PART IV: AFTER THE DEFEAT OF THE BLACK MAGE

Chapter 2: Convergence

(A/N: With the end of Aftermath, this is the official start of the Grandis storyline. There’s a very notable shift in how much the story quality has improved in the Grandis update, as this is around when the KMS story group was established. I have some mixed feelings about the lore introduced in the Grandis update. On one hand, the KMS directors have been particularly interested in the story and aesthetics of Grandis, and so you can clearly tell that this is where they’re investing all their effort.

However, there’s one side effect of this that I don’t like. Grandis has been established to be this technologically advanced society since the dawn of the universe itself. It just so happens to be the place where all the Ancient Gods were, where the Transcendents just so happened to be the most active, where there was a whole factory that produced cybernetic Adversaries, and overall just where everything notable in the history of the story took place.

What I don’t like about this is that in contrast, Maple World has retroactively been made into this dingy, backwater world, and its actual significance to the story has been greatly reduced. Part of this is just a natural side-effect of a game whose lore has been going on for almost twenty years now. Obviously, things are gonna be added that don’t mesh well with the established history of stuff from the early game. However, I think that part of it just comes from the influence of the higher-ups at Nexon, who seem to care a lot more about the ideas that they pitched for Grandis than Maple World.

It just feels a bit disrespectful for the writers to sideline Maple World when it’s the OG content that shaped the entirety of the game for many, many years. Every Grandis story gives this vibe that it’s trying to outdo anything that happened on Maple World, and it’s not even done well. The story team has a very inconsistent level of writing quality, they frequently drop or retcon their own plot points, and their revamps constantly misunderstand the characterization and motivations of established characters. I think that the idea of the story team is a good concept, but I really wish that they’d get writers who actually understand the story on a deeper level instead of this superficial level of cohesion that always falls apart under scrutiny.)

Some time after the defeat of the Black Mage, Neinheart summoned the Adversary to the Outpost, where he told them that the Alliance had found Will unconscious in the Origin Sea shortly after the Black Mage’s death. (A/N: This is likely because Orchid won their fight at the end of the Esfera storyline.) As Will had been the only Commander to know about and fully approve of the Black Mage’s goals, the Alliance had secretly relocated him to Maple World in order to interrogate him.

Though he had only recently regained consciousness, Will had appeared to be unexpectedly cooperative, to the point that Neinheart was growing suspicious. He asked the Adversary if they would be willing to visit Will, where Grendel the Really Old was questioning him. After the Adversary agreed, Neinheart escorted them from the Outpost to Ereve, where the Adversary pointed out the risk of keeping Will so close to the Empress.

Neinheart reassured them that Ereve was the most secure place in Maple World, though he added that it troubled him to keep such a great enemy there. However, he was confident that Will would be instrumental in helping them plan future battles. The Adversary asked what other battles there could be, to which Neinheart told them about Melange, who had disappeared shortly after the defeat of the Black Mage.

He then gave them a letter from Edea, which had been sent shortly after Melange had first joined the Arcane River expedition. Edea had written that she had finished investigating Melange, as per Neinheart’s request, and that though she normally considered Neinheart distrusting his allies to be ridiculous, she believed that his suspicions were right in Melange’s case.

She explained that Melange had initially claimed to be the disciple of a great magician, though she had later learned that he had been expelled for practicing forbidden magic. Furthermore, not only was Melange both highly skilled in several branches of magic and extraordinarily powerful, but he also had great knowledge about the Transcendents, far greater than that of the Alliance’s allies in Grandis.

Neinheart told the Adversary that because of Melange’s unusually vast knowledge, he hadn’t been able to afford risking losing Melange’s trust by taking him into custody, and so he had settled for keeping an eye on him. However, Melange had easily managed to escape the guards that Neinheart had sent to escort him to Ereve after the battle of Tenebris, and his whereabouts and plans remained a mystery.

When the Adversary learned that Neinheart planned to go after Melange, they asked if it would be safe to leave Will with fewer guards. Neinheart reassured them that as Will’s powers had been tied to the Black Mage, he wouldn’t pose a risk, especially with a Chief Knight assigned to his cell to keep him under constant surveillance. 

