According to Ishgard's dragoons, the best way to kill a dragon is with the power of another dragon. You don't quite understand how that doesn't count as heresy, but it's not your place to question it.
Melala, on the other hand, has no such qualms. The second Azure Dragoon is much more vocal than her counterpart, having bullied her way into the city proper with help from Ser Alberic; she wields her titles in conversation as she does her lance in warfare, and the sight of her cowing knights over twice her size is truly one to behold.
(The Archons and Antecedent were the only true casualties of Nanamo's doomed banquet, but the attack threw the Scions to the winds. Several fled north to Coerthas like you, while others sought sanctuary on Vylbrand or even further afield. Revenant's Toll briefly became a battleground, according to a letter from Slafborn, but Rowena's goons and the Adventurers' Guild managed to enforce an uneasy ceasefire.)
Once, at the Forgotten Knight - you taking a brief break before leaving to find Lady Iceheart, Melala procrastinating on Heustienne's lesson plan - she took the chance to air out her complaints. Nidhogg's essence eats you up inside, she'd said, waving her empty tankard at Gibrillont, taints your mind and hollows you out until there's nothing left but him. And then you die, broken and insane.
It's something that sticks with you, when you set out for Dravania. Nidhogg is no primal, but his sheer strength matches the worst of them all; his song compels the dragons to fight and die for his cause, a war built on an endless trail of blood.
The method is similar and the end goal is the same: fight dragon with dragon, primal with primal. Put like that, you understand Estinien a little better.
Your other new companion, however...
You tried to summon Shiva-Egi, once, while hiding out in Camp Dragonhead. The process of gaining entry to Ishgard was dragging on, Y'mhitra was making little headway with her tomestones and you were in desperate need of a distraction from the sea of sorrow that threatened to swallow you whole.
The Austerities of Ice failed just as surely as that of Lightning, but the stain on your aether remains: a crown of frost lies heavy in your brow, imbued with glacial elegance and the song of eternal grace. It is a faint feeling, bereft of the fullness that comes when an egi is brought to life, but it rises to the fore in the presence of its original channeller.
Lady Iceheart is a primal-summoning cultist, immune to Shiva's influence yet risking the minds of her followers with every subsequent attempt. The Horde she brought to the Steps of Faith would have murdered all of Ishgard, if Ausbord hadn't died to trap them in the killing salvo.
(Her final Holmgang was the strongest you'd seen before or since, capable of chaining down monsters a hundred times her size. But the strain demanded sacrifice, and her brother never forgave the world for necessitating it.)
Ysayle Dangoulain is a woman whose divine favour equals your own, her summon posing as little danger to you in Ravana's hive as Blast or Razor do to her. She is kind to Alphinaud and dedicated to peace, using Hydaelyn's blessing and her own strength to try and change the world.
It's familiar, in the uncomfortable way that means you definitely can't mention it to Hahavit or anyone who would tell him. You climb the floating mountain, meeting moogles and dragons alike, and the faith Hraesvelgr shatters turns out to be that of a friend.
In Thanalan, between Lolorito's schemes and Nanamo's revival, a corpse-turned-puppet tries to summon his god.
It's disconcerting, to say the least. Armies kill their tempered brethren in the hopes that they will find peace in death, yet Kahedin's tainted aether was bright enough to call an egi to his side. Was it the very same ember from his tempering in life, or did the Ascian present his corpse to the Lord of the Inferno?
Forced submission to a primal is not something you have to fear, but the patchwork of colour on your soul only grows brighter by the moon. Ramuh's staff crackles in your right palm, violet streaks electrifying your blood; Leviathan's fangs fill the gaps between your teeth, dripping brine down your throat and smearing salt across your lips.
If you meet your end, could the Ascians force your remnants to dance in their name? Your attempts at the greater Austerities failed, but could one with a stronger soul channel your victories for an ignoble cause?
The answer, according to Dancing Wolf, is not if we cremate you. Tristan vanished in his own inferno, but his brother is given a funeral befitting any Immortal Flame. You attend while Alphinaud grapples with the consequences of his power, offering a prayer to the simple jar of ash.
