurers and buccaneers, of primals and miracles, had been ground down until it was nothing more than a sandcastle erased by the tides of war.
Sharlayan’s streets were somber that day. Merchants whispered over their wares in the Agora, and the dockhands carried their burdens with heads bent, their voices hushed as though sound itself might draw the Empire’s gaze. The question of their own future hung unspoken from every mouth.
She remembers standing before a cart of fruit, pressing her thumb across the skin of a faerie apple, knowing that its cost would soon rise. Already, she could imagine the shape of hunger curling its fingers into the city. Eorzea—ever the place they were willing to sacrifice, ever the place they relied on for their daily commodities—had always been the buffer, the cushion. With its collapse, Sharlayan stood exposed.
The consequences came slower than she expected. First came the revelation that Labyrinthos had hoarded cultivars from every corner of the world, enough to stretch rations longer than anyone imagined. Then came the rebellions scattered across the wreckage of Eorzea, flickering up and dying down, false sparks of hope. Then a lull, during which Garlemald wholly focused on bringing its new lap dogs to heel.
It took three years for their eyes to turn toward Sharlayan.
It began quietly, as she imagined it also had with the Near and Far East: new tariffs on goods, stalled negotiations, threats no longer veiled but uttered boldly without shame. Then came the airships glinting above the Bloodbrine Sea and rumors of a castrum rising among the ruins of their old colony in Dravania.
And not even four years after Eorzea’s fall, the summons: every noble daughter of age and standing was to travel to Garlemald’s capital to be offered as potential bride to the royal heir.
It was no invitation. It was a demand, dressed in velvet and sealed with wax. A promise of reprieve for whichever nation supplied the chosen bride; a stay of execution for a handful more years.
Sharlayan never had a taste for conflict. She packed her bags alongside a score of other women of marriageable age and off they went with their mothers and servants.
The parties were all bloodless theater. Women from the Far East wore their silk fineries and women from Thavnair wore their glittering jewels. She wore a high necked gown better fitted to a woman twice her age and smiled through wine she didn’t drink.
Zenos yae Galvus arrived halfway through the third ball. He moved through the room like a man on a battlefield—like he was born to be in that place of violence and blood—rather than someone preparing to stand at the wedding altar. Nothing moved the frozen disinterest on his face: not the women standing timid like does, and not the women jutting their chins proudly like coeurls. Not the dresses or the jewels or the music or the chatter.
His eyes slid over her just like all the others, without pause or ceremony. She was just another statue in a hall of many to him.
The summons came late that night anyway, delivered by a servant to her mother’s hands and then to hers. She stood in her thickest nightgown in a pale patch of Garlemald’s moonlight as she was informed she would marry Zenos within a sennight.
She didn’t scream and didn’t cry. That sort of response belonged to someone with hope left in their bones, and hers had fled long ago, perhaps as far back as the ship taking Florence back to her home on Vylbrand all those many years ago.
She simply folded the letter and began to wait for her life to end.
They aren’t supposed to be here—again—but Serah had insisted.
“Just a peek,” she whispers, dragging her twin by the sleeve down the polished corridor, barefoot to quiet their steps. “We’ll hear them talking.”
“Mother will have our heads,” he hisses back.
“I want to see her.”
Luca doesn’t say that he does, too.
They press close to the parlor doors, half-concealed by the heavy velvet curtain that frames the entryway. The doors are cracked just wide enough to spill voices and firelight into the hall.
Inside, three figures sit in stiff formation: their mother, seated upright and severe as a sculpture, with their father beside her, hands folded in his lap. And across from them—
Her.
Their half-sister. The girl from the whisper-chapters of their house’s story, the one they’d only heard ill-intentioned rumours about. No one has ever spoken of her in full, and now that they know the truth of her existence, they notice her absence everywhere: in the sealed drawer in their mother’s writing desk. In the room at the end of the hall no one is permitted to enter. In the way silence wraps itself around their mother when the title “Warrior of Light” comes to pass anyone’s lips.
And now she is here, real and alive.
Serah’s breath catches in her throat.
Through the crack of the doors, their sister sits like a shadow of the house itself, perfectly still and perfectly poised. Her hair is damp from the rain and her voice, when she finally speaks, is low and even.
“You don’t have to welcome me,” she’s saying, “and I’m not here for reconciliation. I only came because you summoned me.”
Their mother’s voice comes next, clipped and cold. “We summoned you because it was proper.”
“Then I’ll not overstay propriety.”
