Otohiko of the village of Yakata was born useless.

He's heard stories of how children are reared elsewhere, individual sets of parents and sometimes other family members caring for them. He's certain if his village did that, he would have been killed as an infant. The fact that they do collective childrearing instead, a whole litter of babies being taken care of by the whole village—and thus being no one's personal responsibility—is the reason he's still alive. No one went out of their way to help him, but there was food and shelter and they didn't begrudge him any.

But he was born useless: his tail so short he needed to figure out how to balance himself without it, which made him the last one of his age group to learn to walk; his bones thin and frail; his skin easy to hurt; his scales sufficiently sensitive he used to wail for an hour if they were touched the wrong way; his horns so weak he used to molt earlier and regrow them later than everyone else. He couldn't fight, he could barely forage, definitely not hunt, and most certainly couldn't carry anything heavyer than a watermelon (and even that was kind of iffy). The only way to be useful was to do the work of old people: weaving, sewing, handicrafts that didn't need strength or vigour or endurance or fortitude.

And by the kami did he take to those.

Yakata was sufficiently out of the way that merchants seldom visited, and only when passing through; those tended to be large caravans, though, as the only reason to pass through would be to go from Yanxia to Dalmasca or Thavnair and back, the kinds of caravans too large to be teleported by aetheryte (oh how Otohiko longed to see an aetheryte in person) led by the kinds of merchants too wary of pirates or with the kinds of merchandise too fragile to transport by boat (oh how Otohiko longed to see the ocean in person). And those caravans didn't care that Otohiko was lame and useless, and if he made himself sufficiently charming they'd welcome his company. And they had books, and materials he couldn't find anywhere else, and he taught himself to read and write Doman and even bits and pieces of Eorzean. He had a head for numbers, too, and after a couple of times of having caught accountants cheating their employers he started making a point of offering his services to every caravan.

They paid in gil, which his village had no use for, but which meant that he could then buy books. And books opened the world up to him.

He made himself more useful. He started building things to help others, gadgets that made their lives easier. At first they were little more than toys, but he got better, he learned more.

And he learned magic. The kind of magic his village used was not for him. Too, too... embodied. But his books showed him that the world had much more to offer than that, and his first arcanism book marked the beginning of his ascent.

"Arcanima", or "arcane geometries", are spatial structures you can channel aether through to generate magical effects. They work best if you have some medium onto which you can draw them using conductive ink—thick tomes are traditional—but if you can fix their shapes in your mind sufficiently precisely it's possible to cast arcanist spells unaided. Introductory books on arcanima don't usually go into detail about the theory and the mathematics behind them, and merely present the basic concepts as well as some simple standard diagrams you can cast from, but it's possible to design your own, if you know what you're doing. Otohiko didn't know what he was doing, but he needed to learn.

So he did. Hunting down a book on theory was hard; he had to bargain with merchants to acquire them for him and hope they'd ever come back. But he was charming, and he was useful, and he acquired one such book in relatively short order. He'd already learned the basics ten times over by then, and he yearned for more.

But conductive ink was expensive, and even though he acquired his own blank tome to draw on he had to be very conservative and only register those shapes he was very sure of. He'd draw them in advance with a compass and multiple straightedges and whatever else he needed, in pencil, and he'd check his calculations over and over and over in advance of inking them, and even so his first two arcanima came out wrong. He almost gave up after the second time; he spent the night crying into a pillow wondering if he'd be useless at this, too. But the third time worked, a simple thing, his own version of the basic "Ruin" spell which just shot concentrated unaspected aether wherever you pointed it. And although people hadn't really been patient with him throughout this, once he killed his first mark with Ruin nothing could possibly ever discourage him.

The advantage of arcanima over other schools of magic is in its ability to create permanent effects. It's not unique to it, but the stable structures of the arcane geometries make them very well-suited to the task. And so he wasted some ink and a few pages of his blank book on utility: a permanent light spell which could be attached to some otherwise nonmagical object to create a lamp. That was all the rage in his village, and everyone wanted one, or more than one. The collective sleep schedules of everyone in the village started shifting forward because of this, and once he modified the spell to have a simple on/off switch flicked by a small burst of aether into it those lamps became fixtures everywhere.

Magic revolutionised his gadgets. There were still villagers who disliked him, resented him, thought he was useless and could never compare to the mighty hunters his peers became, but the majority of them were delighted. It helped that working with old people meant that he had endeared himself to the elders, whose opinions were, if not universally respected, at least universally listened to.