By the time it is over, the manacutters are complete and you have run out of leads to follow. Both Azure Dragoons are champing at the bit, Nidhogg's impatience echoing into their minds; Hahavit takes a break from his mining contract to help lay the Horde low, an ornate claymore strapped to his back and clouds of darkness shrouding his eyes.
One last battle for Ishgard's salvation. Or at least, it should have been.
(On the way back from the Aery, Melala perched on your lap in order to fit four heroes in two manacutters, she doesn't tell you that she is afraid. Her Echo-blessed talent is empathy, the Eye-bond only amplifies it, and she doesn't confess that she can no longer tell where Wyrmblood ends and the great wyrm begins. Not until it is too late.)
You wrest the past from Hraesvelgr and catch Hahavit before he can stain Zenith red, determined to claim his pound of flesh from the woman who shattered Daniffen's Collar. With that truth revealed, the only monsters left are mortal: Ysayle rouses from her despair in time to halt the heretics' onslaught, but Thordan's machinations do naught but advance.
With the loss of its common enemy, Ishgard turns upon itself. Aymeric falls at his father's hand, only saved with the aid of a woman whose status is both the same and opposite his. You climb through the Vault, chase down the archbishop, and-
And-
To kill the priest-king and his murderous slaves, you need more power than you have. Luckily, Y'mhitra knows exactly where to find it.
(Get angry, Aki advises, when she finds you on the edge of the hopelessness that drowned you in Drybone. It's not healthy, sure, but all-consuming hatred's a bit more functional than all-consuming despair. The Dragonsong War isn't over yet, and you have neither the time nor the space to safely grieve.)
Bahamut's final form died a full five malms below the surface, his captive children slain and crystal core shattered. You remember incandescent blue and blazing fury, the whirling lights of Melala's dive, Arielle's remembered fear giving way to determination as her battlesong echoed with the voice of the star herself.
Along with Phoenix, his shattered essence found a home in your back: azure scales above and amber feathers below, their twinned scars of grief and endless rage forcing a disgruntled Razor back to her home in your left arm.
His essence flickers to life as you sneak through the Carteneau Flats, Menphina's light the only witness to your highly illegal escapade. Thick armour tinged with vengeance ripples up and over your shoulders, phantom wings stretching wide in preparation for flight.
(Y'shtola has yet to wake, despite Stillglade Fane's best efforts, and you are not the only soul in need of a distraction from their helplessness.)
The very air itself hums with power, Bahamut's fury a permanent taint on the site of his first death, but only in the throes of battle does it deign to acknowledge your call. You tune out the chaos, trusting Nugget to cover you as you sprint from wellspring to wellspring, a once-distant roar rising to drown your ears in rage.
Meditating under fire is nigh-impossible, but you have to do this as fast as you can. Y'mhitra and Dancing Wolf are just mortal, with no great blessing to shield them - they can't hold off an Ascian for long, and you refuse to let them die for this.
You throw caution to the wind and gorge on the dreadwyrm's essence, desperation lending you the strength to avoid collapsing under the weight of it. Astral aether, all elements in one, floods your soul with each subsequent attunement, burying the rainbow taint beneath a bloody river of blue.
Fire scorches your throat and spills down into your stomach; wings tear from your spine and stir up biting wind. Claws crackle with lightning and force your blood to boil and burst; scales rip from your chest and harden into stone defences.
Your maw fills with broken shards of frost, icicle fangs longing to dig into the opposition and rend them asunder. When you open it - to speak, to scream - you roar, and the lesser beings before you scatter as beasts before a tidal wave.
(It's too much too fast and it hurts and this must be why the Ascian didn't block you, banking on recklessness and pain to weaken your mind and let the primal run wild.)
The creature in black refuses to bow beneath your radiance, its scent rancid in your snout, so you obliterate its servants with a grand sweep of ruin. The smallest of its earthen creations is abandoned when it flees, its undignified capture the only reason it survived.
