When you try to begin your memoir, just three years into the Seventh Astral Era, you spend a few days returning to a blank first page before you can work up the nerve to put your quill to the paper. The permanence of a memoir scares you, so you desperately try to get everything just right. The problem is, the only script that looks good to you is practically no script at all.

Erden, your husband, seems to get even more excited about this than you are, and begins to help you collect old notes, letters, and lends you his diary to speed up the process. He asks specific questions about what you will or won’t include, especially revolving around when the two of you first met.

He’s comfortable with complete honesty, and you are too-- so that is what you decide to commit to. He puts together a conspiracy theory-esque board, which you translate into a numbered list of details to include. You manage to squeeze out a few pages before you begin to doubt if this is really how you want to start it, and move it to a later segment in the memoir.

While he’s helping you get prepared, you receive a letter from your friend K’yoko saying that she has safely arrived in Kugane and managed to secure a place to stay with an old friend she had met during her time in Ul’dah (“What luck!” she writes with a smiley face.) You write back about how happy you are for her and about your plans to write this very memoir, though you know that these letters take around a month to travel, so you quietly wonder if she’s still safe.

You decide to take a break from attempting writing and spend time in Gridania with your half-brother, S’olahr Minoris. He prepares an apple pie with produce straight from his orchard, and you help knead the dough to speed things up. The sugary sweet smell that comes from the pie as it cooks envelopes you and takes you back to your childhood when the two of you were learning about cooking in the Zu tribe.

While it bakes you discuss developments in Ala Mhigo and how Phekda (his wife, a lovely woman with a fierce demeanor,) has returned to the war front to aid with the fight. He laments that the house feels empty without her, and that he feels a bit overworked with his responsibilities as a white mage.

You offer to help take care of S’atria, their daughter, but to be honest your hands are full raising a child of your own. He, knowing this, thanks you for the offer but says he can handle it, it's just tough. You wonder aloud if it’s good for a baby to be away from her mother so often. He clears his throat and asks if you’d like anything to drink.

Being as wrapped up in fiction throughout your childhood as you were, there began to be certain things about reality that didn’t quite line up to the stories you enjoyed. In Seselu Selu’s The Light Within Us, main character I’nal Kiba is a fictional Warrior of Light from the Sixth Astral Era who is plunged straight into war after his tribe is forced off their land by marching imperials.

Near the end of the novel, I’nal sacrifices himself at the Battle of Carteneau in order to ensure that his wife and son are able to escape by holding off a small squadron of soldiers who were preventing civilian escape from Mor Dona. Of course, everyone born in the Sixth Astral Era knows approximately how the story progresses from here.

The calamity uproots everything, and even though his wife and son made it out, they are still homeless, unemployed, and in a land ravaged by The Dreadwyrm’s wrath. Sanayo, I’nal’s wife, is never established as very skilled in the novel other than her aptitude for raising children and basic conjury.

But all of this is just speculative, as the novel ends right after Sanayo escapes. A bittersweet ending where the husband gives everything so that they might live on. The author never planned to write a sequel, as she felt it stood well enough on its own that one was not required, and painted a vividly real picture of what war really looks like for Eorzeans everywhere.

You, of course, disagree, and have sent more than one strongly worded letter to Ms. Selu about the matter. Regardless of whether or not the story should end happily, you believe it does not at all capture the depth and complexity of what war does to a family. War does not begin and end on the battlefield, it goes on to day-to-day life for all but the most privileged to endure, even if no one dies. This, you understand, and so does S’olahr.

The pie is just as good as you remember it being the first time he made it for you when you visited him in Gridania five years after the calamity, and it has an added sweetness that wasn’t there before. When you ask him about it, he mentions that he’s trying a new recipe he received from one of the younger members of the conjurer’s guild, after she made the pie for everyone during the starlight celebration.

By the time you leave his company, your mind begins to drift away from where to start, and more-so what the purpose behind the book will be. When you were younger, there were many times when you didn’t know how to deal with problems at your doorstep, and thought you would often seek answers from books and your peers, answers you often could not find.

As much as you wish you could send this book to your past self, it simply isn’t possible. Maybe, though, if you can get your advice and information down in a book for all to read, other adventurers who find themselves in positions you once were in can wade through the darkness and up to the light.

This memoir is dedicated to anyone who needs it.