Killing Nidhogg

It was a night of revelations! And dragons! And cutscenes!
So, so many cutscenes…
We Scions of the Seventh Dawn had long known that primals are actually created by the thoughts and power of those that summon them. King Moogle Mog XIV, we’ve known for a long time, was just a fanciful story Moogles told themselves before he was given form by those stories (and killed repeatedly by me, a fact that hasn’t seemed to harm Nina/Moogle relationships). The entire Summoner job is based around summoning smaller versions of primals under the summoner’s command.
Hraesvelgr, the luck dragon, admitted to not knowing who the heck Iceheart was, but she sure wasn’t the reincarnation of his lost love, Shiva. He went on to relate the story of how his sister Ratatoskr was ambushed by a group of Elezen ages ago. They took from her her eyes, which they then ate, granting all the people who would become the Ishgard race some measure of power. The Ishgardians, then, are part dragon — and can awaken their dragon heritage by drinking some dragon blood, turning themselves into dragons. We saw this happening in Stone Vigil, hard mode, where there was no explanation given at the time.
Everyone was appropriately aghast that when we killed dragons, we were likely killing transformed Ishgardians. Though why that should be more terrible than just killing straight-up dragons, whom we now know to be an intelligent race, I don’t know.
Staggered by these revelations, we decided to check up on the Sultana Nanamo.

We’d also known for a long time that the Sultana had not been killed that night when the Crystal Braves and the Immortal Flames had joined forces to betray the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and their beloved Sultana and deposed her with a sip of poison. The Sultana had wanted to dissolve the ruling Syndicate, abdicate, and form a parliamentary government comprised both of the wealthy, the commoners, and the Ala Mhigan refugees they had taken in. The Syndicate had a problem with this.
The evil Lalafell (but, I repeat myself) Teledji Adeledji had masterminded this, but he himself was betrayed by the evil Lalafell (redundant!) Lolorito. Lolorito had no ill feelings toward the Sultana, but wanted Teledji and the Sultana’s right hand man, Raubahn, out of the way. He had the sultana’s handmaiden swap the poison out for a sleeping potion. Raubahn, thinking his empress dead, flew into a rage and killed Teledji, but was not in his turn killed, though he was forcibly disarmed by his ex-friend, Ilberd. Literally disarmed. What I’m trying to say is, he got his arm cut off.
Leaving Raubahn alive was not according to Lolorito’s plan. After we tracked down the Sultana’s handmaiden and gotten the true story from her, Lolorito showed and promised the antidote to the sleeping potion, and the Sultana’s current location, if Raubahn would not only not seek vengeance, but say nothing of all these plots, for the good of Ul’dah. Raubahn agreed, and was at long last reunited with his empress, who awoke, unharmed and well rested.
Expect there to be more repercussions down the line as the Sultana still intends to abdicate.

That pause had allowed Cid, Biggs and Wedge to finish development on single-person flying craft called Mana Cutters, the only craft capable of piercing the magical storm around Nidhogg’s lair, the Aery. Nidhogg could not be killed by mortals, unless Estinien the Azure Dragoon could contain the dragon’s power with one of the two eyes that were taken from him in ages past (another cutscene explains how he could lose two eyes yet still have one remaining).
The Aery was an enjoyable enough dungeon, lots of moving parts, massive encounters, yet not too difficult for a decent group. I’ve done it half a dozen times since doing it as part of the quest, and sometimes it’s been torture. DPS checks in dungeons shouldn’t be a surprise by now, and you would expect that people playing high level DPS jobs would know how to do damage. One run, we spent fifteen minutes on the first boss because the DPS weren’t DPSing, as near as I could tell (Bard and Black Mage). Bard had insisted she was no stranger to the instance, even though the game claimed she was, and she didn’t know not to stand in the fire. Anyway. We abandoned that instance because the Nidhogg fight is a DPS check. Even though I like staying in low DPS, high health tank stance in random groups, I have to go to my higher strength, less tanky jewelry and stance and DPS my catty heart out to get past the timer.
Estinien shows up for the Nidhogg fight. It’s going to take him some time to get the eye ready to seal Nidhogg’s power, so we have to DPS the dragon down, then finally fight off the waves of attackers sent straight for the dragoon. This is the DPS part. If we don’t kill the adds before Nidhogg does his ultimate attack, Estinien won’t be able to use the eye to shield us from it.
But, all went well for us, if not so well for the dragon. Nidhogg was defeated, and Estinien removed his remaining eye and handed it to me. I then returned it to its rightful owner.

Meanwhile, back at Ishgard, Iceheart’s heretics attacked the city, but the Ishgardian defenders, already mustered to repel Nidhogg’s Dravanian army, expect them to be no challenge. The Archbishop believed the heretic attack will allow the Ishgard rank and file to look every more for help from the Holy See, and dismissed the council. Only then did the Ascian Lahabrea, the otherworlder responsible for the Garlemand invasion that formed much of the Main Scenario, reveal himself. The Archbishop had claimed that he had been just drawing out the Ascians for more information, but it becomes clear that, like Saruman before him, he had been co-opted by the enemy.
Since Lahabrea doesn’t seem too well-loved by the other Ascians, we don’t yet know if this is something he is doing on his own, or is a first step toward some larger plot. I imagine it eventually involves a primal.
Iceheart and the rest of the surviving Scions arrived in Ishgard just in time to stop the heretic attack before anyone died, with the news that Nidhogg was dead, and the war over.
There’s worse problems on the horizon. Lolorito had earlier shared that the Garleans had just completed work on a new super-dreadnought to replace the one that died in mutual destruction with the dragon Midgardsomr. All of Eorzea will need to work together or be overrun.