Lore Book Revelations

The Echo is mostly still very much mysterious and we really still know very little about it and its capabilities, particularly in the case of the WoL. From what we have experanced, much of the Ascians abilities come from their own Echo and its a thing they use every well. The WoL however has almost always used the Echo passively or unintentionally. Further, we learn that different people's Echo has different properties such as Kryle's ability to sense Aetheric residue of the soul.

The Blessing of Light is a powerful boon that empowers the WoL but frankly I suspect that the Echo is on par if not even more potentially powerful a tool. We do know that the WoL barely scratches the surface of what his/her gift is capable of, at least not intentionally.

I have a theory that the Minstrel's Song version of trials has to do with different abilities of pre and post cognition going haywire. When we fail a duty, we get a boost because lore-wise what just happened didn't, and we tap more into our hidden power. We can also look into past events and, though not change them, see minor differences in how they could have played out. When the Minstrel triggers the memories of a particularly brutal challenge we previously defeated, we go into the past, but as ourselves, and since our foe was the one defeated it gets a power boost instead!

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Originally Posted by Jonnykit

According to Lore Book the Parade Incident that claimed her father's life happened the same year of the Battle of Silvertear Falls. However, Supposedly that happened 5 years ago before the Calamity if you played the Ul'dah stroyline in 1.0.

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Even before the lore book, we knew the Battle of Silvertear Skies and the Goobbue Parade both took place in the Year 1562, ten years before the Calamity and the year in which we played.

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Originally Posted by Seranelien

Lady Minfilia is one of the few survivors of the Fall of the Keeper—one of the few who remember the horrors of that fateful night, ten years gone.

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Originally Posted by Warburton's Journal

The legacy of Minfilia's father, who perished in the parade incident of 1562, when a goobbue broke free of its magical fetters and ran amok through the streets of Ul'dah. Contains a wealth of stolen imperial research on the primals, as well as other information which has yet to be deciphered.

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We view much of the 1.0 city-state starter storylines via Echo. Anonymoose and Gamerescape have put together a pretty good breakdown of which is which.


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Originally Posted by Jonnykit

Not only that but you meet Minfilia who states that the Path of the Twelve has been around researching the Echo for 10 years.

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I believe you're referring to this quote?

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Originally Posted by Minfilia

Very good. I pray together we can learn more of this gift...for though we have scoured the realm for nigh on ten years, I fear there is still little we understand.

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While the "we" does refer to members of the Path of the Twelve, she doesn't strictly say that the Path itself has been around for ten years, only that its members have been searching for answers for that long- 10 years, aka since many members claimed to have seen a starshower after/during the Battle of Silvertear Skies.

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Originally Posted by Godfrey

I myself was woken ten years ago when I saw me a starshower up in the mountains near Ishgard. Not long after, I started havin' these visions. Once or twice a year is all, mind ye, but it was enough to put the fear in me belly. Afore long, there weren't no one I could trust. 'Twas enough t' drive me wife into the arms of another man. If it weren't fer the Path, the Echo might've killed me. Luckily, it helped me kill someone else first.

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I'm willing to believe its all an echo after watching a video of the last part of Calamity Cometh and the beginning. Noticed that Thancred and the others weren't on the cart before the vision. But what I don't get is the echo is triggered to view Nielle being stabbed after seeing the shattered jewel. An Echo within an Echo? This is getting a bit complicated.

Opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPZF...FEA28A2BAEAC6C

Calamity Cometh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUJG...AEAC6C&index=8

An Echo within an Echo isn't unheard of in 1.0 iirc, Y'shtola even forces you out of an Echo vision in he 1.0 Limsa arc? It's been ages.

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Originally Posted by Rocl

An Echo within an Echo isn't unheard of in 1.0 iirc.

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Yrc. Each of the opening story arcs end this way. You're in an Echo of 1562, and somehow the Echo works on someone there, but only draws you back slightly further into 1562 in order to make the member of the Circle of Knowing freak the hell out when they come out of it just as the Starshower hits.

Ul'dah: You enter the memory of Minfilia (who is in the 1572 scenes), as she is actually Ascilia (from the 1562 scenes). This happens because you mention Thancred near the Ossuary, and since he's not in Ul'dah at the time, she remembers him and what happened at the Ossuary ten years ago, pulling you into the Echo. When Thancred comes upon the dying Niellefresne and the terrified Ascilia, the girl holds out the broken gem from Heartstrike, which glows as the Echo activates and pulls Echo-Thancred along for the ride as you see the robed figure run Nielle through.