Suddenly, the ground began to quake as the Adversary headed to the prison with Neinheart. There, they found Oz fighting Soot monsters, which she claimed had come from inside the prison. After helping her defeat them, they rushed inside and found Hawkeye fighting several more monsters. The Adversary quickly took care of them, after which Hawkeye reported that Will had done something to Grendel, causing him to vanish. Just then, an Alliance soldier arrived and reported that he had brought Grendel’s apprentices, Elwin and Lily. (A/N: We were first introduced to Elwin and Lily during the events of FriendStory.)

Elwin and Lily explained that when Grendel had first touched the core fragment from Gloom, he had seen the countless futures that led to despair, which had caused him to start sympathizing with the Black Mage about his dream of creating a world without such pain. Because of that, Grendel had gone to see Will, who had recognized that Grendel had touched the core. He had noted that Grendel must have felt what he himself had felt, though he had then corrected himself, explaining that Grendel must only feel regret and despair now that the Black Mage was gone.

Will had added that humankind was now doomed, trapped and relegated to languish from the laws that bound their broken world. However, Grendel had retorted that broken things could be mended, and that it was no excuse for the Black Mage’s plans, as he would have destroyed everything and everyone. He had added that despite everything, humans longed to keep living, which Will had agreed with, though he had replied that to people like himself and Grendel, choosing to live in such a way was shameful, and a fate worse than death.

Grendel had then told Will that he had seen the future that the Black Mage had chosen, in which he had intended for the Adversary to kill Tana. Will had confirmed that it was indeed the future which the Black Mage had intended, to which Grendel had replied that even that future had branched off into several other paths, though Will had claimed that such a thing wasn’t possible. Grendel had then explained that the Black Mage wasn’t the only Transcendent trying to overthrow the natural order, causing a shocked Will to wonder whether it was the work of Gerand Darmoor.

(A/N: Like I mentioned in the Limina section, there was a lot of narrative shifting that happened in-between writers in regard to the Black Mage and his goals. The Genesis Weapon storyline, which was released before Convergence, revealed that the Black Mage had confided in Will that he was aspiring for something more than just the creation of a new world. It’s left fairly ambiguous in regard to what exactly it is that he wants, which adds another layer of confusion to his motives.

Before the Kao revamp, you could interpret his words as him not really wanting to make a new world, as his true goal was just to reform the current world’s society. You could also interpret his words, both before and after the revamp, as referring to him wanting to destroy the Transcendents in order to remove the Overseers’ influence. Additionally, you could also make the argument that what he truly wants hasn’t been revealed yet.

It’s honestly pretty hard to know for certain what the original interpretation of his words were supposed to be, since his motivations have slowly been retconned over the last several years. The Convergence storyline was released a year after Limina and the Genesis Weapon storylines, and you can tell from the writing that whoever wrote it wasn’t the same person.

Here, Will believes that humanity is doomed to remain under the Overseers’ laws, which doesn’t particularly make sense when the Black Mage has already succeeded in removing the Transcendents of Maple World. However, it does make a bit more sense going by the post-revamp lore, which is that the Black Mage had intended to recreate the world out of his belief that their current one is broken beyond repair, but even then, Will should’ve realized by now that the Black Mage only failed because he had decided not to go through with his plan at the last second, which suggests that the writers had intended for the Black Mage to have a different plan in mind at the time of Convergence being written.

Honestly, I’m almost certain that this is where the issue lies because the way that they talk about the Black Mage’s chosen future is that he had intended for the Adversary to not only attempt to kill Tana, but to actually succeed in doing so. In fact, they even go as far as to say that the Adversary choosing not to kill Tana is what changed destiny because the Black Mage’s intention was for her to die.

Obviously, this makes no sense when you consider that he needed Tana alive so that he could enact the Genesis Ritual, which is why I’m convinced that there was a serious level of miscommunication in regard to what was actually meant to happen. On top of everything else, they introduced another complication by revealing that Darmoor had personally intervened after the Adversary killed Tana in order to create several different futures that went against the Black Mage’s plan to create a singular outcome in his favor.

At this point, I’m not even sure where exactly the story was originally supposed to go. With the Kao revamp, we know now that the Black Mage had always intended for Tana to live so that he could take her powers, which means that he couldn’t possibly have intended for the Adversary to kill her. We also know that whoever wrote Convergence had intended for Darmoor to interfere with the Black Mage’s plans in order to ensure that his chosen future didn’t happen, but we also see that in the Kao revamp, Darmoor didn’t do anything to stop the Genesis Ritual, which was what the Black Mage’s chosen future was in the revamp.

