FFXIV Swap Discord

Kal'istae was born in Doma, the daughter of the envoy from the Azim Steppe and his wife (and bodyguard). She and her family were in Doma when the Garlean Empire began its invasion. When it became clear that there would be no stopping the Empire, Kaien sent all of the foreign envoys and emissaries away. Like many of the others who had called Doma home, Kal'istae's parents and their young daughter were blocked off from returning to the Steppe. Instead, they joined a loose alliance of Xaela who, unable to return home, instead fled across the land and sea and into Coerthas, seeking refuge.

What they found was slaughter. The Ishgardians, seeing their scales and horns and tails, immediately determined that they were heretics - those men and women who had embraced the dragons and partaken of their blood to take on a draconic visage. Their reaction followed suit; the Ishgardian knights took up their lances and their swords and fell upon the refugees, slaughtering them almost to a man. Only one small child, barely four years old, was left alive, hidden beneath a collapsed tent by her desperate mother.

She might not have survived, had a troop of Coerthan chocobo-hunters not been on their way through the area, heading home after a day's hunt. They came upon the scene of the massacre and, having tenuous ties with the Dravanian community, stopped to bury the dead and clean up the encampment. There they found the weakly-crying Kal'istae, already half-dead from exposure. Although not a man among them knew what to do with a child, they scooped her up, bundled her up, and fed her as best they could from their stores before hauling her out of the snow and down into the Forelands.

She was raised among the rough-and-tumble hunters of Dravania, but although she learned to fight, to hunt, and to curse with the best of them, she never forgot the early lessons of propriety and politeness she learned from her childhood in Doma Castle. It was the hunters who discovered her natural gift for healing; they encouraged her to study with such itinerant healers as came through the camps, and with a mix of herb and magickal healing, she kept her foster family in good health.

It was this healing gift that brought her to the attention of Archon Louisoix Leveilleur. When his youngest son Thancred, seeking out the source of a strange pulling in his breast, fell afoul of a drunken hunter one day in the Sharlayan Colony, it was Kal'istae who came to the boy's aid, flinging the bully away with a fist of air, then using her gift to heal the boy's broken arm. Impressed by her young gift - and by the fact that she seemed to be the source of his son's strange pull - Louisoix brokered a deal with the hunters. He would facilitate an agreement with the colony healers, and they would give custody of their young charge to him.

Thus Kal'istae came to live in Sharlayan proper. Although both Louisoix and his older son, Fourchenault, were interested in adopting the young Au Ra, they both recognized that she needed a home with someone familiar with childhood trauma. Instead, Louisoix arranged for his good friend, Pieramont Miurani, to adopt the girl.

Despite not being a part of their family, Kal'istae spent most of her childhood and teen years running tame through the Leveilleur estate, usually side by side with Thancred. The two were inseparable, best friends from the very start. There was some vague talk between the Miuranis and the Leveilleurs about a match for the two children, but in the end, it was determined to let them make their own decisions.

The bond they shared was far more profound than simple friendship or even love. Thancred and Kal'istae could feel each other as a second heartbeat within their breasts; each was aware of how the other was feeling, both physically and emotionally. As puberty hit first one, than the other, it might have caused a few awkward moments between them - but they always overcame it.

When Kal'istae was just turning fifteen, Louisoix summoned the nearly eighteen-year-old Thancred to his side in Eorzea, where they set to investigating the mysterious project that the Garlean Empire had underway. For the next several years she waited impatiently for the Archon to call upon her. When word finally came that she was to join him in Ul'dah, she did so with alacrity, bidding farewell to family and friends and promising to see them again soon.

It was a promise she would not keep for many, many years.

Kal'istae appeared on a cliff above the Carteneau Flats in year 1577 of the Eorzean calendar. It had been five years since the Calamity, five years since the day Louisoix had thrust her and her fellow Warriors of Light into the Rift to protect them from Bahamut's fury. She had no memory of the events prior to her emergence from the Rift - not even the memory of where she'd come from, or who she was.

The only thing that drove her forth was an incessant tugging at her breast, pulling her towards the distant desert city of Ul'dah. There, she knew, she would find her future. And perhaps, if she was lucky, her past.

What she found was both - not that she knew it at the time. In her well-worn armor, with her battered sword, she was immediately taken for an adventurer, one of scores whom had flocked to the city-states in response to the call for aid. With no more notion of her role than they, Kal'istae decided to go along with their supposition and, taking the advice of Mistress Momodi of the Adventurer's Guild, she sought out the Gladiator's Guild for training.

But the tugging was neither the appellation of Adventurer, nor was it the training she received at the hands of Mylla. Instead, it turned out to be centered upon a handsome, silver-haired hyur who had a disconcerting tendency to be where she was right when she needed him most - and wanted him least. His cavalier attitude and casual flirtations irritated her; she was already high-strung from trying to acclimate to a world she did not know, and to have him making light of every situation in which she inevitably found herself grated on her nerves. Despite her frustrations with him, however, he did come to grow on her (rather like a fungus).

It was at his behest that she joined the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, a mysterious organization beholden to no government, but supposedly serving the needs of the land as a whole. Its leader was a woman Kal'istae gauged to be a few years younger than herself, but already wise in experience and knowledge.

And this leader, this Minfilia, she knew Kal'istae. She could not share her knowledge; whatever had stripped the Au Ra's memory would continue to do so - but she could reassure the adventurer that she'd been a good person. Reassured, if not satisfied, Kal'istae agreed to join the Scions, to act as their agent in the field, utilizing the rare and mysterious power that she shared with Minfilia - the Echo - on behalf of the organization and Eorzea.

She underwent countless trials - facing down Primals single-handedly, joining other adventurers to delve deep into dungeons, and aiding those in need. All the while, she was chasing - and being chased by - mysterious men in black robes and masks who seemed hellsbent on some agenda that required her extermination.

She made friends along the way - her fellow Scions, various heads of state, job trainers and crafting trainers and common - and not so common - adventurers around the world. She made enemies too; they were inevitable with the number of petty schemes she overset on her way to stymieing the evil Ascians and the power-mad Garlean Empire.

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