Astraea Fulgris

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Astraea was actually born Astra, just one of many siblings amongst his large family in Kugane. But as he aged being male never felt right, and in time his family could see how miserable it was making him. It was finally his father who sat him down and explained that they knew, and if Astra wanted to be a woman they would support...her.

So Astra became Astraea, and more than just the name change happened as well, her body was changed to match. There were a few hiccups and stumbles, an adjustment period for all involved, but the family stuck together and rallied around Astraea if anyone tried to be mean about it.

Then in her early 20's Astraea set sail for Ishgard. She had spent time learning her family's traditions and learning to use her aether to heal others along with more mundane techniques utilizing potions and poultices and she wanted to put it to use in the frozen cold of Coerthas. Mostly Astraea wanted to travel, hoping to earn some coin by working as a chirurgeon in Ishgard before hopping cities and just spending some time seeing more than Othard and Kugane had to offer her.

But being a woman in Ishgard wasn't safe, so Astraea went back to being Astra. No physical changes, though, just the name and pronouns and as far as the city of Ishgard was concerned they were getting a highly respected male chirurgeon from a respected family in Kugane.

Astraea carried on like that for a while, though it was while she was in the city that she had a vision of a meteor shower. Afterwards her Echo began to manifest, allowing her to touch someone skin-to-skin and feel everything they were physically. Astraea was already one of the best, but this seemed to elevate her beyond and allowed her to save patients that otherwise would have likely died had she not been able to sense internal injuries, poisons, shock, and other aspects that patients just couldn't verbally tell them about.

And it was this success that drew the eyes of the Temple Knights. Ishgard was still corrupt in so many ways, and as an outsider Astraea knew she was subject to more scrutiny than native born Ishgardians so she tried to be careful but...not careful enough. The Knights found out that she had been born male, changed to female, and was passing herself off as her male self while in Ishgard and they considered the change of her physical body in such a way to be heresy.

Rather than turn her in or kill her, however, the Knights decided to have some fun. They used the information as blackmail and spent months abusing Astraea, assaulting her over and over while she slowly broke - after all, they felt good when they were assaulting her and in turn she had no choice but to feel good as well due to her Echo power forcing their sensations to override her own.

Astraea was ashamed. She knew telling the higher ups in Ishgard would do no good, and she didn't feel as if she could just up and return to her family. They would ask too many questions about why she left, and she couldn't face telling them what was happening to her. She should have fought back, she should have been able to defend herself. Instead she was left broken, isolated, and contemplating ending her own life.

Then came Vantelme. A good man who saw what was happening and went straight to Aymeric about it - Aymeric who was trying to punish Temple Knights who stepped out of line, who never tolerated Knights abusing their powers. Astraea was brought before him and asked if the Knights were troubling her, and she was introduced to Vantelme as the one who alerted Aymeric and saved her. The Knights came no more and Astraea fell in love with her rescuer.

Happiness was not to be, however. As the Scions came to Ishgard and there was talk of ending the Dragonsong War once and for all Vantelme did the unthinkable; he left to join the dragons. To him, Ishgard was beyond saving. How else had the Temple Knights gotten away with doing what they did for months on end? They weren't even the first he had turned in for such crimes, and they surely wouldn't be the last no matter how much 'reform' Ishgard went through. The system was too broken and nothing short of burning it all to the ground would fix it.

He wanted Astraea to join him but she couldn't. She understood his position, truly, but she could not betray the people she had spent so much of the past few years helping. Instead she joined the Scions and helped end the Dragonsong War, taking some time afterwards to have Felix Haillenarte and make sure he was set up before returning to the Scions to help them in their future endeavors. She tried not to weep for the dead Vantelme, remember his body laying on the floor of the Aery after his dragon form was slain, tried not to scream and cry and blame everyone else for the love she lost.

During Shadowbringers Lalaan came on board, and while neither wanted to admit feelings for a time they eventually couldn't deny what was happening and allowed themselves to love. They adopted Fyrihanth Fulgris and Nikola Fulgris from the fields of Bozja, orphaned children who had come to think of one another as siblings while trying to survive the battlefield their home had become. And eventually they even had Luna Fulgris biologically, as Lalaan was also born male and chose to present as female but had not been physically altered to match.

Eventually Felix wanted to know his mother, and though hesitant at first with Lalaan's coaxing and understanding Astraea tried to know her son. She introduced him to his siblings, and when that went well she was just relieved he understood her position as well and was willing to forgive her. It's still hard because her exact fears have come true, some days she sees Felix as the spitting image of Vantelme and other days she sees the Temple Knights, but Astraea does her best to cope and be strong for Lalaan and her children.

Because several timelines exist for these characters things can get a bit confusing, so I wanted a space to give a small explainer of this.

Please be aware there may be spoilers for any point of the game's story, so read at your own risk.

The Primary Timeline is one in which Astraea is dead. She ran away with Ventelme to join the dragons and died in the resulting assault on Ishgard.

The Secondary Timeline is the one that you can safely assume applies to most of the information on this page about Astraea. It's also the timeline listed in her history section.

The Tertiary Timeline sees Astraea and her wife Lalaan with many children, all support for a WoL but none the WoL themselves.

Nymeia

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