And while this isn’t strictly to do with the issues due to rewrites, there’s another important question that pops up in regard to Darmoor and how he factors into the Black Mage’s plan. If we’re going by the original idea that the Black Mage never wanted to create a new world, his plan makes perfect sense because he destroyed the Transcendents of Maple World and left it to the Alliance to finish what he started with the Transcendents of the other worlds.

In the revamped story, however, there’s a pretty major plot hole that opens up with his plan, which is whether it’s just Maple World that got erased, or if Grandis and the third world were erased too. In Shade’s exclusive dialogue in Vanishing Journey, Shade mentions that Moonbeam and her world don’t exist anymore, which would mean that Grandis got erased in the Genesis Ritual, suggesting that the Arcane River being a convergence of the three worlds constitutes them as being part of the same universe.

If Grandis is part of the same universe as Maple World, then that would mean that Darmoor and the other Transcendents would’ve been erased in the Genesis Ritual, but if that’s all it took to destroy the Transcendents, then what was the reason why the Black Mage had to go through so many hoops to split Zero and scatter Alicia if they would’ve just disappeared anyways? And if Darmoor didn’t disappear with Grandis, then how can the Black Mage call his world free of the Overseers when the Transcendents of Grandis and the third world still share the same universe?

The problem also doesn’t go away even if you assume that Shade is just misinformed about Grandis not existing anymore. Even if the new world exists in its own dimension, there’s every chance that a tear in spacetime can be created to expose that world to another world that Transcendents can cross over from. The Black Mage’s post-revamp plan was already pretty incoherent, but this is yet another testament to just how poorly the story team has handled it.

Getting back to the main point, though, I would personally treat a lot of these details in the Convergence storyline with a grain of salt, as it’s clear that the original story direction has been significantly changed or been reworked from Limina to Convergence to the establishment of the story group in the Destiny update. The current lore is that the Black Mage wanted to remake the world and simultaneously destroy the Transcendents, he hit the redo button when Kao failed to do the latter, and he changed his mind in the current timeline and left it to us to carry on his ideals. Any future developments on the Black Mage and Darmoor are going to revolve around those details, which means that any pre-revamp lore that conflicts with future story updates can be treated as a result of a change in writers and can be safely ignored.)

Grendel had then asked Will what the Transcendents were, and for what purpose they had been created. Will had laughed and replied that someone had once told him that truth was a sweet poison, and that it was sometimes better to avoid it. He had added that in that sense, there were no bigger fools than himself and Grendel, as neither of them could give up their insatiable hunger for the truth. Will had then taken out another core and given it to Grendel, who, upon touching it, had vanished in a flash, after which the Soot monsters had begun appearing.

Lily then told them that Grendel had been acting strange ever since he had touched the first core fragment, though it had been nothing like what had happened with the second core. Hawkeye asked Will what he had done with Grendel, to which Will replied that he had merely given Grendel a nudge in the right direction on the path laid out by the Black Mage.

He explained that if Gloom’s core was a simple array of futures, then the one that he had given Grendel was a core filled with thoughts. He explained that the core that he possessed contained the Black Mage’s innermost thoughts, plans, and his deepest despair. Neinheart then asked Elwin to create a dimensional gate to follow Grendel and told the Adversary to accompany Elwin and Lily. Elwin then used Grendel’s magical trace to create a portal to his location.

(A/N: Zero gets some exclusive dialogue here. Right before they enter the portal, Will asks them whether they know that the teeth of spiders contain a poison that can even stop time. He explains that though he normally enjoys the anticipation, he’s particularly excited this time.)

After entering the portal, the three found themselves in Lachelein. There, they met Protective Mask, who led them up the clocktower. He then told them that while he had been searching for Lucid, he had seen Grendel wandering inside. Upon tracing his path, they found themselves inside Lucid’s room, where they discovered Lucid in deep slumber.

Protective Mask then allowed them to peer inside Lucid’s dream, where they found Grendel speaking with her. To their surprise, they found Lucid addressing him as the Black Mage and telling him that the Alliance had begun investigating the Gate to the Future, after which she asked whether she should stop them.