There is a scrape of a chair leg and the twins stumble to hide themselves better in the curtain. Serah steps on Luca’s foot and his elbow is in her side, sharp and pointy, a reprimand already falling out of her lips when the door fully opens and their sister comes through.
The woman—the famed Warrior of Light—stops when she sees them.
The hallway swallows the sound of her breath. The soft candlelight catches on the curve of her jaw, the gold of her hair. Her eyes are the same blue as the ocean beyond the cliffs, sharp and stormlit.
She stares.
Luca stares back. Serah’s mouth parts.
For a heartbeat, no one moves; and then their mother’s voice slices through the silence, low and unrelenting. “Do not leave through the side hall. You are not a fugitive.”
Their sister flinches and turns away.
Her footsteps are soft and sure as she walks past them, her eyes lingering for just a moment longer, as if she means to say something. As if there is a word caught in her throat that never quite makes it out.
And then she’s gone down the corridor, steps vanishing like a ghost into the deeper part of the house.
Serah blinks, stunned, and Luca presses a hand to his thundering heart.
Their mother’s unhurried footsteps come up behind them. “You two,” she says, voice cool and toneless as ever. “Return to your studies. You are not to speak of this.”
The twins watch her go, the long hem of her robes brushing over the same tiles their sister had just crossed. The silence left behind is louder than anything.
Serah turns back toward Luca, wide-eyed. “She saw us.”
“She didn’t say anything,” he mutters.
“No… but she saw us.”
And for once, Luca can’t tell if his twin sounds happy or heartbroken.
When she does, it is done with purpose: appointments with Forum members, guest lectures, the occasional inspection of the Labyrinthos archives. Today there had been a meeting with the Director of Botanical Studies, and she had exited the conservatory early to avoid the rush of students.
The late afternoon light paints the stone walkways gold. The air smells of cut stems and the ocean, and the streets are full but not chaotic. Sharlayan crowds move as Sharlayans always do: precisely and predictably.
She moves through them like a knife through silk, long used to the parting of people before her.
And then—she stops.
It is just a slight hesitation in her stride; a tilt of her head. The kind of pause no one would think is strange unless they know her.
Across the square, past the shade of a fig tree and two shelves of traveling book vendors, stand a trio of figures, half-turned and mid-motion.
Theodora stares at her eldest daughter at the center of them, who looks… young.
Not fragile or weary, or like someone carrying the titles the world whispers after her like a ghost: Warrior of Light. Savior. Myth. In this moment before Theodora, she is just a woman, leaning toward her companions with a smile half-formed.
Alisaie Leveilleur is beside her, hands waving mid-story. On her other side is the one they call G’raha Tia, a Student of Baldesion and supposedly an expert in Allagan history, who'd mysteriously disappeared from the Forum’s scrutiny before re-appearing years later.
The three of them are laughing freely with the kind of laughter that belongs to young people. Theodora hasn't heard it in her home in years, and it feels like watching sunlight slip though a high window.
Her daughter tilts her head back and says something, smiling so openly it startles her.
Theodora feels it before she understands it:
Absence.
It is the absence of her late husband’s laugh echoing through these same streets, years ago, when he teased her for walking too fast. It is the absence of small fingers tangled in her robes at age three, asking if stars ever sleep. It is the absence of her golden haired child down the hall, calling her mother without hesitation.
She had erased those sounds for survival, and here was her eldest—the girl made up of her and Nadir—glowing in the light. Not erased, or missing, or walking around the manor like a mouse afraid of her own shadow.
Theodora watches as Nadir’s daughter leans into Alisaie’s shoulder, laughing again. As G’raha says something that makes both women roll their eyes. As a passing fruit vendor tosses them a slice of something sweet and sticky from his pack that her daughter catches with the ease of someone who has long since learned to make joy part of her reflexes.
The fruit stains her fingers. She licks them clean, laughing.
That’s his smile, Theodora thinks, bitterly, because that’s the root of the issue, isn’t it?
Nadir’s smile, wide and quiet, curling up at the corners. It always made people trust him far quicker than Theodora thought sensible. Now their daughter—his daughter, because Theodora let her be led into a life without her mother—is standing in a place Theodora chooses not to enter, carrying his smile, his golden hair, his bright blue eyes.
Theodora closes her hand around the strap of her satchel as her feet carry her further and further away. Her daughter never turns to fully face her, unaware that she is being watched, and Theodora doesn’t stop, because there is nothing to say.