The mortals speak, their trophy rumbling in distress from where it is clamped firmly under the large one's arm. Your power in this limited body is agonisingly weak, incapable of bringing them into your service; their petitions wither and die in the air, helpless against the indifference of dragons.
(In the depths of your mind, a bastion shielded by Hydaelyn's blessing, you wonder if this is what tempering feels like.)
Yet the small one dares to approach, waving off the large one when it attempts to protest. The sheer audacity startles you long enough for it to reach you, sheathing its wand and reaching out-
Cool hands grab your face, already spilling over with a far gentler cerulean, and strip the blinding torment from your mind as their owner (your friend) presses its (her) forehead to yours and whispers, wake up.
Back in Ul'dah, it takes thirty straight hours of sleep and two full pots of Katherine's best mutton stew before you can muster the courage to take stock of yourself.
Physically, you are fine. Rhetioeya was in town to consult with the Alchemist's Guild, and Dancing Wolf enlisted him to discreetly examine you: Bahamut's essence has no lingering effect on your body, and your aetheric balance is the same as always.
It helps, somewhat, to have a neutral observer confirm that. The Dreadwyrm Trance didn't actually transform anything other than your mind, and even that was a fluke brought on by the Ascian's disruption and the sheer concentration of power in the Carteneau Flats.
(You were engulfed by an incarnation of blue fire, according to Y'mhitra. Bahamut's power became yours, and in turn your form became his to control. The voice that spilled from his throat had been your own, scorched hoarse from a millennia of agony, and the sound made her realise how to save you.)
Mentally, you are very much not. You remember every moment of pain, each action taken with your hands, the seconds stretching out into an endless abyss of isolation. Though it was only in your head, you felt your body twist and warp into Bahamut's ideal of perfection, a spirit of vengeance whose only goal was to kill.
On the airship back to Ul'dah, insensate and worn down by rage, you dreamt of Nidhogg, and Estinien, and Ysayle and Hahavit and a bloody lance of light. When you woke, it was to robes stained with blood and a mouth dripping with bile.
(You looked like you were about to call down the Seventh bloody Calamity all over again, according to Dancing Wolf, who carried you down from the Heliodrome. He held your hair back while you vomited over the side, and never once flinched from the truth of it all.)
The might of the dreadwyrm lives in you now, and all that comes with it. Tendrils of blue wrap around your veins, their ends tangling between your shoulders in a seething, roiling mass. You can hear the shape of him, a litany of immeasurable loss beneath the louder, vicious refrain.
Bahamut as you know him was summoned and maintained by the dragons in the Coils, a twisted, desperate reflection created to fight back against the Allagan Empire. His summoners' fury burns as bright as the sun, their fear and pain singing a counterpoint to your own, and a lament for the lost fills the silence between your heartbeats.
Hraesvelgr's brood-brother is dead, yet man ascribes his name to the false idol cast from his legacy. It is understandable, then, that he chose to spurn them in kind.
You are no stranger to anger - quite the opposite, even. Career adventurers with happy lives are rare, and the lifestyle is not conducive to a peaceful state of mind.
Take Ausbord Whorlbat, for example: orphaned at seven in the fall of Ala Mhigo, the final heritor of her clan's traditional style of axe-work. She joined the Marauder's Guild and the Scions in turn, Hahavit grumbling at her heels; scavenged a bloody Bravura off the fields of Dalamud's descent and donned the Braves' blue to try and change the world.
For twenty years, her dearest wish was for liberation. Ausbord died believing in Ilberd's dream, trapped in the throes of a warrior's rage, and never knew the truth of the twisted lengths her captain would go for their homeland.
Or Hahavit Tatavit, blinded by grief and by resentment: he lost control of his inner beast after the Steps of Faith, and turned to a dead man's darkness to replace the power that failed him. He brought down his own demons in Whitebrim, accepting the venom they spat as his own; returned to Vylbrand with Bravura after Bismarck's fall, his crimson soul reignited by the spark of abyssal flame.