Grendel then echoed the Black Mage’s words from the memory, telling Lucid to let it be, as it was the only way that the Alliance would learn fear. By witnessing the Second Future, they would learn about the lie of free will and begin to hate the chains of fate. Grendel then spoke in his own voice and realized that the Black Mage had intended to lose from the very beginning.

The Adversary also was surprised to learn that the Gate to the Future had been part of the Black Mage’s plan. Elwin then told Grendel to snap out of it, but Grendel merely exclaimed that he had to know more before teleporting away. Protective Mask then decided that he would rescue Lucid from her nightmare, realizing that her subconsciousness had created him for such an occasion.

Lily was surprised that Lucid had thought of such a possibility and realized that Lucid had hoped all along that someone would help her when she couldn’t help herself. Protective Mask then entered Lucid’s dreams, where she was drowning in a dark ocean, and took off his mask, revealing Mercedes’ face underneath. Protective Mask pulled Lucid out of her dark abyss and told the others that she would remain unconscious for a while longer, after which he would hand her over to the Alliance soldiers in the town square. With no more time to waste, Elwin created a new portal to follow Grendel.

(A/N: Mercedes gets some exclusive dialogue during this part. When Protective Mask rescues Lucid, Mercedes expresses her shock that Protective Mask is a projection of herself. Right before they enter the portal, Lucid calls out to Mercedes in her sleep, overjoyed that she came to save her from her nightmare. Lucid is still asleep at this point, and so she’s actually addressing Protective Mask, believing him to be Mercedes. The actual Mercedes then promises to return soon in order to bring her back home to Elluel.)

With no more time to waste, Elwin created a new portal to follow Grendel, which led them to Trueffet in the Morass. They continued onward, fighting past the thralled monsters, and found Grendel speaking with the White Mage. The Adversary was surprised to see the White Mage, as Tana’s memories of Trueffet were set after the White Mage had already fallen. Lily pointed out that Transcendents weren’t bound by time and space like they were, meaning that the Black Mage’s return to his original form before he died could have influenced moments in the past.

They then heard Grendel speaking as the Black Mage, who told himself that he could leave the task of removing Arkarium to his echo in the Morass. He noted that the process of achieving his goal was long and complex, as he was still on the path that the laws of the world had intended, though he also realized that the complexity and uncertainty of his situation may have given him a clue to escape that fate. With those words, Grendel disappeared once again.

Elwin attempted to open a portal to follow him, but the White Mage’s presence terrified him to the point that he couldn’t do so. Suddenly, the White Mage teleported before them, immediately scaring the trio. The White Mage reassured them that he wasn’t the Black Mage, and that they had nothing to fear from him. Lily asked what he had told Grendel, to which the White Mage explained that he hadn’t told Grendel anything, but rather, Grendel had realized the truth about the purpose of the Transcendents on his own.

The Adversary asked him to tell them what Grendel had learned, and so the White Mage told them that long ago, before the Transcendents had existed, the universe had been ruled by many unpredictable and uncontrollable gods who had their own independent aims and goals. In some cases, they had actively interfered in the world, resulting in an inevitable age of chaos.

In resistance, the world had desired order and control. Its will had forged chains of law that began suppressing the Ancient Gods, whose creations had gradually become insignificant as a result. Over long years, the chaos had gradually subsided, but the will of the world had not yet been satisfied, as there was a possibility that the Ancient Gods, who had been chained into an unnatural slumber, could still awaken someday, and the countless factors of causality that stemmed from this created countless futures, which spelled an uncertainty that would never end.

The White Mage explained that up until that moment, the future remained open, as it wasn’t something that could be predicted or manipulated. Because of this, the Transcendents had been created, whose mere existence suppressed the Ancient Gods from awakening ever again. Simultaneously, they had exerted tremendous influence on the universe, and as a result, uncertainty was eradicated, and the future became set in stone.

(A/N: Zero gets some exclusive dialogue here, in which they express their shock that they were used to manipulate fate, regardless of their own will.)

Lily was shocked to know that even the Transcendents were slaves to order and asked if Grendel had any more questions. The White Mage told them that Grendel had asked what would become of Maple World with the absence of the Transcendents, and that he had set out to confirm his suspicions. With their questions answered, Elwin created a new portal to follow Grendel.

(A/N: Several characters get some exclusive dialogue right before entering the portal.

