ive been messing around with au'rhea so much lately it was probably inevitable that one of us would make some kind of joke that would push me over some kind of edge......
this started as a convoluted SCH riff but by the time i was actually drawing it i had invented a bunch of bespoke new lore and plot so dont even worry about it . SCH but slightly to the left. SCH but file the serial numbers off
i know yr abt the girlfailure teachers rn but do u perchance have any more thots on that rhea and edelgard comic from a bit ago where Edie said she needed a healer and woke up rhea??
are you ready for a long ass post? because this is a VERY! LONG! POST!
tl;dr yes i have a fair amount of thots, and theyre all serial-numbers-filed-off chop-and-screw-it final fantasy fourteen thots. i will recap that first, and then the AU itself (final warning for Long Post)
enjoy (or avert thine eyes. it's up to you)
oh, yeah! so that au (tagged "SETR" because they can't resist an unreadable acronym tag*) began with mostly just riffing on the Scholar job quests from final fantasy 14 before veering off in order to separate from "being in ff14" (<- i simply don't feel like keeping up with all that) (<- he's just now getting to stormblood). so it's pretty much a crossover where one half of the cross had its serial numbers filed off HAHA
so obviously people who are familiar with ff14 SCH lore have a head start on this one, but let's see…from the top, let's TL;DR the stuff from the game proper:
in ff14, Scholar is a type of healer you can play. lorewise, the original scholars belonged to an ancient civilization that fell centuries before the game begins, so their art is completely extinct and lost. but back in the day, their like, marine city-state nation was at Big Magic War with a couple others (bigger nations with stronger/more plentiful mages). their smaller nation's sorcerers, too precious and few in number to risk putting on the front lines, took up dual duty to serve as both healers and tacticians/commanders. to that end, they learned to form pacts with faeries; relying on these familiars to act as their co-healers, the casters were able to give more of their focus to Studying The Art Of War (and were given the new title of Scholar for their big brain tactical caster schemes)
however, this nation and their brilliant military tacticians were wiped out by calamities (the Big Mage War they were involved in ended in huge colossal devastating floods and stuff) and their arts lay forgotten……until centuries later as [PLAYER CHARACTER] gets involved…. because of course you do <3 that's not really important though
what IS important is that at the tail end of this civilization's existence, they also had to juggle a Fucked Up Arcane Plague that one of their enemies strategically infected them with. the plague ("green death", or simply the "sickness from the sea") transformed the people into monsters and more or less demolished the standing army. the mutant plague was contained by quarantining the infected behind magical wards, but attempts to find an actual cure were unsuccessful. tormented by their prolonged isolation and the outside world's rejection of them, the plague's victims gradually became consumed with resentment, eventually depriving them of all reason. after the calamitous floods, the sealed temple--protected by its warding spells--has remained intact, but lays submerged. its transformed population has been trapped inside, alive, for centuries. yikes!
(gameplay wise, what this means is basically you have a fairy pet from the bygone era who automatically casts a basic healing spell called Embrace whenever you or anyone in your party is missing HP (<- in easy content she can sometimes do your job by herself which is very funny) and also, there's a dungeon full of monsters you feel kinda bad about killing)
the main important materials here for us are the "ancient civilization" aspect, the familiar/caster bond, and the simultaneous war/plague problem . <- list of ingredients to add some 3H sauce on
(
*here's the connecting tissue that got us from A (ffxiv) to B (fe3h)
my funny NPC retainer in the game is an au'ra woman named au'rhea (here is a pic of her). she does my banking and sells wares for me. beautiful dragon woman
while dicking around with glamourer i accidentally disguised my character as au'rhea. it was rly funny to see her running around doing stuff for once (because retainer NPCs normally Just Stand There)
i (scholar main) started glamouring my fairy to look like au'rhea so i could drag her with me on adventures (she does not get paid for this extra work)
scholar fairies can't be glamoured in this way so i had to use the ingame petglamour function to change mine into a carbuncle first. i chose topaz carbuncle because yellow is cool
somehow in the intersection between everything that's going on with my game at this point, the log window begins referring to this entity as "Topaz Au'rhea"
the groupchat starts making jokes about topaz au'rhea and scholar edelgard (apropos basically nothing). because it would be funny for rhea to run around getting super busy and stressed about keeping edie's health up while edie is aggroing every enemy on the map or whatever. you get it
this story is not set in the normal fodlan setting, so it's unclear what everyone's up to / what the current societal climate (and international relationships) of each country is (<- this would probably be ironed out if the AU was more fleshed out than it is)
