Voidsent Headcanons, Part owo

this has been sitting on my desktop for ages waiting for more but I’m just gonna go ahead and post it

AHRIMAN
One of the most familiar voidsent in Eorzea, owing to its frequent use as a minion by thaumaturges. Ahriman have an obscure and complicated life cycle, beginning life as tiny bat-sized creatures no smarter than a cat, but they grow exponentially larger and more intelligent through consuming aether. The oldest ahriman are massive beings of nigh-incomprehensible intellect. The fact that they begin life so tiny and tractable means that they are a safer summon, relatively speaking, for the aspiring voidmath; they are so common and their methods of calling and binding so well-studied that they are even permitted as familiars to members of the extremely conservative Ossuary – provided, of course, they do not overfeed the demon and cause it to grow cunning enough to give its master the slip. There exist thaumaturgical rituals to temporarily increase an ahriman familiar in size without making it corrospondingly more powerful so they could be used as mounts, but it has long since been lost – and most scholars in Eorzea today seem to agree that they wouldn’t make very good mounts in any case…where would you SIT?

Ahriman who are not summoned into the world by magicians come about in a most gruesome fashion – they possess the eyes of the recently dead, causing the eyeballs to sprout tiny limbs and tear themselves out of the sockets to fully manifest some minutes later. The conditions which cause ahriman to be able to appear this way are not well understood; the Ul’dahn practice of laying silver coins over the eyes of a corpse, ostensibly in honor of the Trader, is thought by some to have originally been an attempt to prevent the deceased from playing host to an ahriman.

The Thavnairian habit of closing one eye, or covering it up with your hand, to bring good luck (similar to the Isghardian tradition of crossing one’s fingers) is related to the fact that a great many ahriman, for whatever reason, seem exceptionally delighted by gambling and games of chance. A number of folk tales feature quick-witted heroes tricking their way out of a monster’s clutches by exploiting this idiosyncratic quirk.

Void Headcanon Post, Part 1

because i need to make more of these, I guess.

Random info about various voidsent that I have been using in RP:

Colloquially known as “gnats”, the lowest order of voidsent resemble vilekin with horns and human-like teeth. They come in a range of sizes – mostly they are tiny, about the size of horseflies, but examples have been found that are the size of a fully grown chocobo. Gnats of all sizes manifest more or less spontaneously around concentrations of active void energy.

Puddings occasionally spring forth from places of immense filth and corruption. Though they have what amounts to a face, they are not sentient. They can, however, repeat sounds perfectly, including voices – more than one unwary adventurer has followed a friend’s cries for help in the darkness, only to find himself face to face with the blank eyes of a voidsent screaming in his friend’s voice.

Their tasty-sounding taxonomy was coined by an Ishgardian voidmath with an extremely peculiar sense of humor.

A common subject of the reverence of void cults all over Eorzea, mind flayers must be summoned into the corpse of a sentient being. The corpse undergoes a hideous metamorphosis, its head being entirely consumed and replaced by the mind flayer’s squid-like body, and regrowing any flesh it has lost in the process of decay. In general mind flayers are arrogant creatures – they seem to delight in the adoration of mortals and prefer to inhabit the bodies of kings and emperors.

The resemblance between the head of a mind flayer and certain kinds of earthly sea creatures is a hotly debated topic among scholars. Limsan academics, familiar with the horrors of the water, have proposed that voidgates open naturally deep within the ocean; an outlandish Sharlayan theory holds that squids and octopuses are simply the detached heads of actual mind flayers, grown feral and beastlike.

Atomoi are bizarre beings that appear only rarely in creation. Even among scholars of the void there is much superstition and very little solid information about them.

An atomos’s gaping maw is capable of swallowing anything small enough to fit inside it, and it is driven by a ravenous hunger that cannot ever be sated. When swallowed, the victim does not actually end up inside the atomos itself – thus its unending hunger. Instead, the atomos’s maw is a gateway to either absolute annihilation, or some kind of strange stasis-universe inaccessible from the outside. Some powerful voidsent use atomoi as living prisons for their most hated enemies.

It is possible that the phenomenon known as “Ozma”, which the Mhachi used to obliterate the city of Nym, is derived from research into the properties of the atomoi.

Random Headcanon

“Jongleur’s X” is the name of a famous mathematical paradox that has circulated for centuries among the learned folk of Eorzea, in various forms. Its name comes from the fact that the most widely-cited description of the paradox was originally found in an anonymous dancing manual dating back to one of the earlier Ul’dahn dynastic courts, where it was proposed as an impossible juggling routine in which fifteen jongleurs of varying skill would juggle harmless scarves and deadly knives. The inclusion of Jongleur’s X in the manual is thought by most scholars to be an erudite joke and is popularly attributed to Lalamu Lamu, a poet-philosopher of the time whose sense of humor is well known.

The demon Ferdiad’s favorite trick, when toying with mortals, is an aether-warping glyph that disrupts a person’s sense of balance and direction so suddenly and violently that the victim is overwhelmed by nausea and panic, often causing themselves injury before the effect vanishes as swiftly as it came on. Any learned individual subjected to this spell, in the unlikely event they could recall what it looked like, would recognize it as a solved form of Jongleur’s X.

