Clive Rosfield is not born to power. He is born adjacent to it, the firstborn son of a duke who will never inherit, the shield assigned to protect a brother who carries the Eikon he was supposed to have. The game opens with a hierarchy already in place and Clive already beneath it. What he carries instead of the Phoenix's flame is the expectation that this is simply how things are.

The prologue does not take long to prove that it isn't. The Eikon Ifrit appears where it shouldn't, and everything Clive understood about his place in the world burns with it. FFXVI begins not with destiny but with its destruction, and the man who emerges from that fire is not the one who walked in.