I...am the bearer of the memories of Queen Sphene of Alexandria, and my desire to protect my people transcends all others! For them, I will do anything! No price is too high!

Sphene

Queen Sphene [ˈsfiːn], posthumously known as Endless Sphene, and occasionally referred to as Queen Eternal, is a character from Final Fantasy XIV, introduced in the expansion Dawntrail & serving as the main antagonist of its final section. She is the Queen of Reason of Alexandria, motivated by a strong will to protect her people that brings her into contact with Tuliyollal.

History[]

Before Dawntrail[]

The original Sphene Alexandros XIV was the crown princess of the kingdom of Alexandria located in the Ninth, a reflection of the Source, split during the Sundering. She was loved by her people even after she became the queen; her people's happiness became her happiness. Alexandria eventually became embroiled in the Storm Surge, a war with various kingdoms, including the neighboring kingdom of Lindblum after the discovery of electrope—a material able to absorb lightning-aspected aether and change that aether's elemental affinity using magical circuits based on arcanima—revolving around securing access to the electrope as its use in society became more common. As the war broke out, Sphene was crowned queen after her parents' death, and later succumbed to levin sickness due to the increasingly strong lightning aspected aether of the Ninth.

When the kingdom of Lindblum activated their lightning aether-based superweapon, triggering what was seemingly a Flood, the group known as Preservation saved Alexandria by covering it in a barrier projected by electrope around the Everkeep. To maintain Alexandrian society, they sought to bring Queen Sphene back. Through the ideas of Preservation founder and child prodigy Calyx, Preservation learned how to separate a person's incorporeal aethers, soul and memory, to store the memories as data that the might be "preserved". This knowledge was used to copy Sphene's memories and implement them into machinery, creating an artificial simulacrum of the original who was reprogrammed with a desire of maintaining her people's happiness no matter the cost. Sphene was "reborn" as an entity called an Endless, and reinstated as the queen of Alexandria. The same procedure was done to many other deceased Alexandrians; they, too, were brought back as Endless. They lived in eternal bliss within Living Memory, a physical realm reserved exclusively for them, with Sphene keeping them happy.

With his practice, Alexandria, protected from the Flood of lighting within their dome, effectively cut themselves off from the lifestream, with Alexandrians using the souls of the deceased as commodities and their memories stored within Living Memory's terminals. Preservation understood that the aetheric cost to maintain Living Memory began to outstrip their ability to meet the demand as the Endless required a constant supply of aether to continue existing so they sought new sources of aether using the Milallas' ancient relic, the interdimensional key. A gateway to the Source was constructed, with the intention of killing its denizens and harvesting their souls. The other side of this gateway wound up in Tural, inside the Skydeep Cenote in the forests of Yak T'el. Two Preservation scientists, Milallas Robor and Alayla, objecting to this plan, defected and transported both the key required to open the gate and their infant daughter to the Source. Bereft of the key, Sphene could no longer open the gate once it closed, and the plan was put on hiatus.

Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail[]

The nation of Tuliyollal held a rite of succession to determine its next Dawnservant, who would succeed Gulool Ja Ja as its leader. Each participant's final challenge was to find the fabled "golden city", which, in reality, was the gateway to Alexandria. One such participant, the First Promise of Tuliyollal Zoraal Ja, Gulool Ja Ja's natural-born son, was disqualified during the rite of succession, but nonetheless conspired with his assistant, a palace seer named Sareel Ja, to steal the key and gain access to the gate. After reaching the gate, the two heard Sphene speaking from the other side, promising them power in exchange for opening it. Desiring to keep this power for himself, Zoraal Ja attacked Sareel Ja before fulfilling Sphene's request and traveling through the gate alone.

Zoraal Ja was eventually crowned King of Resolve of Alexandria, with Sphene becoming Queen of Reason. Using interdimensional fusion they took two parts of Alexandria—the Everkeep metropolitan area, and the region of Heritage Found—and moved them directly onto the Source, on top of the region of Yyasulani in Xak Tural. The dome of lightning-aspected aether was transported with them, and the existing residents of Yyasulani assimilated into Alexandrian society. Thirty years passed until the dome was breached with the Vanguard base. Zoraal Ja launched an invasion to Tuliyollal, killing his father alongside many civilians, all the while Sphene watched over the carnage with apprehension. When one of the newly-appointed Dawnservants, Vow of Resolve Wuk Lamat, decided to strike back, she, alongside her allies the Warrior of Light, Alisaie Leveilleur, G'raha Tia, Erenville, and Krile Baldesion, broke into the dome through Vanguard and discovered that while only days had passed in the Source between when the dome appeared and when it was breached, due to time discrepancy between the Source and its reflections, this was equivalent to thirty years within Alexandria. After the barrier was broken, the flow of time seemingly stabilized between the two regions.