adrestia and hresvelg's shared history is also a bit different, namely due to incredibly heavy losses suffered during the war of heroes. after barely surviving the war with a devastating pyrrhic victory, the newborn adrestian empire was probably uh not powerful enough to rise up and control all of fódlan lmao
without the support of either seiros OR any big Ws to pick them back up, they're probably still a smaller country (and . maybe not really an "empire" since…idk if they have the means to take and control several territories unless they 1) made a Huge Recovery since then and 2) nobody else on the continent minded that sudden expansion enough to corral them back into their pen HSBHFDF)
^im spitballing here, obviously this would also get ironed out more thoughtfully if i did more work. but that's kind of the vibe it has atm. like idk how big they would be without any strong Ws, without seiros, and without the church
it would also be an AU where there is no empire-church war to fuss around with (due to the absence of. well. the church of seiros--at least in its canon form) and rhea is not a figure in anyone's lives at all, so edie's list of priorities is much different
however because she is still an edelgard and it's important to her swag, her predicted life span is incredibly short due to an Evil Blood Curse(TM) woven in her childhood by the ancient enemies of her family (the nefarious slitherers…)
her condition is unheard of and utterly arcane to adrestia's mages and healers, and attempts to reverse its effects have been futile
after finishing up whatever other shit she had going on in this AU (<-???) (again, would be fleshed out if i had more than 1 post in the SETR tag lol), with no big wars or anything on her docket, she's already free to pursue leads on how to remedy her situation and possibly brighten her prognosis
in a handful of surviving archives private to the hresvelg family, wilhelm I wrote about the old pre-"adrestia" hresvelg territory, the war of heroes, and the allies that shored up the first army's faltering strength
he also made notes about their enemy's tactics, which included sending Curséd Plagues Most Foul, a tactic that all but demolished the pre-adrestian forces
it's not much but it's the best lead anyone's got at this point
wilhelm occasionally referenced his contemporaries' progress in combating these arcane plagues
this and the war combined take up more than 100% of their resources. they are working at a noticeable deficit, war is going rapidly downhill, and wilhelm's notes become more fragmented as the situation becomes increasingly unsustainable and dire
around this time, he also writes about mages forming pacts with "[word untranslatable to modern fódlan languages]" (but edie uses context clues to figure out it's some kind of magic familiar or something) to aid them, primarily in healing
while much of his text is either obliquely phrased or just straight up faded by time, he does pass down a swaggy amulet to his descendants, which is now in edie's possession (the "crest of seiros", if you can believe it)
edie starts investigating, referencing the texts for Important Places To Search For More Clues. starting with a place wilhelm wrote about very often: the last standing stronghold of the first hresvelg army and their allies
the red canyon.
the ruins there are thousands of years old and entirely forgotten by time. but one stubborn emperor (or whatever her title would be) is determined to search every inch of Old Fódlan for Curse Clues
deep in the lost ruins of zanado is a warded sanctum, still protected by an ancient spell. according to wilhelm the first, this was the very last and most hidden warded zone in the red canyon, erected in absolute secrecy just before their forces left the canyon for the final battle at the tailtean plains
the warded zone was left behind to protect the victims of the plague and keep the curse quarantined while the few remaining mages continued working on a remedy
despite the ward still being active, it has grown quite weak and allows edelgard to pass through (likely due to her blood connection to big wilhelm)
exploring deep into the warded zone, she finds it pristinely safe but utterly untouched for god knows how long. eerily quiet, preserved in time but abandoned by it…
at the heart of the warding spell is its caster, who edelgard initially mistakes for a human mage but quickly realized is the "familiar" wilhelm wrote about. she is Not in fact a funny heehoo imp of some kind, but in fact, a tall as fuck , Whole Ass Woman
(the untranslatable word in wilhelm's writing on the topic was obviously nabatean, a proper noun, the long-forgotten name of a people who once lived alongside humanity but were wiped out)
(the nabateans, few in number but possessing astonishing magicks, invited the battered army to take shelter in what remained of the nabateans' home in zanado. wanting to help beat the agarthans back, they offered to join their own power with humans in "pacts"--special contracts between a human mage and a nabatean caster that was beneficial for both partners and allowed them to work in great synergy)
(the pact magic, innovated by the nabateans, greatly enhances the human mage's capabilities, and imparts a certain degree of mutual mind-to-mind awareness of their partner, which the two can use to strategically coordinate their movements. although very few were left alive at this stage of the war, the nabateans were extremely powerful and could flex into any role on the battlefield--but they were also greatly prized in the sick bays and quarantine zones for their potent healing magic)
