Grenat Querroux

Basic Information

Name: Grenat Querroux
Race: Duskwight Elezen
Gender: Male
Age: 22
Clan: Larronbreux, of the north-eastern Shroud

Physical Appearance

Tall and long-limbed like most of his kind, Grenat possesses the kind of easy grace that is the province of youthful athleticism at its apex. Although lithe in appearance, underneath the lancer’s alabaster-pale skin his body is wreathed in wiry musculature that guides it with precision and flexibility into whatever arrangement his thought commands. The rewards of lifelong training with the spear, an active life besides, with the complaints of age still a long way away: a good place to be, physically, at least.

He has a narrow face with sharpish cheekbones; a pale, unremarkable mouth; thin brows and thick black hair, kept clean but groomed impatiently and allowed to descend artlessly over his shoulders and to the collarbones. Among all this monochrome, his eyes have a way of startling with a splash of colour: a blue that ranges from near-icy to turquoise depending on how they catch the light.

Being on the poor side, he usually dresses simply - a fighting suit of comfortable leather, long-sleeved cotton shirts, a few dreadful poofy sweaters from the charities of the Carline Canopy. His recent arrival in Ul’dah has had the effect of slowly awakening a sartorial taste, and he has acquired a waistcoat, shirt and cloth trousers in which he enjoys looking a little sharper.

Background

Early History:

Born into a subterranean clan of Duskwights calling themselves the Larronbreux, Grenat is the eldest son of Heinreix and Ailice Querroux, and grandson of Ranglant Querroux, a locally respected martial artist and tactician. He has three siblings: a brother named Lutierre, aged 18, a sister named Ambrine, 15, and the youngest child of the family, the six-year-old sister Alou. The Larronbreux, a very old clan primarily organised around banditry, comprise about a dozen families, of which the Querroux are but one. A more detailed background on the clan can be read here.

A strong and quick lad from the earliest age, Grenat soon became the favourite of his paternal grandfather. Ranglant saw in the boy a chance to pass on the family’s spear techniques, lore dear to his heart to which his own son was largely indifferent; Heinreix’s talents ran elsewise. He was not disappointed. Grenat came to idolise the old man, and the weapon became a constant companion. In the course of this training, the young Duskwight learned his first lessons in self-discipline, which stayed with him haphazardly, and growing mastery of the Querroux Family Spear was the first thing he could call his own vocation with pride.

When their guardians were occupied with work and plunder, the young children of the Larronbreux were entrusted to a communal creche, sometimes for days at a time; those orphaned or abandoned lived there permanently. In Grenat’s time, the creche was overseen by another old man who would become a figure of cherished memory; the gregarious and eccentric old rogue known as Treize Lieux. Assisted by several elderly matrons, he had a talent for entertaining his young charges with endless stories told through the fragrant haze of his pipe smoke, practical lessons made lively by his japery, and inventive games. It was an idyllic period for Grenat, free of worry and ambition. Childhood ended when he understood the business of banditry and the peril inherent in forays to the surface. Thenceforth, his time was filled with a mixture of worry for the grown-ups’ safety and a burning desire to join them.

His first raid was, all told, anti-climactic. The stripling, brandishing his spear and quivering with nerves and aggression, was held back in the second wave of the ambush; by the time they charged, the modest merchant convoy on a winding road through the Shroud had already surrendered. Still, the feeling of belonging, implicit trust, and fraternity that inhered in that event and all subsequent robberies with the other Larronbreux would be something he would come to miss sorely later in surface life.

Calamity and the Surface:

The descent of Dalamud, when observed, was met with suspicion and bewilderment by the clan. The Calamity itself was an immensely frightening time, with its epicentre in the nearby western part of the Shroud. Many caverns collapsed, some were exposed, and others became unstable and uninhabitable. For all that, however, the Larronbreux suffered relatively few direct casualties. Tragically for Grenat, his grandfather was among them. The old bandit spearman was buried along with several others under an unlucky rockfall during the chaotic retreat to safer parts of their subterranean living space.

The years that followed were bleak. With the surface devastated, and the clan reluctant to add to the misery of ordinary wood-folk, the Larronbreux relied heavily on accumulated resources to survive. Raids grew ever more infrequent. Initially, food was rationed and the families, several of which were now bereft of their ancestral caverns, were forced to share unusually close quarters. Without his grandfather’s mentorship, Grenat grew restless and unhappy, seeking escape in solitary training whenever he was free of the duties of rebuilding. Ranglant had often told him that the family’s spear style had to be continuously built upon not to grow stagnant, and it was the duty of every practitioner to help it evolve with new insights; that idea came to dominate Grenat’s thoughts and formed the basis of an ambition.

It took him nearly four years to decide to seek inspiration and refinement of the Querroux Family Spear on the surface. At first, it seemed selfish and irresponsible to deny his family and the larger clan a capable pair of hands during the work of reconstruction and the fight for sustenance. Only when their privations lifted adequately did his guilt recede, until finally, the day came when he felt he could depart with a clean conscience. After speaking his farewells to his siblings and leaving a somewhat disjointed letter of explanation for his parents, Grenat climbed up into the light of the overworld, not to snatch a scrap of wealth and retreat but to stay, learn and prove himself.

Little of that has come to pass so far. His first couple of months upside were spent as a day labourer at a logging camp in the East Shroud, an operation which paid little enough not to care about the provenance of the muscle. He kept his spear wrapped carefully to disguise it as a pole for a vagabond’s bindle, and practiced in secluded clearings. When he finally made his way to Gridania proper, the Duskwight found out quickly that the locals bore little love for his kind. Only two institutions of the city showed him kindness and acceptance. The first was the Carline Canopy, where Mother Miounne reigned with a soft word and adamantine will and all manner of adventuring misfits were made welcome. The second, the lancers’ guild, whose master recognised Grenat’s skill and passion for the polearm and accepted him into the ranks of junior and later senior students - much to the chagrin and disdain of any Twin Serpent and Wood Wailer aspirants he’d run into in training.

Although training with the lancers of Gridania had given Grenat much food for thought and the first opportunity to compare the Querroux style with another complete and sophisticated polearm fighting system, he was restless. With precious few friends and plenty of trouble - Duskwights being the go-to culprits whenever anything went awry in the city - he began wondering about life even further afield, in the other great cities of Eorzea. After a fateful visit to a strip joint too upscale for their means, Grenat and his best mate Theronault Olivier resolved to strike out for Ul’dah, where fortune and fame beyond what their sedate forest city could offer surely awaited them.

Recent Events:

While neither fame, fortune nor great epiphanies on the spearman’s art have quite come Grenat’s way, he has caught a lucky break: a spectator at one of the local fighting tournaments who would subsequently become a friend pointed him to the Beoulve Manor, an estate owned by a charity-minded wealthy patron offering free accommodation for adventurers and other misfits. At the manor, the Duskwight tries to carry his weight by tending to the chocobo stables, learning about the birds on the job.

With the eye-watering residence fees at the Quicksand no longer a concern, Grenat’s finances improved through another stroke of good fortune: a successful spelunking-prospecting trip to an abandoned mine complex in Eastern Thanalan. Though the bounty of the rock was shared with Theronault, it has nonetheless supplied enough gil for modest living for a few weeks to come.