Otohiko wasn't useless anymore. The village of Yakata was made better by his existence.

II. Hear. Feel. Think.

When he was sixteen summers old, one of the moons fell.

Not Nhaama, the goddess; her much smaller counterpart, Dalamiq. The stories were never clear on what its relationship with Nhaama was, and it would not be until much much later that Otohiko would learn the truth of it—of both of them. For that moment, all that he and everyone else in Yakata knew was that Dalamiq was falling, growing larger and redder by the day until one day it could be seen in a decidedly downards trajectory, far to the west, probably in Aldenard. And even though Aldenard is very, very far from Othard, the effects of its descent were still keenly felt. Changes in ambient aether, changes in the weather, in the behaviour of wild beasts. Even his magic became unstable, more chaotic in his hands than it used to be. He was sufficiently talented in its use that he managed to compensate for it, but it still needed compensating.

However, as far as Otohiko was concerned, the biggest effect of the fall of Dalamiq was the dream he had on the night following it.

Hear. Feel. Think.

The voice was simultaneously overwhelming and not. It rocked him to his very core, reverberated through his bones and made his blood rush and his breath quicken. It came from everywhere, from somewhere deep within the world itself, and didn't travel through air to reach him. It simply was.

He was standing on nothing in a black and blue void with distant stars. He looked around himself, and behind him was...

...a glowing crystal, mountainous in size, surrounded by smaller ones, each individually taller than the tallest tree Otohiko has ever seen. He was as a pebble compared to the crystal, a speck of nothing, and it's not humility so much as awe that filled his being as he beheld the swirling aether surrounding it, thick enough to itself glow.

Crystal of Light

Hear. Feel. Think, she repeated, and Otohiko was filled with certainty that it was the crystal speaking to him.

...who... are you? he asked, or thought, or projected, for he noticed he was not embodied, either. He was a mote of awareness in this unkown and unkowable space.

Child. I am sorry for the future that awaits you, and endlessly proud of what you have done and what you are yet to do.

I... what?

There is great darkness in this world, and you will choose to bring it to harmony. You will do much and more, child, and the world will be made better for it. Stand tall, walk free, believe. Hear, feel, think.

And when he woke up he was not useless anymore.

III. The Adventurer's Journey

Despite his newfound vigour, he had still spent most of his life weak, and had to learn how to not be weak. He took to the lance, diving into the project of honing his body with as much enthusiasm as he had for honing his magical skill. He needed to go to Aldenard, of that he was sure, and he would need to be able to hold his own in a fight, to survive the perils he was certain awaited him. For five years he dutifully studied under his peers, his elders, and even children younger than himself. He had never learned, never could, and now everyone was his teacher. He dedicated five days of the week to physical training, and the two remaining days and most nights to his craft and his magic. He couldn't hunt with a weapon as effectively as he could with his book, but neither was he going to be a slouch should something get close enough to think it had the advantage of him.

In those five years, he also chanced upon a yet more advanced arcanism book, which taught him his most complex spell yet: Carbuncle. Despite the revolting name, it served to summon an adorable little creature, a quadruped the size of a dog with glowing blue fur, a long sleek tail that trifurcated halfway along its length, ears half as long as its body, and a blood-red oval gem attached to its forehead.

Carbuncle had many purposes. The most straightforward one was serving as bait, or as a distraction, something that could walk right up in a foe's face and harass them, which could be resummoned if destroyed. But it was built most of all as a channeling tool, a semi-autonomous aetherial construct that could have specific arcanima embedded onto itself and which could then be trusted to cast those spells automatically or on command. It was most useful for battles, where you might want to cast powerful harmful spells with relative alacrity, and for complex workings, which you can store carefully, piecewise, and analyse and double-check before actually casting. Once Otohiko mastered the construct he finally felt like he was ready to go.

He packed his meagre possessions, donned travel leathers, and hitched a ride with the next passing caravan, offering not only his accounting services but also his bodyguard services in exchange for it.

He went southeast rather than west, to the port city of Valnain, because the merchants had told him that Dalmasca had been taken over by the Garlean Empire and travel to Aldenard was heavily restricted. From Valnain, he could go northeast to Hingashi, to the port city-state of Kugane, which was sufficiently rich and powerful to remain independent, and from there he would sail west.

But first, he had to see the aetheryte for himself.

