At work but friend reminded me of Esrahaddon and thus I must share. Spoilers for the entire character.
I don't know exactly how old Esra is in Riyria times, but he gets grey hairs and a long wizardly beard by his end, and that could be 900 so years catching up to him or he was old before the time freeze and then unfrozen he's just continued aging normally.
But in my mind Esrahaddon is middle-aged when Royce and Hadrian meet him. And it is the idea that though the fall of Percepliquis happened when he was 27, Mawndulye had him for as long as it took to make Gutaria Prison. Which in my mind magic aside took a bit.
I think this because also other things happened after the fall, Venlin took to power with the Church and had to retake society after everything was destroyed in the capitol. So I think it just fits for Mawndulye to have a handless Esrahaddon for a bit before he figured out hey I'm an elf, I got a while to fix this but you are just a human I need to fix that problem first.
But then I will add other contexts, like how by the end of Esrahaddon, Esra genuinely thinks he's sacrificing himself. He's done what he can to hide the horn and protect the heir, he's not going to be around for end of the 3000 years, that's a thousand years away from him. He's going to die here trying to give them a fighting chance.
He's going to burn the brightest doing that. There was no plan for him to survive.
But then he's caught.
So I imagine him locked away, unable to help, just slowly aging waiting for death, and then being put into Gutaria. And yeah the Riyria gang were concerned he might have gone insane over those 900 frozen years, but he could just have much broken the morning after Percepliquis.
My other reasoning to have this headcanon is Jarish and Nevrik, I like pain. And Michael J Sullivan's lovely afterlife of Phyre.
Basically, just like Esrahaddon, Jarish and Nevrik both believe Esra sacrifices himself to destroy Percepliquis, so when they both eventually die and go to Phyre, they expect to see him there. And of course they have to wait nearly a thousand years for him to reunite with them.
The fanfiction part of my brain likes to think what if early timeline characters see the stories of later timeline characters so they can see their legacy.
And just imagine you've lived through the fall of the empire, you've passed on your medallions and the world's most important secret to your children, in the hopes they can save the world 900 years down the line. And the next story starts with Hadrian and Royce in Ryiria Chronicles.
Like imagine Nevrik and Jarish having a vision in the afterlife of their legacy, in a time skip that leads to someone who clearly carries Jarish's great spadone, and his medallion, and then some random thief, who are breaking into a tower to steal from the church for no real motivation other then some cookey non artist wizard told them to.
And then they have 12 years of Riyria adventures to watch wondering what the fuck went wrong and oh no this is how humanity dies.
And then on yet another random Riyria job, they end up taking some poor betrayed prince to see "Esrahaddon", 900 years after he sacrificed himself for you but somehow never made it to Phyre.
And the random ass group somehow actually makes it in, and there he actually is. Your most trusted companion, handless and decades older then you remember him, and yet he can't possibly be there.
And he addresses the thief just as he does you. He immediately clocks what's going on and you do to.
And then he leaves them to find the heir and you have to wonder if he's actually crazy or if he really does know what he's doing, and you get to see the rest of the story unfold.
I know it's my own idea but it breaks me every time.
Ty @sephrynmybeloved for reminding me of my ideas