Luminous asks the White Mage if the darkness that he had received from the Black Mage will disappear. The White Mage tells Luminous that the darkness is now a part of him and says that he’ll just have to learn to love that darkness, just as ‘she’ does, with ‘she’ referring to Lania.

Shade asks the White Mage if he knows how to remove the curse on him. The White Mage replies that he doesn’t know how, but he tells Shade not to worry, as he’ll shortly see that the curse will soon mean nothing. This line doesn’t really make much sense anymore now that Shade’s curse is gone.

For the Demon, the White Mage stops him and explains that there’s something that he needs to know before leaving. The Demon asks if it’s about Damien and Arkarium, which the White Mage confirms. The Demon explains that at first, he didn’t know who to hate between Arkarium, who had been the perpetrator, and the Black Mage, who had given the orders. However, he tells the White Mage that he no longer cares anymore, as neither Arkarium, nor the Black Mage and Damien exist anymore.

He explains that he doesn’t want to keep living in anger and regret, to which the White Mage is pleased to note that the Demon has made his peace with it. He then asks the Demon to keep moving forward, explaining that it’s the duty of those who survive.)

The White Mage smiled softly as they left before scattering into Erda. The Adversary then began considering what the Black Mage’s goals were, to which Lily offered to explain the principles of magic and the universe’s structure in order to help them understand. She gave them a situation in which two identical marbles were put in a box, which was then shaken. Based on the dimensions of the box, the shape and weight of the marbles, and the force and direction of the shake, it was possible to predict the path that the marbles would follow.

However, she then changed the situation to add more marbles with different sizes and weights, which would make it much harder to predict the trajectory of the original two marbles. In that regard, Lily equated the Transcendents as having removed the countless variables introduced by the Ancient Gods from the equation in order to make the future predictable, and explained that the mere existence of the Transcendents was what maintained order.

Soon after, the trio emerged into the Radiant Temple in Esfera, where the Adversary watched their past self rush into Mirror World in order to defeat Will. Lily realized that they were in the Morass, which had taken the form of the Black Mage’s memories of watching the Adversary in Esfera. They entered the mirror and fought through the monsters before reaching the moment when the Adversary had refused to take Tana’s life.

They then saw Grendel voice aloud the Black Mage’s thoughts that the Adversary had rejected their fate. He noted that the power of the Seal Stone - which he described as the power of chaos, the power to refuse control, and the power of the gods - was what had allowed them to do so. However, he added that the decision to use that power had been the Adversary’s alone.

(A/N: Here, Elwin expresses his surprise that the Adversary chose to spare Tana and asks them what they were thinking. You get the choice to say that you were having trouble thinking clearly at the moment, you thought that fighting would be inevitable anyways, or that you just couldn’t do that to Tana, although it doesn’t really make a difference which choice you pick because it just cuts back to Grendel’s dialogue no matter what.)

The Black Mage noted that it was, at once, a victory and a defeat, as it had demonstrated both the power of the gods and the will of the people. He noted that if the Adversary could defeat him - the last Transcendent of Maple World - then the universe would return to its original state. Suddenly, Grendel himself had an epiphany based on what he had heard from the Black Mage’s thoughts and disappeared.

(A/N: The line about the Seal Stone holding the power of chaos and the ability to refuse control is part of the original KMS dialogue that was omitted in the GMS localization, which only said, “The Seal Stone contained incredible power. Enough power to change destiny itself.”

Please note: the following text contains major spoilers for the Shangri-La storyline. If you don’t want spoilers, skip to the next paragraph.

~~~

This concept later becomes a significant plot point in the Shangri-La storyline, as it reveals that the Overseers had ordained that the fate of every Adversary is to die after fulfilling their purpose, which was meant to prevent them from plunging the world into chaos with their immense power to influence the world. When the elders meet us in Shangri-La and see that we’ve broken free from our destiny to die, they view our existence as a profane defiance to the will of the Overseers and believe that we’re inevitably going to bring an end to the natural order if left unchecked.

~~~

However, a lot of the other stuff that the Black Mage says here is likely yet another instance of miscommunication caused by change in the writers. The dialogue makes it seem as though the Seal Stone had done something in Esfera that allowed us to change destiny by saving Tana’s life, which ties back into the earlier idea introduced in this storyline that the Black Mage had intended for us to kill Tana as part of his ultimate goal.