Kugane Aetheryte

It was, as he'd expected, beautiful. The aetheryte plaza was right by the river, a cosy little thing close to the center of the city with a disc of stone surrounding a disc of water surrounding the aetheryte itself. Its design is also marvellous, the central crystal surrounded by intricate floating scaffolds holding the accessory crystals, lazily rotating around it.

Otohiko could feel the aether swirling around it. It was so entirely unlike anything he'd ever seen, and yet... still familiar. It wasn't arcanima that imprinted magic onto it—if nothing else the crystal itself was pure condensed aether rather than some inert substance that had an effect added onto it—but magic was magic, and the structure of the spell embedded onto the crystalline structure was very reminiscent of what he could cast. He wanted to study it, he wanted to understand it, to know how it worked—

But not on that day. He had things to do. On that day what he'd do was attune to the aetheryte, register his aetherial signature onto it and its aetherial signature onto himself so that he could someday cross the aetherial currents and come back here, and then he'd attune to some of the smaller aethernet shards around the city—too small to be reachable directly by teleportation from far away but you can use them to teleport to each other and to the aetheryte.

And then he had a boat to catch, the Eorzean city-state of Limsa Lominsa on the continent of Aldenard.

It was a very long trip during which Otohiko became well-acquainted with the term "sea legs" and the fact that he did not have them. At least at first. He managed to mostly start to reliably keep his food down after the first week, but it was a month before the background nausea completely subsided.

After it did, though, he could properly appreciate the trip. He'd acquired a few more books in Kugane that he was going through at a steady clip, sunbathing on the deck of the ship while practising his magic. He'd been hired by the boat as security, part of insurance against pirates and sea monsters should any appear, and that meant that until and unless that happened he was basically just a passenger. His employer was mildly baffled by the fact that he was often nude, but he pointed out that as a magic user he'd mostly attack his foes from a distance, and furthermore where he's from they felled mighty beasts wearing nothing but the harnesses they attached their spears to and he was used to that.

(Separately, he'd never really gotten at all comfortable with most clothes. His scales no longer actively hurt as they had when he was a child but they were still awfully sensitive and most fabric felt like the tactile equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to him. The distraction was probably more dangerous to him than the lack of protection from armour.)

So, despite the rocky start, it was an altogether pretty enjoyable time, and the ship was only harassed by a sea monster once, which Otohiko and the other security handily took care of.

In Limsa Lominsa, however, he was soon aware that wearing nothing would be a problem. Not because it was forbidden or anything; rather, because people just assumed he was a beggar or dangerous or otherwise untrustworthy, and it was difficult to acquire jobs as an adventurer if people freaked out when they saw him. The leathers he used to travel would have to do, in a pinch, but the very first thing he saved up for was something comfortable to wear. Which took some trial and error to figure out, but eventually he settled on a sturdy pair of leather sandals, a fabric waistwrap only long enough to cover his crotch but not enough to distractingly brush against his skin when he moved or when the wind blew, and a leather wrap around his torso sufficiently tight against his skin that it was mostly unobjectionable, similar in style to what people at his village worn to hunts. And despite this being, objectively speaking, not all that much more clothing than nothing, it was still enough that apparently it signalled "adventurer" rather than "crazy person", which was good enough for him.

And it's interesting that "adventurer" is a well-known and well-respected social category, here. Or, well, "respected". Anyone could claim to be an adventurer, and half of them would give up within a year and half of the remaining had been just frauds in the first place, but Aldenard was...

...different. It was different. Otohiko had thought he'd seen savage beasts in Othard, and he had, but magic in Aldenard was just much more abundant. He was not sure what it was about this continent, but an old man on the boat he came here on had mentioned it to him, that lots of people who came to Aldenard from other continents got aethersick because of the concentration of ambient aether around. And abundant magic meant that the creatures he faced here, even the weakest mangy wild dogs, were a cut above their equivalents back home. Faster, stronger, sturdier, deadlier, capable of casting magicks of their own. And the place being much higher-magic in general, and more dangerous as a consequence, meant that there was a lot more call for people doing even variously menial tasks like delivering packages to and fro. Thus: adventurers.

And it was on one of those simple package delivery trips that he died for the first time.

It wasn't a wild beast, actually. It was pirates. Well, landed pirates who had lost their ship after a storm and who decided to become cutpurses and hired mercenaries. The package Otohiko had been carrying was more valuable than his employer pretended it was, probably because they couldn't afford the kind of muscle that would be necessary to protect valuable cargo, and the bandits caught wind of it, and ambushed him. And as he lay dying there, bleeding out because they didn't even make sure he was completely dead before they left, part of him wondered if powerful adventurers just kind of lucked into it, while part of him was just resigned to the fact that he turned out to be useless after all, crystal lady or no.