While traversing through the now-lightning-filled atmosphere of Heritage Found, the aforementioned party met Sphene, who took them to the outskirts to learn about her people, their use of electrope, and the role of soul regulators in their day-to-day lives. While not revealing her true intentions, she was civil and courteous to the group despite their wariness of her. Sphene requested their assistance in overthrowing Zoraal Ja; she had come to see him as a threat due to his desire for personal power over the happiness of the Alexandrian people. She granted them passage to Solution Nine, the ninth level of Everkeep that acted as a residential zone. In Solution Nine, Sphene served as a guide to the Warrior and Wuk Lamat, and they got to know her better as she told them about her world, the Storm Surge in particular, which the Warrior compared to an Umbral Calamity.

The Warrior, Wuk Lamat, and Alisaie eventually learned from Otis Velona about the Endless, and his story made them realize that Sphene is one. When they met Sphene again, she confirmed it.

When word reached out that Zoraal Ja was about to continue the invasion of Tuliyollal, Wuk Lamat, the Warrior of Light, and Alisaie proceeded to Vanguard to face him. Zoraal Ja revealed Sphene's true form as an Endless, a simulacrum using a mechanical soldier as a host and that she desired the invasion of Tuliyollal as much as he did, as it would supply Alexandria with more souls and aether to maintain their way of life. He ordered for the invasion to continue, but this time Tuliyollal fought back with the help of Dawnservant Koana, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, the residents of neighboring Shaaloani, and dragons Vrtra and Azdaja of Radz-at-Han, ultimately routing the Alexandrian forces. This drew Zoraal Ja over the edge, and he ordered the people of Alexandria be slaughtered and their souls extracted, hoping to attain further power by absorbing them himself. Sphene became outraged and desperate, but the adventuring party decided to save her people, as even though Sphene's crimes were unforgivable, her people were innocent. They fought their way through Solution Nine while saving those they could. Sphene was reunited with Otis, a former soldier at the employ of the original Sphene, whose soul had been transferred into a mechanical body centuries before as part of Preservation's first experiments with soul manipulation. He protected Sphene from a wild fiend, but the strain was too much for his old mechanical body. After quelling the carnage for the time being, Sphene stayed behind to look after her people, while others prepared to pursue and challenge Zoraal Ja.

At the top of Everkeep, after engaging in a fierce battle with the mad King of Resolve, the Warrior of Light and their party killed Zoraal Ja, ending his reign of tyranny. As he perished, Zoraal Ja dropped the interdimensional key only for Sphene to appear behind the party and seize it. She redeclared her intention of using lives from the Source to sustain the Endless in Alexandria, and used the key to open another dimensional gateway to Living Memory. She took to the key with her, closing the gate behind her to prevent anyone from following. After the Scions determined where she had gone, they returned to the original gateway in Yak T'el and used Krile's clover-shaped earring—in reality a data storage device of Alexandrian design containing a code for the gate—to open the gate to Living Memory.

The party proceeded to the central Meso Terminal where Sphene was preparing for her ultimatum. Wuk Lamat tried one last time to reason with Sphene, believing that in her heart Sphene did not want to massacre the people of the Source. Sphene admitted that she did not, but saw no other recourse, and intended to erase the original Sphene's memories so that her kind personality would not serve as a hindrance to do what she was programmed to do to maintain the Endless. She refused to reevaluate this stance even after G'raha Tia pointed out that this course of action would be merely delaying the inevitable: should she succeed and continue, there would come a time when there would be no more souls to harvest, and then the Endless would cease to exist no matter what. Sphene retreated to the Meso Terminal to enact this plan; in the meantime, the party began shutting down the other terminals in Living Memory used to keep the Endless active, essentially "killing" them, though the people whose memories were used to create them had already passed long ago.

The party proceeded into the Meso Terminal, and fought their way through its defense systems before reaching Sphene, whose original personality was now fully erased as Queen Eternal. She captured all of the party to be eliminated, save for the Warrior of Light, whom she engaged directly due to their higher perceived threat level based on the Eliminator's assessment. They, in turn, summoned reinforcements using the crystal of Azem. Partway through this battle, Wuk Lamat reentered the battlefield, reaching out to Sphene one last time and causing her rewritten personality to be partially restored long enough to reaffirm that this plan was what she wanted, unable to bear losing her people again.

