pre-canon

[gibbetgallowsguillotine]

The story of Drividot Nicot, the savior of the star, begins one thousand years ago. The floodwaters of the Sixth Umbral Calamity recede, and from the mass of frightened survivors, one group peels off. They are led by a prophet, by an oracle, by a promise: Halone has chosen her people and will send them to a homeland, to a land of hardship and plenty, beauty and suffering. It will make them strong, it will make them wise. This much is true; their city winds round a holy spire and the verdant highlands sustain it. There was very little else true about what the Ishgardians told themselves. But that is another story.

The story of Drividot Nicot, the savior of the star, begins some centuries later. Under the Black Shroud, barred from the surface by the rage of elemental spirits, is a people in exile, and quickening within them is their shame: the traitors who prefer the caves, the sinners who consider Gelmorra a fine thing to have built. Ethnogenesis swells gravid and erupts, like any birth, with shocking amounts of blood. But that is another story.

The story of Drividot Nicot, the savior of the star, begins three centuries ago. Once more Halone’s mountains call out to the frightened, this time to a clan of elezen as dark as their grottos: Gelmorra has fallen and her lovers, bereft, scatter. But if there is one good thing about the ancient lineages of Ishgard—and there may not be—it is that divisions between the elezen of the Black Shroud are considered an untrustworthy, new-fangled fashion. If these duskwights, as they call themselves, cleave to Halone, then there can be a place for them in her country. But that is another story.

The story of Drividot Nicot, the savior of the star, begins thirty—two years ago. A duskwight girl presses Coerthan flowers into her diary and dares to pray for intercession from gentle saints, for she has sinned. (So has he. But some of the Coerthan duskwights have assimilated more fully than others). But that is another story.

The story of Drividot Nicot, the savior of the star, begins some moons after that. The parish recordkeeper is ill at ease in the caves under Dourwood Estate, but this girl is still bedridden and the birth must be recorded. For propriety, he has come with a priest and they with half her clan. When the recordkeeper has written “Grey—“ the matriarch herself snatches the paper from his desk, uses it to light her pipe. Unrepentant, when pressed she simply says that it is a terribly cruel thing to do to a child. None of them let him leave until each of them has verified the presence of the Nicot name on the record. (Some of the Coerthan duskwights have assimilated more fully than others).

This, then, is the story you came to hear.