The fact that he calls it both a victory and a defeat makes it even more confusing because it’s unclear what exactly he would’ve considered a pure victory without defeat. The writers for this storyline seem to be under the impression that his ultimate goal involved Tana being killed by the Adversary because he doesn’t have the power to kill another Transcendent himself, and us sparing her life is both a victory and a defeat because while he wasn’t able to get rid of her, he was still able to ascertain that the Seal Stone has the power to change destiny.

I’m gonna be honest - I really can’t make any sense of what it was that the Convergence writers were trying to go for. The entirety of this storyline suggests that the Black Mage had hoped for the Ancient Gods to return and restore chaos back into the universe with the way that he talks about how the uncertainty and complexity of his own situation had given him a clue about how to escape the Overseers’ preordained fate.

Another thing that also doesn’t make sense to me is how Darmoor factors into everything. From what we know, Darmoor was planning to stop the Black Mage from realizing his goal after Tana died, but he stepped back after the Adversary changed destiny in Esfera and prevented that future from happening.

Like I said earlier, I’m like 99% certain that these details have been retconned because none of it makes sense with the lore introduced in Kao’s timeline. More than anything else, the concept of the Seal Stone having the power to change fate is something that’s also been retconned, and it’s something that I’ve never really believed in to begin with.

The idea of the Adversary being the “Adversary of Destiny” is probably what made the Convergence writers think that the Seal Stone can exert some abstract power that somehow lets us exist outside the Black Mage’s influence, except that doesn’t make any sense at all. Destiny implies the existence of there being one, fixed future that’s bound to happen no matter what, which is inconsistent with everything that we’ve seen.

Grendel explains in Limina that there are infinite futures constantly being written, erased, and rewritten based on the actions of individuals, which we can see with Kao being sent back in time and changing events, demonstrating that there isn’t one singular future, no matter what else the writers might say with their attempted retcons.

Lily’s explanation about the marbles is a good analogy about how destiny works. Each individual person is a tiny marble, which is proportional to the amount of power and influence that they have on the universe. Beings like Ancient Gods, Transcendents, and Adversaries are giant marbles because they have more power to influence the universe - in other words, it’s a correspondence to the amount of chaos that they can create.

By sealing away the gods and killing the Adversaries, the Overseers minimized the total amount of chaos in the universe by ensuring that only three big marbles can exist in each world, and since the Transcendents aren’t meant to have free will of their own, it means that the Overseers are the only people who can significantly influence the world through controlling the Transcendents. Because the influence of individual people is much smaller, it means that the broad strokes of the timeline are easily predictable because there’s very little room for any significant divergences to happen outside what’s most statistically probable.

When Cygnus calls us the Adversary of Destiny, this isn’t supposed to be the actual title of all Adversaries. In the Odium storyline, for example, one of the researchers describes their creations as the “Adversaries of the Gods”, which is likely what our actual title is supposed to be. The fact that Adversaries are meant to be predestined for death in itself shows that our existence as someone who can defy destiny is outside the scope of what we’re supposed to be able to do.

Cygnus telling us that we’re the one piece on the board that can’t be controlled is meant to help keep up our morale when we spiraling about the Black Mage having planned out our fate. The Adversary of Destiny is likely a title that she came up with on her own, not an actual characteristic of all Adversaries. Because of this, it means that the Seal Stone doesn’t have some sort of magical power that lets you defy destiny whenever you activate it. In fact, there’s really no such thing as a power that can let you defy destiny in the first place. Destiny is just a series of different causalities intersecting in a complex network.

Before the revamp, us changing destiny was because we were the only person with the power to kill the Black Mage, who wouldn’t have died if we hadn’t faced him. In the Convergence storyline, the writers erroneously believed that the Seal Stone had done something to change destiny when we spared Tana, except it was our own free will that resulted in us saving her. If the Seal Stone was responsible for doing that, that would imply that it mind-controlled us into making the choice that led to our victory, which would completely go against the game’s message about the importance of free will.

Personally, I prefer the way that we defied destiny in the Kao revamp by changing the Black Mage’s mind. Up until that moment, the Genesis Ritual was inevitable no matter what, as the Black Mage would either die and create a world free of Transcendents, or he would survive and lose his last chance at attaining his goals with the Adversary’s second defeat.

