New Tales from the Storm (August 18)

[Mieck]

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.

At the risk of making assumptions (Mieck says as she goes straight in with an assumption ), it could conceivably be the case that Solus is made ill / incapacitated by the failure of the Meteor project. I know failure is an odd word, but I think it fits; Eorzea was not reduced to ash, though it was heavily scarred, and the promise of Primal extermination was clearly not met. Here is the old man, a lifetime of triumph behind him, his Eorzean designs rebuffed at Silvertear, having turned to van Darnus' plan in desperation, only to receive the news Eorzea endures, and it might just be enough to push him into a decline.