Both disciplines are fuelled by emotion, of which rage is paramount. Hahavit has been furious all his life, never wanting to help out of kindness, and the crushing weight of it very nearly tore him to shreds.
Aki's father was executed for the "heresy" of showing his horns in public, and Stephanivien gave her the chance to break the system that caused it. Melala's family was press-ganged by Castrum Occidens, so she turned her harpoon from fish to Garlean flesh. Most of the people you know are angry, whether at a single grievance or many, and you yourself are no different: the path you walk is awash with the blood of the sacrificed, and their ghosts cry out for vengeance as you wade ever onwards.
Anger is not a bad thing - those who are happy with the status quo have no reason to improve it - but it is a double-edged sword. It is the progeny of loss and suffering and powerlessness in the face of the world. It is useful, in moderation, but too much will hollow out its wielder until they have nothing left to fight for.
It's what Melala tried to warn you about, in the warm comfort of the tavern; it's what fuels Estinien even now, through the blood and the unknown.
There is a part of them both that is Nidhogg, deeper and more intimate than anything you could possibly know: if the stains of primal power are paint on the brickwork of the soul, indelible yet causing no true harm to the stone underneath, then the Eye is the ivy that infiltrates the mortar, impossible to remove without damaging the wall in which it grows.
Dragoons to kill dragons, summoners to smite the summoned, Warriors of Light to push back the encroaching darkness. You have a dragon-spirit of your own now, alike yet impossibly different, and the anthem of agony and salvation that Meracydia taught him to sing reverberates in the hollows of your veins.
Your convalescence was never meant to be lengthy, but it is cut short regardless: Y'shtola is soon to wake, according to Stillglade Fane, and Tataru has a surprise that she requires your support in procuring.
But after that, you will need to return to your duties, and you cannot lose control in the thick of them.
As such, practice is in order. Dancing Wolf pulls rank to clear out a training room - while summoning is perfectly legal, your standing in Ul'dah is already shaky enough without the added threat of vindictive rumours - and leans his bulk against the closed door, ears pricked for any curious eavesdroppers. Y'mhitra stands ready in the case that something goes wrong, hands planted on her hips and a confident smile on her lips.
Nugget rumbles pitifully as you wriggle free from his hold on your arm, shooing him away to give yourself some space; he has been glued to your side since the battle atop the Heliodrome, galled by his inability to stymie Bahamut's flood, but you do kind of need both hands free to cast.
(Egi, as it turns out, can have irrational regrets. Can feel guilt over a failure that isn't their own, and try to make up for the suffering it causes. It is remarkably human of them, despite the immortal purity of their birth.)
In the center of the room, with your friends looking on, you reach inside yourself for traces of the dreadwyrm's wrath. His is an alien power, a song born from rebellion and the prayers of the dead. Azure scales glitter within your upper back, and the vestiges of wings unfurl like petals greeting the sun as you ease yourself into Bahamut's power.
You have all the time you need, now. Your mind sharpens with glacial urgency as tendrils of blue snake down through your bones, twisting the six-point rings of Ruin III into streamlined bolts of corrosion. The rainbow patterns of Tri-Disaster snap into stark relief: rivers of poison break their banks beneath your skin, a sea barely contained by the limits of your flesh.
Dreadwyrm Trance behaves, though, which is the important part.
It feels markedly weaker than the fury that nearly swallowed you whole on the Carteneau Flats - testing confirms that there is no demonstrable difference in your power, just in the speed at which you can cast - but maybe that is for the best, for now.
There is a reservoir of blue bundled up around your spine, only barely touched by the spells' exertion. (Y'mhitra has barely sat down on the airship to Gridania before she starts sorting through her notes with characteristic aplomb, determined to identify a way to put it to use.) You carry the Meracydians' fury there, in a bid to turn it towards forging a brighter world than the one that drove them to this.
A trance is not an egi, and thus you don't grant it a name. But Bahamut burns bright in the face of the oncoming blizzard, and his song promises to see you through to the light beyond it.