“Strong or weak, it matters not. Fortune can change at any time, and often it does so entirely outside of our control.”
The Persistent Little Bugger
Being too young to remember the place where he was born before his mother took off to get away from the war, he never once experienced the feeling of being homesick. Aran, or rather Vahnai at the time, was just a carefree, generally happy child. Living under the careful watch of his loving mother, he had lived the privilege of being the only child who had others to play with in his earliest years.
The change of fortune came swiftly and out of nowhere, it was a sharp, intense experience, like a knife in the dark piercing through the coat of a stranger who has just cut the very same corner you have. It simply happened. Overnight. Aran fell asleep and he woke up sick.
His mother, the protective and caring creature she was, did everything she could to find help for her beloved child. Day in and day out she'd reach out to healers and doctors from all over the region. Once she exhausted all of the options there, she sold her house and left again, with her sickly child, traveling the star until she found help.
The two of them bounced from a doctor to a doctor to a doctor in a neverending cycle of re-telling the story behind the mysterious illness, only to have their questions answered with more questions. Gridania. Ul'dah. Old Sharlayan. Thavnair. They've traveled the world far and wide, until things got even worse, and eventually, being always on the move ceased to be an option.
Chained to a bed, with no hope for a change of fortune and a pile of medicines to at least ease the pain, young Vahnai accepted his fate.
The Ever-Marching Corpse
The large metal shape swooshed through the air, and by the time he could turn around to see, he heard a nauseating wet noise. His eyes went wide in horror as his companion, the thaumaturge assigned to their unit, was practically split in half and pinned to the debris from a fallen Garlean battleship. To think that someone would be mad enough to just fling their weapon at someone like that was perplexing. A pained grunt brought his attention back to the armored figure ahead, as it continued its charge only to shoulder tackle Emily to the side, somehow her raised shield only protected her from the brunt of the blow, but did not warrant her ability to stand her ground. As he instinctively channeled aether to weave healing magic to recover her stamina, his eyes followed as she was flung a good dozen fulms in the air, as if she was a ragdoll and not a fully armed Temple Knight. Big mistake.
Before he even got to finish casting the spell the figure was upon him. He broke the concentration and stopped channeling magic to narrowly escape what was just a large chunk of metal hurled at his torso. He raised his cane a little, but a palm grabbed it halfway between his trembling hands and simply crushed it as if it was a twig and not a carefully crafted magicked staff. The sensitive ears instantly identified the noises that came right after that, the sounds the steel-clad fists made as they rained upon him like a hailstone. One slammed into the collarbone, full force swept him off the feet before the brain even registered the cracking of the bones, then another landed upon his jaw just as he howled in pain, that sensation further amplified by dislocation of the mandible. A burst of red followed up after the horrifyingly quick concert of broken bones when another blow fell onto his nose. Blinding, numbing physical torment. He desperately sucked in the air through his mouth, but halfway through that motion, yet another hit was delivered, straight at the throat, making it collapse, blocking the airway. He could only stare in fear as the figure above him raised the bloodied, armored fist to deliver the finishing strike.
The blade of the Temple Knight struck true, piercing the side of their foe as Emily made a desperate attempt to take down the enemy by throwing all of herself at him, shield and sword first. The conjurer awaited the pained yelp, the howl he himself made mere seconds ago, but that simply didn't happen. Feeling his life sneaking out of his body in a merciless march that could no longer be stopped, he stared in disbelief as the armor-clad figure not only didn't fall but threw the brave swordswoman to the ground and hurriedly pulled the sword out of his own body, splatting blood around, seemingly with no care for it, as if he was nothing but a sheathe. Unable to feel much beyond pain, with ashes falling onto his face from the sky, he could only await the air to run out and watch, as the figure stood above the body of his friend, savagely smacking the sword at her raised shield, not even making attempts to bypass the obstacle. Even after the ringing noise of steel crashing against steel turned into this unmistakable sound of metal being ripped apart, even after the blade reached her body, the armored monstrosity kept swinging it repeatedly, over and over again. With curtains falling and the lights growing dim, the dying Elezen conjurer shut his eyes and silently prayed for his friend's demise to be swifter, and less painful than his own before he too departed from the realm of the living.
The Purposeless Creature
His step was confident, despite not knowing where he was going. Not that the destination mattered much, if at all in this case. The City-State of Ul'dah, the crown jewel of the Thanalan desert, was widely regarded as the den of the vile and opportunistic, a home to those who would exploit others for their benefit and laugh in their faces about it by the end of the sun too. Perhaps for many that is exactly the case, but for Aran, this was not the image befitting this city. In his eyes, it was the land ruled by those who had power, the power that was measured in wealth, and with its crystal clear focus on business, it was obvious that there would be a plethora of opportunities to amass riches if one had the skill to earn them. As such, it was not a home of scumbags and villains, but rather a plain, simple meritocracy. A place which he did not truly belong to, a place that was not his home, nor even a place that he hoped to turn into something like that… but it was a place where he could easily find ways to sustain his existence and, maybe, just maybe, a place that would provide him with some semblance of a purpose as well, one day.