What would she have done? Called her daughter’s name? And if her daughter had turned and locked eyes with her—what then?
Would she have smiled that smile at her?
Or would she have gone still, polite, and prepared for battle?
Theodora disappears to the sound of Nadir’s daughter laughing.
5 Seventh Umbral Era (Five Years After the Calamity)
She hadn’t expected to meet Edwin here.
Her heart is still pounding after Staelwyrn’s request to round up his men, the name Sevrin escaping his mouth casually enough that it took half a second for the world to tilt under her feet. She’d felt that the man passing by earlier looked familiar under the low-drawn bandana he’d been wearing, but to have that name attached to that face…
Sevrin, the name Helena’s gruff older brother would take on when they’d finally convince him to play pretend with them. Edwin, who she’s known since she was ten and trailing after Helena like a lost puppy. Edwin, whose mother had said only yesterday had disappeared without a word several years back. For him to suddenly be here in an orchard employing landlocked buccaneers, looking at her like he didn’t know who she was—
She ducks into a corner shadowed between cliffside and farm shack and presses her face into the warm stone. Brother E–Sumi–Yan taught her to breathe through panic when she’d first thought she was going mad over the voices in her head, and the method typically works well enough to calm the chaos in her chest. She gulps in a deep breath of sea-salt air and counts to seven, holds it for four, and exhales it for seven again.
Edwin’s hair had been longer since the last time she’d seen him, but it was still the same color that Helena’s had been when the sun touched it. He was broader in the shoulders, too, with a face weary enough to age him. In her memories he’s been locked in time, forever the boy who’d wink at her to bring her out of her head and braid her hair alongside Helena’s. He’d complain the whole way through but always apologize if his hands pulled hard enough to hurt.
Edwin was the boy who stood with her at Helena’s grave, the one and only time she’d managed to visit before being sent to Gridania, and let her collapse against him when the tears wouldn’t come but the trembling strong enough to send her to her knees did.
She breathes in and counts to seven, holds for four, and exhales again for seven.
Staelwyrn is expecting her to track Edwin down and she is supposed to pretend she doesn’t know who he is, who he was. Supposed to pretend she didn’t see his face and feel the shoreline of her past buckle beneath her feet.
And somewhere nearby, Y’shtola is watching—cool-voiced, elegant and Sharlayan, with the Archon sigil branded into her skin like a reminder of her worst memories.
She squeezes her eyes shut. And behind her eyelids, light—madness or vision—of the crystal still burns: blinding and beautiful, speaking in a voice that called itself Hydaelyn. That claimed to know her, and bid her walk a path she does not understand.
She opens her eyes. The sun is too bright.
She wipes her palms against her clothes and forces herself to stand. Her shadow stretches long across the dirt.
She sets her jaw.
Staelwyrn gave her a task. One thing at a time.
And when Edwin is found, she will go home. Florence will be waiting with supper half-cooked and Frederick will be in the orchard, pretending not to worry. Her little room will smell of old flowers and linen, and she will close the door behind her and breathe again.
It is raining when the butler knocks. One of those soft, steady Sharlayan rains that seems to hush the whole city beneath it. It mutes the clatter of life beyond the parlor windows and the distant murmuring of stone beneath sea. Even the candlelight feels quieter, somehow.
Theodora does not look up.
She is seated by the hearth though the fire is long since dead, her reading glasses low on her nose and an annotated treatise on aetherial dispersal open in her lap. A silver bookmark rests unused beside her. She’s been reading the same paragraph for nearly half an hour.
Elias is across from her, one ankle draped loosely over the other knee, reading a modest paper on agricultural reclamation. It is a peaceful domestic scene, polished smooth by fifteen years of habit. Elias turns the page softly.
The knock comes again.
“Enter,” Theodora says, not lifting her gaze.
The butler, an older Elezen named Cilian who has served House Grace through two generations, steps in with a bowed head. His voice is careful, but not without weight.
“My lady. My lord. There is… news.”
She marks the page she has failed to absorb, closes the tome with a muted sound, and finally lifts her gaze to him.
Elias sets down his paper. “Yes, Cilian?”
The pause is only a breath long, but Elias notices it. So does Theodora.
“Your eldest daughter has entered the city,” Cilian says. “She passed through customs not half an hour ago. With the Leveilleur twins, and members of Students of Baldesion.”
There is no gasp or wide-eyed silence. No rush of emotion, no dropped tea or frantic clutching of arms. Only the faint sound of rain on glass, and Theodora’s breath catching—just once, too sharp and too quiet to mistake for anything else.