(the tactical advantage of pairing a war mage and a nabatean caster is credited by wilhelm as the key to many victories that would otherwise have been crushing defeats. also, the remaining nabateans had a vested interest in allying up to beat the agarthans down, as this was their ancient enemy who recently laid waste to the red canyon and decimated most of their population--and was about to conquer humanity as dessert)
wilhelm, the leader of the hresvelg army, formed a pact with the leader of the nabateans . the two of them combined were a force to be reckoned with (excelling in both tactics and raw force, but also defensive maneuvers), but due to how thinly stretched their manpower and resources were, the two commanders were forced to part ways at the very end. one commander was to depart with their army and finish the war, and the other was entrusted with staying back to defend zanado and keep their most vulnerable people safe
for thousands of years, rhea has been casting the same spell, maintaining the final barrier around the sanctum. the plan was for wilhelm and his (hopefully victorious) army to return here, but that uh, did not happen, due to him and his forces being annihilated in the massive effort it took to bring the war to an end
and it did end. only barely. wilhelm's descendants and whoever was left of their supporters founded adrestia proper and continued the hresvelg line into the future, but big wilhelm was absolutely dead and never came back and neither did anyone else sorry
anyway.
edelgard knows that this woman is one of the healers who were working directly on the Curse Problems back in ancient times, and is hoping she will know a solution to the "wretched curse is killing me" problem
the crest of seiros edie carries breaks the centuries-long casting trance and wakes rhea up
the first words out of her mouth are, in essence, WILHELM THANK FUCK YOU'RE BACK, DID WE DO IT? DID WE WIN?
(edelgard voice) erm about that
she basically has to explain to rhea that the last thing she remembers before beginning her Long Watch was, in fact, thousands of years ago, and that wilhelm and everybody else she knew is dead (on top of all the nabateans and allies rhea already knew were dead ofc). the world did manage to survive the war thanks to their efforts, but that's like, the one positive note in all this, lol
rhea understandably distraught and more than a little bit overwhelmed
also quite at a loss for what to do, being a magic guy from an era that in its entirety doesn't exist anymore (and hasn't existed for a very long time)
for all she or edie knows, she might be the very last of her kind (since all records are lost, wilhelm's notes obviously stop kind of abruptly, and no one's heard anything in the millennia since then)
obviously the amount of time that has passed means the people she was holding the ward for are also long gone. she's pretty devastated about that too as they're going through the sanctum and quarantined zone
edelgard trying to tactfully rummage around for clues for her own problem while the big lady spirals
i straight up feel like one of those plants that evolved for a type of bee that doesn't exist anymore
however rhea sadly must return the favor when edelgard is like. so you guys had this curse problem. and you were a very prominent commander/healer at the time. it so happens that i have curse problem. what is the solution to curse problem. i need it badly
and rhea is forced to be like . well we very much did not solve curse problem in my time. sorry. i don't know it. i don't have the solution. we didn't find it in time before our whole shit collapsed
so it's really bad news all around
but because edelgard is wilhelm's blood descendant and has used the crest of seiros (which marks the pact between wilhelm('s blood) and the nabatean rhea), they are pact-partners now, Just Like Old Fódlan Used To Make
rhea can't crack Terminal Blood Curse right now, but she does have a lot of knowledge about it and its course/symptoms (and she can confirm edelgard's problem as being The Very Same Indeed)
she feels pretty strongly about finishing her work, and is suddenly edelgard's funny pact partner, and third of all has Nowhere Else To Go And Everything She Knew Is Gone--so she says she'll help lmao
edelgard is more or less used to not finding concrete answers to her curse problem at this point given the difficulty level of this investigation. so she p much just moves on to the next lead on her checklist. gotta keep it moving if she's gonna crack this thing in time
road trip!
rhea basically provides her with palliative care while they look for ways to break the curse. she does feel noticeably better with a more specialized healer (<- kind of an understatement) and it is buying her more time to work with which is good
strangers separated by millennia of history but slowly bonding!
maybe on the way they'll also root out the bitches who put the curse on her to begin with
if you are out there slithering in the dark. you better not be
finally,
edelgard is a big axe guy. she does not do healing magic. she is basically face-tanking everything and rhea is so busy casting heals and shields she barely has time to do any DPS of her own
im sure they run into other characters n stuff on their funny road trip too but that all is the basic concept
