Who Are Toxa and Lacryma, Kartia's Two Heroes?
Two heroes, thirty-six chapters, one story that completes only when both halves are played.
Kartia is divided into two volumes that can be played in either order, one straight after the other or alternating chapter by chapter as the episodes interleave. Toxa's volume follows a free knight attached to the Vigilance, the local corps that polices Kartia and its runaway Phantoms. Lacryma's volume follows a shrine warrior of the Church who serves in the same corps. They meet, fight side by side, and split again; each campaign is a complete story, but each also holds scenes the other cannot explain, and the game is designed so that the full picture exists only in a player who has finished both.
TOXA CLASSICO
The free knightA merchant's son who chose the sword
Toxa was born to a merchant family and grew up idolizing heroes; at eighteen he became a free knight, lodging with his distant relative Count Shinon and riding with the Vigilance of Cross Land.
The knight who writes
Unlike an old-school swordsman, Toxa fights with Kartia as readily as with a blade, forging, casting, and summoning. The older knights around him read him as a sign that the age of Kartia has arrived.
His story starts with a rescue
Toxa's volume opens with the rescue of Mona, a druid girl whom rebels want for the forbidden Kartia she carries. His vow to protect her pulls the Vigilance into a war over the Originals.
LACRYMA CHRISTI
The shrine warriorThe hero's daughter
Lacryma is the daughter of Kainas, the legendary shrine warrior the city of Kainas is named for. Raised by Bishop Aile after her parents' deaths, she is revered by strangers as something close to a saint, a reputation she carries like armor.
Left in command
Her volume opens with her holding the Vigilance headquarters while its chief, Rimzan, is away, and the first arrests for Kartia theft land on her desk. The rebellion reaches her as paperwork before it reaches her as war.
Faith, tested
Lacryma begins as the Church's most devoted servant, in a game whose villains include churchmen and whose rebels accuse the shrines of hoarding Kartia's blessings. Her arc is the game's argument about what her faith is for.
THE SHARED STAGE
The Vigilance and the warOne corps, two parties
Both heroes serve the Vigilance of Cross Land, and their parties overlap: Duran, Alana, Misty, Troy, Kun, Ele, and the wandering Bachstail pass between the two campaigns, seen from both sides.
The Akueldo rebellion
Against them stands Akueldo, a rebel alliance of heretic scholars, thieves, and a fallen kingdom, hunting the Original Kartia to raise Eden, a floating paradise, out of the other world.