“…I see,” she says, and sets her glasses beside the book.
Elias doesn’t speak. His eyes remain on his wife.
“Was she announced?” Theodora asks, voice still even.
“She was not. But she was recognized. A small stir followed. Some of the customs agents said it was her—though not all agreed, at first. There was… an argument.”
“Of course there was,” Theodora says, too calmly. “And did they verify?”
“They did. One of the Leveilleur children confirmed her identity—Master Alphinaud, I believe.”
A beat. Then Elias finally speaks.
“That would do it.”
Theodora’s jaw tightens. She rises, not abruptly, but with that restrained, stately precision she’s always had—the kind of grace that makes people forget she was ever a girl who fell in love on the docks of the city.
“She returns without a word. Not a letter. Not a missive sent ahead.” She moves to the window and watches the rain. Her voice remains perfectly even. “After fifteen years.”
It’s been longer than fifteen; Elias doesn’t move to correct her. He simply watches her, his hands steepled in thought. He knows better than to offer comfort. She does not want that. Not now, and perhaps not ever.
“She may not come here,” he says at last.
“No,” Theodora replies. “But she might.”
“Do you want her to?”
A silence coils in the air. Theodora’s hand curls against the window frame, so faintly that one might mistake it for tension from the cold.
“She was ten when she left. A child. And now the world calls her savior.”
Elias hums. “It does.”
“And still… they speak of her with disdain, even now. I heard it in the Forum just this week.”
Another silence. Finally, Theodora turns. Her expression is unreadable.
“Prepare the receiving room,” she says. “If she intends to come, she will find the doors open.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
Theodora looks at the candlelight, flickering faintly in the hearth mirror. Her voice is a whisper now.
“Then nothing changes.”
Elias inclines his head, not agreeing or disagreeing.
Only marking, in silence, how her hands tremble as she stares at the city past the window.
No choirs rehearsed now, and the last performers had long since bowed and gone, their voices scattered like petals across the air. Only the flowers remained: rows and rows of brilliantly white moonflowers, their petals trembling slightly in the ambient aether, the memory of music clinging to them like dew.
The mnemosella. Her own precious creation.
Astraea stood alone beneath one of the tall, glassy spires that arched overhead for visitors to lean against and take cover under. Her hands were tucked behind her back and clasped in stillness as her eyes wandered over the garden she had once imagined in solitude.
She had not meant to invent anything so beloved. She had only wanted, selfishly, to hear a voice again.
Persephone’s laughter had always been the loudest sound in her memory, but just like everything else, time had made it fade. And Astraea had thought: if memory could fade, then perhaps it could also be held.
So she had taken the moonflower—small, dismissed, blooming far below Amaurot in the common lands—and whispered to it the secrets of resonance and the soul. It had taken trial after trial after trial, but finally, it had listened.
Now, years later, the garden had grown far beyond her original intent. From just one small plot in a city space, it had evolved to gardens layered throughout Amaurot, each with their own purpose. The mnemosella was not hers anymore; it belonged to the people. To the lovers who came to record their vows. To the dying who left final messages behind. To the children who believed the flowers whispered back only for them.
A soft note thrummed through the stillness.
The petals nearest her trembled, then shimmered into a pearlescent white. A voice rose from the bed of flowers, gentle and warm—a woman singing from earlier that day.
Astar on high, sweet traveler of the dark…
Astraea closed her eyes.
She could almost believe the garden was singing to her.
And in a way, it was.
“Still not perfect,” she murmured. She knelt beside a flower whose petals hadn’t opened in time with its brethren and placed her fingers gently along the stem, whispering a small correction in the structure of its aether. The mnemosella shifted, adjusting its existence.
The next note rang out clearer. …guide us home from this brief spark.
The floating city thrummed with their presence. Great living murals spun of light and memory decorated buildings and streets, and public demonstrations on history and art spanned the city’s venues. Teachers spun their lessons into shape with careful hands, their works spilling out from classrooms into courtyards. The illusions flickered across the avenues, cloaking the city in lessons, pageantry, and spectacle. Hythlodaeus had grown so used to them that sometimes he forgot where the physical world ended and the conjuring began.
This one began innocently enough.
He stood among a crowd of students and citizens gathered in one of the wide amphitheaters where the floor dipped and opened toward the world below. The vast ocean that Amaurot was leisurely travelling across was a deep blue, bluer than the sky, and covered in wispy clouds. The lesson was simple: an old catastrophe revisited, and the power of the elements rendered visible. The speaker, stood upon a hovering platform above the open pit, spread their arms to the expectant hush of the crowd.