The resemblance between the demon’s magic and the complex geometric formulae used by arcanists raises many troubling questions.

your angle…or yuor devil

OK since I was asked: a brief summary of “angels” in FFXIV and headcanons thereof

Outside of Ishgard’s high-fantasy-Catholic deal (and Sephirot and Sophia, but that’s a different post probably) there isn’t a lot of dipping into Judeo-Christian belief and aesthetic in Eorzea. However, we do get “angels” occasionally, and I thought the specific places they appeared was kind of…interesting

(DISCLAIMER: obviously #opinion and not canon, i may have overlooked things, i’m probably overthinking it, etc)

Historically speaking, angels have been thought to look like all kinds of things, usually really WEIRD things – I mean, there’s a reason the first line spoken by most angels in the Bible is often “be not afraid”. however, when you say ‘angel’, there’s one look that usually springs to mind first – a beautiful human being with wings, the classic “angel” look as it were that you can see in everything from christmas cards to renaissance frescoes

there are only a couple of places that the classic “angel” crops up in FFXIV: Lost City of Amdapor (Hard Mode), and…Void Ark

The final boss of Lost City HM is Kuribu, an animated statue created by the Amdapori in the form of an armored woman with wings. Interestingly, she also calls on “putti” adds – putti being a sort of baby-with-wings kind of decorative angel, the kind of thing people often erroneously call a cherub. The putti monsters that show up in the Kuribu fight are definitely NOT babies with wings, though – they’re VOIDSENT. Vodoriga to be precise. statues of these beings can be seen all through the interior of Lost City HM. Vodoriga, along with gargoyles, are voidsent associated with dreams and dreaming – and of course, the central structure of Lost City NM is the “Sanctum of Dreams”, where the Diabolos, the Lord of Nightmares, lies imprisoned

The other place you see classically angelic beings is in a trash encounter in Void Ark – where armored, winged demons are summoned by none other than Diabolos himself. The Bloodguard adds are masculine but otherwise bear a distinct resemblence to Kuribu, albeit a lot more evil

Mhach apparently summoned Diabolos to destroy Amdapor, but obviously Mhach had command of a great many powerful voidsent (plus whatever the fuck Ozma is) Why Diabolos? Well, given that Amdapor is covered in statues of vodoriga, has a major building called the Sanctum of Dreams, and carves guardian statues in the image of the Lord of Nightmares’s footsoldiers…

my theory is that the Amdapori were already in contact with the void, without realizing it. maybe their white mages had dream visions – and maybe even spent days in sacred trances inside their holy sanctum. Maybe they encountered luminous, winged beings in their visions and carved their enchanted statues in their likeness. Because they must be sacred creatures, of course – why else would they appear to the holiest people of all?

Mhach might have sent Diabolos to Amdapor, but the Amdapori themselves had already flung the door wide open, far too convinced of their own purity to ever realize it lead directly into the abyss

Random Lore Thoughts

So, the final boss of Brayflox NM. Sucks to heal on low-level SCH, etc etc.

Dragons are apparently intelligent, civilized creatures, and Aiatar is at least as big as (and has a similar model to) Vidofnir. So…uh, why is this dragon hanging out in a swamp cave, killing giant salamanders and eating adventurers without so much as a line of dialogue.

Well, she lives in an isolated wilderness area surrounded by hostile fauna, in a cave. A cave that is pretty much COVERED with bones (most of them seem like dragon bones actually…) and broken eggshells.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that Aiatar must be like…the dragon equivalent of a crazy backwoods hermit with a basement freezer full of severed heads. She’s the Leatherface of dragons. Brayflox and her goblins just narrowly avoided stumbling into a fucked up The Hills Have Eyes-esque mutant redneck massacre.

bodleianlibs:

In his travels Marco Polo vividly described the cold province of Badakhshan, a prosperous land where horses that descended from Alexander’s horse Bucephalus were once bred and where priceless rubies and the finest lapis lazuli were found.

Since ancient times lapis lazuli has been sourced in this remote region, north-east of modern Afghanistan, and exported over vast distances. Its mines on the steep Hindu Kush Mountains, above the Valley of the Kokcha River, can only be reached through a tortuous and dangerous route.

Lapis lazuli consists of a large number of minerals, including the blue mineral lazurite, the white mineral calcite and golden specks of iron pyrites.

A laborious process transforms this composite mineral into the pigment ultramarine; various grades of ultramarine can be obtained, from the purest extremely expensive deep blue, composed mostly of lazurite particles to the pale grey so-called ultramarine ash.

Our conservators recently attended a 2-day workshop learning how to make their own ultramarine pigment for use in our own conservation. See the entire process in our Case Study!

This was actually my headcanon about how different kinds of carbuncle are constructed/summoned – drawing the arcane geometry with various types of gem pigment produced slightly different carbuncles! I played around with this to have Rin develop Skiver, his sooty lampblack carbuncle who is summoned using plain ink.

There’s one major issue with this theory – the fact that none of the canon carbuncles are named after minerals that can actually be used to produce pigments, oops. Also, literally nobody else roleplays carbuncle summoning this way, so I ended up handwaving it into an obscure alternate method :X

pudgy-puk:

>wake up

>roll out of bed

>”supposing though–what if au ra construct their sexual and sex norms (their heteronormativity, cisnormativity) not primarily around the arrangement of one’s genitals and whether one’s partner has the correct arrangement relative to one’s own but more around one’s height and mass and whether one’s partner is the correct size relative to one’s own; what if au ra consider two and a half feet of height and well over a hundred pounds of weight far more salient to the construction of a sexed (and then to be gendered) body than a comparatively tiny afterthought like how the genitals are arranged. what would be the implications of this for au ra in interracial relationships”

nim-kanim:

nim-kanim:

I can’t believe it took me this long to notice what the carbuncles are used for in the Arcanist guild. While I knew the guild dealt with customs, and tolls, I had no idea carbuncles played an actual part, other than being someone that helps protect the overseer.

But they’re sniffer dogs!! 😀

That’s so adorable though!! I love this and so glad I finally noticed. (Derp, so late to this) Only goes to show that I need to read even more flavour text than I already do! ; v ;

Also-

My in-game carbs wears this. ~~(Drawn with my busted hand)~~

Reblogging for afternoonies.