Resurrection has been a hypothetical possibility in the Kiseki series since The 3rd. Now, that possibility seems more likely than ever. But what’s the secret behind it?

Vita Clotilde’s beautiful staff in Trails of Cold Steel II is called ‘Kerykeion’. Since you are unable to access her inventory in the Reverie Corridor, the only way to find the name is through data-mining the game.

The Kerykeion is better known as the Caduceus, the staff carried by Hermes in Greek mythology. According to  William Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers (1876), a source found through Wikipedia, “[i]f [the wand is] applied to the dying, their death was gentle; if applied to the dead, they returned to life.”

Vita was unable to help her Azure Awakener, who had been pierced through the heart. “Even our witchcraft won’t be enough,” she laments. “The most I can do is make it as painless as possible…”, she adds, reminding us what Hermes’ staff with the same name as hers was capable of.

Now, in Sen no Kiseki III, we see people considered dead return to the world of the living. Rutger Claussell, for example, returns to the world of the living after having been dead for close to three years. Siegfried, reminding everyone and their mother of Crow, also re-appears, wielding twin guns coated in gold and a pretty edgy mask.

People die if they are killed?

The staff, however, is no longer in Vita’s hands. She left it in the Infernal Castle as she scuttled away from the not-dead Osborne and his right hand Rufus, who just killed her familiar. Grianos, however, is still dead in S.1206, when Vita pops up again wielding fans rather than the Kerykeion.

If we turn over the Dengeki page, however, we see the undead enigma Roselia wielding a staff that fits Vita’s old Kerykeion to a T, as pointed out to me by @aokihime. The only difference is that it lost its pure azure colour it had when it was still wielded by the Azure Abyss. In Roselia’s hands, a girl associated with the colour vermillion of similar shades of red, the Kerykeion turns purple. You don’t need to be Bob Ross to conclude that blue + red equates purple.

But…this evokes more questions than that it answers. Welcome back to Kiseki, I guess.

How did the Kerykeion end up in Roselia’s hands? Why is she alive in the first place? Why is she standing next to Thomas in the fifteen second commercial? Did Thomas do some ‘artifact shopping’ in Heimdallr’s catacombs after the Infernal Castle vanished under the Valflame Palace again and found the Kerykeion? Is the Kerykeion actually an artifact? Did Thomas revive Roselia, and if so, for what purpose? Why are Thomas and Vita collaborating? Why does Hermes’s Egyptian counterp–

Well, that’s not go in that rabbit hole yet. That’s for another time.

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