After being defeated, Sphene reappeared, glitching as the Meso Terminal could no longer maintain her, but for this brief moment she was free from the forced programming the Preservation had implemented on her. Despite her partial restoration, only her time as Endless Sphene remained, but not her memories of the original Sphene. In her last words she admitted that she was only delaying the inevitable, and that despite her aims, she enjoyed her time with the adventuring party and admitted that under different circumstances they would have been able to live on in happiness and harmony. Sphene gave the interdimensional key to the Warrior, believing they would keep it safe. Sphene accepted her death and left her people's future into the hands of Tuliyollal, bidding farewell to her kingdom she loved so much.

Legacy[]

With the shutdown of Living Memory, the Alexandrians could no longer forget those who passed away, including Endless Sphene, and Alexandria mourned heavily over the loss of their beloved queen, with a funeral held in her honor in Solution Nine. Around the same time, due to the shutdown of Living Memory, a stasis casket, holding the still-living body of the original Queen Sphene, shut down, releasing the former queen, still suffering from levin sickness, but preserved through the years.

Wuk Lamat continued caring for the people of Alexandria as if they were her own, in memory of Endless Sphene.

The head of Preservation, Calyx, used seemingly another copy of Endless Sphene's memories to create a simulant to manipulate the citizens of Alexandria—using their regulators to erase the memory of her death and funeral and the simulant to offer neo-regulators with the promise of becoming Endless—in an effort to incite fear of death in the people of Alexandria.

As the Warrior of Light, their companions, and the anti-Preservation organization Oblivion investigated both the remains of Solution Nine and the simulant, they encountered the original Queen Sphene, who came to relate to Endless Sphene's love for her people, referring to her as "[her] other self", wishing to protect the people she left behind. Calyx continued to use the simulant Sphene and the total control of the Everkeep's infrastructure to instill a continued sense of dread on Alexandrians. Calyx used the simulant Sphene to attempt to assassinate the Warrior of Light to obtain the interdimensional key that Endless Sphene had entrusted them with, the last act of the simulant being to lure the Warrior and the original Sphene to the Underkeep's throne room to force them to fight Sphene's recollection of Zelenia Triantafylli. With this last attempt at killing the Warrior failed, Calyx retired the simulant, gifting the original Sphene Endless Sphene's regulator tiara.

While attempting to ascertain Calyx's location, Oblivion discovered an abandoned research facility. Calyx eventually greeted them through a terminal and invited them to attempt to destroy his memory bank inside Meso Termnal. Wuk Lamat asked him, why he didn't reclaim the key after Endless Sphene's defeat. His answer was, that when she was defeated, her memories became one with the electrope systems, which allowed her to wield an even greater authority than he. She also knew Calyx was watching, and she saw him as a threat. As result of these factors, she trusted the wellbeing of her people to Wuk Lamat, and the key to the Warrior to keep it safe. This answer prompted both the Warrior and Wuk Lamat to honor their promises to Endless Sphene and defeat Calyx for good.

During a final confrontation with Calyx atop the Meso Terminal where his memory unit was held, Wuk Lamat used all her strength to pierce the shield protecting the unit as the Warrior of Light destroyed it, fulfilling her promise to Endless Sphene, which she saw while weakened. It is unclear if this vision of Endless Sphene was a real manifestation of her, or simply a hallucination by the hurt Wuk Lamat.

People's memories of Endless Sphene's death were presumably restored when the government of Alexandria, with the help of Oblivion and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, reactivated Living Memory to restore the sealed memories for those who asked and still used regulators.

When the Warrior and their companions visited Treno on the Ninth, Miayli, the town's mayor, gave a word of caution to the Warrior about the key the Endless Sphene trusted to them. She believed that the key may actually choose its keeper, hinting that Endless Sphene knowingly handed it to them for this reason.

Characteristics[]

Sphene appears in multiple forms throughout the story of Dawntrail. To distinguish these versions, Shale proposed a set of identifiers for the Warrior of Light's allies to use:^[3]

• Sphene's name, as is, referred to the original, living Sphene.
• Endless Sphene (先王, Sen-Ō?) referred to the Queen of Reason encountered during the interdimensional fusion with the Source.
• Simulant (シミュラント, Shimyuranto?) referred to the new Sphene that appeared after Queen Eternal's defeat.

Appearance[]

Sphene takes the appearance of a young Hyune woman with olive eyes and medium-length gray hair that curves when it reaches her shoulders. The tips of her hair are yellow. She wears a brightly-colored yellow and teal dress and long stockings, and wears a small teal-colored crown. The medallion on dress reads the name "Sphene Alexandros XIV", and on the back the phrase "Service Eternal, Many souls, One heart, Alexandria".

When forced into a final confrontation with the Warrior of Light within the unlost world, Sphene takes on the form of Queen Eternal, a giant vaguely humanoid machine with multiple arms that possess reality-warping abilities and drone weaponry.

