Revelations from Patch 5.3

[Fenral]

So anyway, on that assumption that all is well and it's only the Exarch's body that is there in the tower... it's a strange thing. He died and there's a body but at the same time he's not dead, so should it be mourned or not? His departure from the First might as well be death in some ways, and yet the people know he's alive but beyond their reach.

All of a sudden I am reminded of The Little Prince... there are shades of that story's ending here, I think, though of course it's not the same thing. But a bit of that mixed joy and sorrow.

In the major arcana of the Tarot, "death" is used less to mean "oh emm jeebers you gon die" like you see in fiction, but to symbolize an end necessary for a new beginning. Even when the Tarot aren't invoked, I still consider it a useful lens to view situations like this through. He did actually die as the Exarch, but rather than simply reverting to the old G'raha, he was reborn as a combination of the two.

(For aspiring writers out there, the tl;dr is that it is perfectly okay to bring dead characters back, as long as they are changed by the experience in some way, not necessarily the Pet Sematary kind of way...)

The Exarch ended up being this weird mashup of Desch and Xande (FFIII editions), I wrote up something a bit after he was revealed (speculative, so I got some stuff wrong), so I imagine this was probably the best way they had to reconcile those polar opposites.

Also yeah, Le Petit Prince is exactly the tone they were going for. Doing something that will definitely kill you, on the belief, with no concrete evidence, that it won't be the end. In that case, I think it's okay to mourn.