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So, when last we I was with her,Hraesvelgr seem disgusted with her and mankind in general. yet suddenly in the final hour, she's riding him into battle? I would think that Hraesvelgr still gave zero crap about us and would never let himself be ridden by another Elezen again.
What am I missing?
In the game alone, there's a bit of inference to be made - how she feels, what she thinks, how Hraesvelgr sees her, what - if anything - they might discuss, left behind in Zenith, and what conclusions they might have reached.
This side story came out later to fill in some of the gaps.
If you have any questions after that, I (and I assume others) would be happy to dive in again.
Ok so there is nothning in game that tells the story of Shiva and Hraesvelgr right before they showed up together to help you break into the city?
It's there, just in many pieces.
In 2.4 you hear about the patron saint of the heretics - a blasphemous woman who turned her back on Ishgard and "laid with a dragon". That's Ishgard's side of the story. Then you learn throughout 3.0 that the Ishgardian people actually came to Coerthas two hundred years earlier than King Thordan supposedly led them there, and though they did war with the dragons at first, Shiva and Hraesvelgr helped forge peace and spent the rest of their lives together. (Dragons don't really mate in the traditional sense, they have spiritual relationships and reproduce asexually.) In the end, Shiva begged Hraesvelgr to consume her (and thus her spiritual aether) so that they could be together forever, and he reluctantly agreed.
On the other side of it, you have Ysayle, whom Hydaelyn gave the Echo around the time of the Calamity. In reality, she was just a confused, orphan girl starving in the snow with a gift she didn't understand, desperate to find purpose. She twisted a chance flicker of Hraesvelgr's memory into thsi idea that she was "chosen" for a divine mission to end the Dragonsong War. She mistook Hydaelyn's giving her the Echo, mistook Hydaelyn's silence when she summoned used a summoning ritual to bring back Shiva's soul (a ritual taught to her by Ascians tricking her into giving birth to a new primal), and mistook the primal essence within her - a manifestation of her own desires - for Shiva's return, consent, and a righteous affirmation of her supposedly-divine mission.
At first, in 2.4, you see Ysayle as she thinks she is, and then from 2.5 through 3.0 she just gets torn down. The dragons didn't behave how she expected, the truth wasn't what she thought it was, and Shiva was a figment of her own loneliness and desire to be special.
But in spite of all her delusions and pomposity, Ysayle just wanted the war to end - for man and dragon to be friends again. (For Ishgard to not be beholden to a church of lies and lives of never-ending war. For no more little orphaned girls to have their homes burned by spiteful dragons and be left starving in the snow.) That's all she had left, and it was something the Warrior of Light was (incidentally) working towards. She idolized Shiva because she felt a connection with her, and in the end what little of Shiva remained in Hraesvelgr and his memory led him to give hope in mankind another chance.
Until she side story came out, you just weren't privy to that part of their conversation. You see them together, coming to help you, and it's just supposed to be apparent(ish) that Ysayle has accepted that your path is the best hope for her dream, and that she's convinced Hraesvelgr to not live the rest of his days without any hope at all.
And even that is just a spark; it's not the last time someone has to debate Hraesvelgr on the merits of giving a damn when he's been given plenty of legitimate pretext to not.
This is actually something that is brought up & covered (somewhat at least) in the quest Winning Over the Wyrm in Patch 3.3. In this Hraesvelgr admits that it was Ysayle's passion, that was so like his beloved Shiva, and her desire to help set right the wrongs she had committed that had caused him to take flight that time to bring her to where she did what she did. He had no intention of helping *us*, but he was acting out of pity for Ysayle and letting her do her one deed of balancing the scales... because even though her summoning of "Shiva" was of her mind, she still reminded him of the real Shiva.