Limsa Lominsa: You enter the memory of Blackburn (who is in the 1572 scenes), as he is actually Emerick (from the 1562 scenes). This happens because he knows you're unraveling the truth about what happened ... and you're currently standing exactly where the Ascian (Travanchet) took the Key (horn) that Sthalmann and Y'shtola were fighting over. Sthalmann only knew that it was an object of great power and he wanted to use it to overthrow the Admiral and protect Limsa in his own way, while Y'shtola just knew that the Ascians wanted it and couldn't let them have it. (Travanchet planned on giving it to the Sahagin to summon Leviathan, but they didn't end up needing it, apparently, because he eventually passed it along to Mide who used it to summon Alexander.) As they squabble, the Echo activates and the Key glows, dragging Echo-Y'sthola along for the ride and showing a vision of Emerick, Merodaulyn, and Sthalmann conspiring to steal the key in the first place.

Gridania: You enter the memory of the Hermit of the Wood (who is in the 1572 scenes), as he is actually Khrimm (from the 1562 scenes). When Khrimm hears that the adventurers being drawn to Gridania "by the forest" are the "Messengers of Nophica", he recalls the 1562 iteration of the same ritual being performed in 1572. The ritual from ten years earlier was quite complicated, politically. Gridania was pretending that its citizens were being claimed as wildlings to funnel covert assistance to the Ala Mhigan Resistance. Khrimm's parents, along with Dunstan, the brother of Khrimm's best friend Fye, were such "Wildlings". Because it hurt Khrimm to see Fye miss her brother so, he tried to burn a hedgetree to prove that the Elementals weren't real, leading to him actually being claimed as a wildling. At the 1562 ritual, Dunstan and Khrimm were both publicly cleansed of woodsin, even though only one really needed it. During the vision of the ritual, the Echo triggers, causing the gem on young Khrimm's mask to glow and drawing Echo-Yda and Echo-Papalymo along for the ride as you see a vision of Khrimm burning the tree in the first place.

In all three events, you see the 1562 starshower (which was publicly seen by everyone as opposed to the private visions people experience when awakening to the Echo), and it leads to the Sharlayans realizing that their mission to forestall the Seventh Umbral Calamity will more than likely end in failure as the Echo has officially sounded. That seems to be the point of the scene - beginning to explain who the Circle of Knowing are, what they were trying to do, and what the real danger to Eorzea is. It's not just war with the Empire - it's primals and Calamity - an Umbral Era.

The Echo-within-an-Echo bugs me a lot, because even though you're seeing deeper into the memory you're already in, it seems to activate on an object in their memory, which is something the Echo never does outside of the CG opening for 1.0 (and the CGs always have a handful of weird errors like that on account of being set in stone a year before the rest of the game; see: the Drowning Wench with an aetheryte in it, the swarm of Hraesvelgrs attacking Ishgard, the male black mage). The Echo is supposed to resonate with other souls. It's possible that perhaps it picks up aetherial traces of memories left on objects, but that's way over-powered fanon-bait for which there is no other precedent for that (yet), so I've chalked it up as inconclusive. After all, it's not like you're entering a different person's memory - you're already resonating with that person's soul, you're just going deeper.

Honestly, I think we can chalk up the Echo-within-Echo to old-fashioned "early installment weirdness", to use a certain fansite's term. The Echo was pretty loosely defined during the initial launch content of 1.0, and it's likely there were initial plans for the Echo to be able to go full-on Inception mode on us - Echoes within Echoes within Echoes (just like ~real echoes in caves~, geddit? geddit?). However, after the launch intro questlines were received as poorly as they were (as the Echo back then was a confusing goddamn mess rather than they very clearly-marked flashback sequences we have in ARR and beyond) I wouldn't be surprised if this feature of the player Echo was quietly shelved and never, ever brought up again. Hell, the Echo isn't even interactive anymore, so Echoception is completely out.

I don't think we should really worry about how the Echo worked in 1.0, especially launch 1.0 - it's clear that pre-Yoshida 1.0 is pretty broad-strokes when it comes to canon at this point, so we probably don't need to worry about how the Echo worked at such an early stage of worldbuilding.

What is your take then Annoymoose, on the vision we have with Cid prior to the Garuda battle where Cid sees us give him his goggles? Cid seems to remember us from that moment. That in itself was rather weird. For a start, where the hell did we get the goggles from? Did we miss the part where our echo self stopped by a MB on the way to appearing as a floating apparition.

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Originally Posted by Belhi

What is your take then Annoymoose, on the vision we have with Cid prior to the Garuda battle where Cid sees us give him his goggles?

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This one I'm actually rather confident about. The scene begins with Cid struggling to regain his memories; as if he has a word on the tip of his tongue. He uses the phrase, "Just how long have I worn these damn goggles?" as an example, and suddenly the Echo triggers and begins to not only reveal his memories to us, but to him. As we see the images, it all starts coming back to him, scene by scene. When we appear in the glowing light and hand him his goggles, I believe it's a metaphorical scene - we're literally giving him the memory he just asked for; the scene comes full circle and has him say, "Ah, yes! It was then that I first donned these goggles."

He recognizes that the light he saw was you, and muses that perhaps his third eye was to blame, or perhaps it's a lucky guess.
(And then he remembers the flight to slay Nael van Darnus on the Rivenroad if you were from 1.0.)

Is that what Cid's Triple Triad card refers to?