New Tales from the Storm (August 18)

[Anonymoose]

It seems like it attempts to square the circle of the time discrepancies regarding the rebellion - how it makes explicit Zenos is in town before Varis is actually emperor

I was hoping that the player point of view for the war of succession would one day get pushed back a bit, but I was hesitant to accept that, before Solus's death, it was more than rising tensions without a solid citation behind it.

I recently did some re-exploration of 2.0, 2.4, and 4.2 on account of our new friend, Shadowhunter, and had never quite fully processed (or needed to, for that matter, I suppose) that all the castra that went up in Eorzea weren't part of Gaius's rogue invasion. That he was ordered to establish them at all proves just how long Solus has been too ill to rule; Solus's interest in conquering Eorzea via a traditional, time-consuming campaign had long been exhausted. That left a nice, wide-open window for the war of succession to have begun earlier (and to put all those references to "last year" somewhere that didn't break anything), but, again, I was hesitant to make any assumptions.

Back to the Tale, what really caught my attention was the irony of the tension between Yotsuyu and Zenos: a woman drawn to a powerful man solely for his ability to destroy, a man drawn to a courtesan solely for her rage - both seemingly (and understandably) sexually oblivious to one another.