Still, though he was not sure there was any way that he could have done better without a lot more information—or paranoia—he couldn't help but overanalyse his mistakes and while away the seconds thinking about what he could've done differently.

But he got a second chance.

He stumbled in place when he found himself standing a couple dozen feet from the place he'd been ambushed, holding the package under one arm, Carbuncle next to him. There was no sign of a fight. There was no sign of his dead body and the blood that must have fed the grass. He was... fine. Alive.

Had it been a dream? Some dangerous hallucination, a nightmare of an adventure he hadn't had? It had felt so realistic. Maybe that was part of being aethersick? He hadn't felt the typical nausea that usually accompanies aethersickness, and he'd been in Aldenard for a few weeks already, but maybe it was some delayed effect of the excess aether getting to him. He was, in fact, still very much alive. Not dead at all. Not ambushed. Package under his arm.

He died again shortly after that when the ambush turned out to be real. He fared better the second time, but he was in fact badly outnumbered; five of them versus just the one of him.

And he woke up fine again, after dying, and at that point he had to start considering alternative explanations.

People didn't come back from the dead; they could be revived from just before dying, if powerful restorative magicks were cast quickly enough, but past that point there was no coming back. That was not a thing. That did not happen. Dead was dead, if people could just redo the moment of their deaths the world would look much different.

So, precognition of some kind? He'd...

...there was a part of him that wanted to test it, die a third time to make sure it replicated. He shouted that part down until it shut up because that was an absolutely, monumentally stupid idea. He got another shot at life, fine, time to actually put his thoughts into practice. All of the mistakes he made, all of the things that weren't mistakes but that were ways he could turn the situation to his advantage, he would use them.

And the third time, he won. He didn't die. He got hurt, absolutely, but they got hurt worse. He knew where each of them was going to come from, and he had a good idea of what they wanted to do, and he could preempt them. It wasn't perfect, by any means, but it was good enough to catch them entirely unawares, and by the time he was done two of them were dead and the other three had fled.

Okay.

He wasn't sure how this whole "adventurer" business worked for other people but apparently he had a little time-travelling guardian angel giving him second chances. With those, he absolutely would be able to get a lot done. He wasn't sure what he needed to get done, but he'd do it.

IV. It's Probably Pirates

Limsa Lominsa turned out to also be where the Eorzean Arcanist Guild was headquartered. The guild doubled as an accounting office, coincidentally enough, and so Otohiko could find easy employ there to supplement his adventurer's income with something more reliable, and as a bonus he got to talk to arcanist scholars and learn from them directly and have access to books with ~more magic~ and even specific training for dedicated arcanists. He learned how to channel elemental magic through Carbuncle, and how to use it as a sort of "amplification device" for his own magic. He was introduced to other similar aetherial constructs; Carbuncle was the most commonly-used by far but there were many alternatives. In the end, though, Otohiko still preferred it over said alternatives. He learned how to heal, which was very novel and the fiddliest type of magic he'd run into yet, and how to shield, which was comparatively simpler in principle but very flexible in practice and made arcanists unusually capable of going into the fray themselves compared to other types of spellcasters.

And it was in Limsa that Otohiko met Y'shtola Rhul.

He didn't really know, at the time, how important that chance meeting would turn out to be. Then again, is it chance that he's the kind of person who would run into her? The first time they met, he had been investigating the disappearances of some farm workers; more specifically, it was a farm that employed reformed pirates, or at least pirates claiming that they wanted to be reformed, and it was only pirates that seemed to be disappearing. And Otohiko was the kind of person who would investigate those, and so was Y'shtola. She'd been assigned to La Noscea—the name of the archipelago Limsa Lominsa is situated in—and if he hadn't met her in this particular adventure he would probably have met her in some other adventure.

Regardless, the interesting thing about this one was that it turned out the pirates were being kidnapped by—other pirates, a group called the Serpent Reavers, who ultimately served a tribe of sahagin (a species of man-sized fish-people who could walk on land). Some of the reformed pirates had actually been part of this group, and defected out of fear or discomfort with the sahagin's increasingly distasteful policies of violence and conquest, so the Reavers were trying to bring them back, using the threat of force. What was interesting, however, was that they didn't tell Otohiko about this. Rather, while talking to one of them, he had a vision of their past, and of their feelings. Y'shtola was present for it, and she gave this power a name:

The Echo.