Personality[]

Sphene appears gentle and kind, and has a lighthearted and easygoing disposition. She deeply cares about the people of Alexandria, and is always ready to help anyone in need. In a similar vein to Wuk Lamat, Sphene endeavors to interact and know the people under her rule, making her easy to approach. Alisaie noted that Sphene reminded her of Wuk Lamat, as she expected a queen to be colder. However, her lighthearted disposition is a facade, as she is anguished and troubled by her people's suffering and of the means she has to employ to maintain their happiness. When Wuk Lamat takes notice of her troubles, Sphene changes the subject while trying to act cheerful again.

After her true goal of massacring and plundering other worlds of aether is revealed, Sphene is shown to be unyielding and determined in her objective, willing to go to extreme lengths to protect and preserve Alexandria and its people, especially the immortal Endless, refusing to allow them to fade. She does so with guilt and reluctance, believing she has no alternative, so much that she needed to suppress her gentle nature via reprogramming to confront the Warrior of Light, accepting to be "history's most brutal queen" if it means to protect her people.

Sphene abhors Zoraal Ja, trying her best to mitigate the negative effects that his cruelty and greed have on the Alexandrian people. She only suffers his presence as the King of Resolve because of their covenant, which allowed Alexandria to invade and draw aether from the Source. Though she attempted to reason with the King of Resolve for a peaceable solution to his feud with Wuk Lamat and the heroes, when Zoraal Ja's cruelty extends towards the Alexandrians she deems it goes too far and Sphene forms a truce with Wuk Lamat and the Warrior of Light to stop him. Sphene was mystified by the Scions' willingness to help her protect the Alexandrians from Zoraal Ja's massacre despite knowing she had deceived them.

Sphene, upon her revival as an Endless, was modified by Preservation to prioritize the well-being of the Alexandrian people above all else, regardless of how the Preservation's intended methods affected others. This programming is likely the root of her inner turmoil, as her gentle nature conflicts with the lengths she has to go to fulfill this prime directive. The Preservation's programming makes it impossible for Sphene to accept any alternative to the Preservation's plan of plundering the aether of other worlds to sustain the Endless, despite knowing that maintaining the Endless is unsustainable and is only delaying the inevitable.

Sphene has deep empathy for the suffering of others and does want to minimize pain and death, at least within her domain. She shows compassion to the people of Xak Tural who became trapped within Heritage Found, helping find ways to preserve their culture and way of life as best she can. When the Warrior of Light defeats her, she forgives them and entrusts them with the well-being of her people, believing them to be in good hands.

The simulant Sphene is complete opposite to the personalities of both the original and Endless Sphene's. She does not possess free will, and acknowledges herself as a pawn for Calyx. She acts with whatever mannerism is needed of her. For the people of Alexandria she appears just like Endless Sphene, their beloved queen, who has the best interests for her people. To fulfill Calyx's goals, she is ruthless and cruel and has no qualms trying to kill the Warrior of Light. She tempts Wuk Lamat by playing with her feelings towards Endless Sphene. She twisted Sphene's memories of Zelenia into a machine, and Sphene declares her unfit to be trusted with the memories of Alexandrians.

Gameplay[]

Endless Sphene appears as an ally NPC in the duty instance of The Protector and the Destroyer, initially removing an obstacle in the way but otherwise is a non-combatant interacting with other NPCs. In her stunned state during the final battle of the instance, she is protected by Otis.

Endless Sphene is fought as Queen Eternal in The Interphos and its optional Extreme mode, the Minstrel's Ballad: Sphene's Burden, which was added in patch 7.1.

Behind the scenes and etymology[]

During promotion for the release of Dawntrail, Sphene was referred to as the enigmatic maiden, with her description intended to withhold spoilers about her role in the story.

Dawntrail features many references to Final Fantasy IX, with Sphene's character based on Garnet Til Alexandros XVII, princess and eventual queen of Alexandria. [view · edit · purge]Sphene, better known as titanite, is a green and brown neosilicate mineral. Garnets are also neosilicates. The writing on Sphene's clothing gives her full name as "Sphene Alexandros XIV", which references Garnet's full name and the number 14 as the fourteenth main game in the series. Sphene shares the general beats of Garnet's storyline as a young ruler forced to ascend the throne during a time of calamity for the kingdom of Alexandria, gaining the strength and resolve to protect those in need in the process.

Endless Sphene was designed by Toshiyuki Itahana, character designer for Final Fantasy IX, with her dress and appearance being based on the keyword of an "artificial ghost", and the theme of a “living, walking tomb”, with a doll-like appearance.^[1][2]

Citations[]