However, our unexpected choice to save Tana changed that predestined outcome by branching off into a new future in which the Black Mage decided not to create a new world. Even then, though, the Seal Stone had nothing to do with this outcome. The reason that we won was because our free will and our choice to be selfless was powerful enough to influence a Transcendent into changing his mind, which proved that mortals have a power that, in spite of everything else, exceeds even that of a god.)

As they prepared to follow him, Elwin realized that Will had dropped his book nearby and suggested grabbing it before Melange did. (A/N: I mean, this is the Morass, so it still wouldn’t change the past.) As Melange appeared, Elwin told him to stop, calling him a kid while doing so. This irritated Melange, who then unexpectedly grew self-aware and realized that he was a memory in the Morass, after which he cast a spell to make the three ignore him and find Grendel.

He then created a dimensional portal and the three found their legs moving on their own towards it. As Elwin passed him, Melange ordered him to stop and hit him in the head with his staff as punishment for calling him a kid before sending him on his way. Lily was surprised that Melange knew that he was in the Morass and was shaken that he had used magic that she had never seen before.

They then emerged in the waterfalls of Limina and fought past the monsters until the Erda Surge poured down, changing their setting to the inactivated Genesis Crux. Suddenly, the Crux began shaking and the waters turned crimson. They were then suddenly transported to the White Spear overlooking the giant before teleporting to the ship that the Adversary had used to reach the Temple of Darkness.

Just as the ship exploded, the scene changed to the Throne of Darkness, where the Aeonian Rise and Tanadian Ruin towered over them. As the twin knights slashed their blades, the scene changed again, sending them to the black and white void where the godlike Black Mage appeared before them, saying, “The answer is here. It is time to act.” (A/N: The Black Mage here is actually Grendel speaking aloud.)

Just as he launched an attack, the setting changed once again and they found themselves standing on a strange cliff with runic rock formations. At the center of the area was an indentation in the ground, where a round gem was embedded. There, they found Grendel, who told them that they were, quite literally, at the end of the world.

Grendel explained that his journey had helped him reach the answers that he had been searching for. He revealed that the Transcendents had changed the nature of Maple World by their very existence, and with their absence, Maple World could return to its natural state. When the Adversary expressed their confusion, Grendel asked Lily what had happened when Rhinne and Alicia had disappeared.

Lily replied that Maple World and Grandis had started converging as a result of the Transcendents’ disappearance. They all then realized that if the Transcendents’ existence had influenced the world, and that their absence had resulted in the two worlds’ convergence, it meant that Maple World and Grandis had originally been the same world.

(A/N: This is what the White Mage meant originally when he told Shade that the curse won’t matter. Since the two worlds will become one, there’s no dimensional travel between Maple World and Grandis, which means that no one will forget him if he goes back and forth between them. After his class revamp, however, Shade’s curse has already been lifted by the Fox God, meaning that this is all completely irrelevant.

This storyline also makes an interesting retcon with how the world merge works. In Zero’s storyline, it’s explained that a world without Transcendents will seek to merge with another world in order to maintain balance. However, from what we learn here, Maple World and Grandis were originally the same world, and they’re simply returning back to how they were always meant to be.

The lore presented here adds to the idea that the Overseers and their enforcement of order is an artificial construct, as they’ve essentially gaslit everyone into believing that keeping the universe separate is supposed to be the natural order, which the Black Mage is attempting to undermine with his plans. In reality, however, the Overseers are the ones who’ve been suppressing the true natural order. The world merge isn’t happening because Maple World is trying to maintain its balance, it’s because the Transcendents are no longer there to constrict it from returning to its natural state.)

Satisfied with their understanding, Grendel told them that the place that they were standing at marked the veil between the two worlds, which had grown paper thin without the Transcendents. To their shock, Grendel raised his staff and smashed the jewel in the center, causing massive spell circles to appear in the air. Their dissipation pushed away all the clouds and fog, resulting in a blinding flash of light.

As the light from the dimensional convergence faded away, the Adversary, Lily, and Elwin were shocked to see that the sky was now filled with the thirteen moons of Grandis. They also saw a large city that hadn’t been there before, which stood at the other end of a sea that hadn’t existed either. Suddenly, however, the ground began shaking as a purple wave of light appeared that melted through the ground, just as the Adversary began to hear a mysterious voice in their head.

(A/N: This is where the 6th job advancement storyline is meant to take place, although you technically don’t need to complete it in order to story the Cernium storyline.)