Water answered their call.
At first it was only a trickle, bright threads of liquid weaving through the air like ribbons, and the audience murmured in delight. A child to Hythlodaeus’ side tugged at their parents’ sleeve and pointed, laughter bright in their voice. He smiled at the sight, watching the way the conjured water shimmered like crystal in the sun.
The threads multiplied.
Soon they were torrents, rising arcs of water that looped and twisted above the crowd, forming a glittering dome. The speaker’s voice rolled on, untroubled, but the demonstration grew wilder. The air filled with mist and Hythlodaeus’ robe quickly grew damp against his skin. The crowd tilted their faces upward as one, half in awe and half in unease.
Then the dome broke.
The amphitheater flooded in an instant. Walls of water crashed down, sweeping across the marble steps, roaring into every hollow and stair. People cried out, some laughing, some shrieking, as the conjured tide surged waist-high. Hythlodaeus staggered against the force, clinging to the stone railing as water foamed around his chest.
He knew it was not real. It was light and aether, a conjuring to prove a point. No one would drown. No one would die.
And yet—
The current pulled at his robe with greedy fingers. For a moment, in the crush and roar, he lost sight of the other spectators. His ears filled with the sound of water, endless and ceaseless, like the beating of some vast heart beneath the ocean. His chest tightened. He could not breathe.
He turned, and in the water, through the spray and foam, he thought he saw her.
Astraea.
She stood not struggling but still, her head lifted and eyes fixed on something beyond the amphitheater walls. The dark black of her Azem mask was nowhere to be seen. Her figure was unbending in the flood, planted like a great boulder until the water parted around her. The wildness of her hair floated in a dark cloud, wet strands clinging to her face. Despite the deluge, the expression on her face was serene, as if the water posed no threat at all.
Hythlodaeus blinked and she was gone. Only the crowd of soaked spectators clambering for higher steps remained, their laughter edged with anxiety.
The water receded as quickly as it had come, draining away until only wet marble and the faint sheen of mist lingered. The speaker raised their arms again, voice carrying calmly over the shivering, dripping crowd, as though nothing had gone awry. A demonstration completed; a lesson given.
But Hythlodaeus’ hands still shook as he braced them on the railing. His lungs burned, though he had never once been without air. The child who had tugged on their parent’s sleeve earlier clung now to their hand, face pale beneath their mask and all laughter gone. Around them, Amaurotines murmured over the sound of their robes drying, speaking of how convincing the illusion had been.
Hythlodaeus could not shake the image.
Later, when he returned to the upper tiers of the city, his robe still smelled of brine. He paused on a balcony overlooking the true ocean far below and watched the dark water stretch endlessly toward the horizon, unbroken save for the slow drift of clouds across its surface.
The illusion had felt too close. Not the water itself, but the weight behind it. The way it had pressed, as though the whole of the ocean had risen up and forced itself into that small space, crushing all within. And in that weight, that force, he had seen her: Astraea, calm amid the storm, staring toward a horizon he could not see.
It unsettled him more than he wished to admit.
When at last he found her days later, she was in one of the city’s gardens, kneeling among the flowerbeds. She always gravitated toward Halmarut’s public spaces, and today was no different. Her hands were folded in her lap, gaze fixed on a single pale bloom, delicate and beginning to fade at the edges.
“Hythlodaeus,” she said without looking up, as though she had known he was there all along.
He swallowed, forcing brightness into his tone. “You missed quite the spectacle in the amphitheater.”
Her lips curved faintly. “So I heard. The ocean, was it not?”
“Yes,” he said, too quickly. He wanted to tell her what he had seen—how he thought he had seen her—but the words caught in his throat. Instead he leaned against the garden wall, studying the flowers with feigned casualness. “I imagine you would have found it fascinating.”
Her gaze did not leave the fading flower. “Perhaps,” she murmured.
The silence stretched, filled with the hum of lamps and the faint rustle of leaves stirred by the city’s orchestrated breezes. Hythlodaeus shifted, uncomfortable. The memory of water still clung to him—the roar of it, the pull. And beneath it, her face, calm and serene and unyielding.
He wondered if she already knew something he did not.
When he left her there in the garden, the image returned to him once more: a flood not of illusion but of truth, unstoppable and vast, pressing into every hollow, sweeping away all that had been built. And Astraea, standing in the midst of it, untouched.
