Ja’rhem stands at the threshold of a burnt-out house at the edge of the world. His bright-eyed stare floats in the predawn dark, wild with mischief. He shoulders his rifle and smiles and even in the blackness he is beautiful in youth, even as that youth starts to fade. Like a parchment beginning to yellow and crack at the edges. Once a slumdog, he has cast off his sandals for the boots of the road like some wayward soldier of dirt, carapaced in leather and dragging in whorls of chaff kicking about his feet.
He is in the north, lean and wolf-like and stooped in the shadows of great trees. Skulking in the backdrop of a world rent in war. He watches it unravel. He spits. Three weeks later he sits in a desert canyon beneath a sky littered in stars. He cranes up to see and his throat tells a story of violence and garrote-wire. There is a woman there now, one of many on the road. He speaks quietly to her and his broken grin is full of lies and ill-kept promises.
He spends a month in Drybone. The young man drinks too much, sleeps too little, and laughs too loudly like it might push back the nightmares or a night that will not end. His two fists are like icons, busted and bruised, tools of worship for some other day, but not this day. A gold-capped canine grin works around a cigarette, around a blackpowder flask in the pitch of battle, around litanies of vaulted thieves cant and drives of poetry and good-humor. He moves with a heartache grace.
He is a suzerain of rats.
Ja’rhem sat alone among the hard, inelegant pews of a derelict chapel. The smell of dampness and mildew hung heavy in the back of his throat. There were signs of squatters and vagabonds, all vacated now save he: the pallets of linen and wool molded over and eaten away by rot and moth; small, blackened patches of detritus on the stonework floor where desperate men had torn apart some of the benches and brought the pulpit down to where it lay shattered and torn apart at its bones in order to build a fire to fight back the cold; shattered glass that lay strewn across the floor in uneven and maddening arrangements like men had sought at one time to make sense of all the destruction by some way of divining now lost to this age, its gaping origins now boarded up against the weather. And overhead where a preacher had once told his sermon, the vaulted ceiling was caved in to bury the altar as an indictment against whatever God had slept there.
A pale light danced among the empty congregation, a cigarette burning and swiveling between Ja’rhem’s lips. His consciousness submerged and heaved and submerged and heaved like some ghostly vessel left adrift in a storm without man to man it. He knew only that time had passed, but was unsure of its details. He knew that Carver had gone sometime in the night, but couldn’t remember when. Only the sound of his boots sucking noisily away, heavy with blood and urine. Only the idea of his shadow, long and dark and final, stretching out the front door to disappear, perhaps (and hopefully) this time for good.
He’d been thinking about Carver more than he’d like to admit. And Bosco, quiet and somber, blistering in the evening sun. Hadrian, too, leaning over the table and talking more than anyone wanted to hear, but doing so charmingly, now tongueless, now eyeless, now scalped somewhere out in the desert. He thought of Ja’ahrami and her infectious smile. In firelight, dancing and laughing. Her hand in his, dragging him into the song. He didn’t know where she was now. Somewhere safe, he hoped. Somewhere far away. He even thought about that really nice girl that had always followed Augustus around. She wasn’t bad. Not like Carver and not like him, at least. Bad like Bosco and Rami and Hadrian, maybe. Bad because life never gave any of them another choice.
Mostly, though, he thought about his father. Standing in his worn, leathern breeches, shirtless, stooped over the forge, hammering away at a shard of white heat that would one day become a nation. Or the thing a nation is built on. In this story, a boy is watching the father intently. He is explaining something to the child. He tells him that he has seen many men broken on that thing that we call love. He hammers against the unborn shape and he is smiling now though it is an incomplete smile and the boy is watching him like an acolyte, like worship. The air is filled with the silence and then the hammer’s panging and then the sparks. The boy is always watching. The man is always hammering. The boy doesn’t even blink.
Haunted - He lies in drink to forget and the room spins. Nightmares that he kept in his dreams bleed out into day and he languishes through those acts that must be done in the dark.
Of Gods and Savages - He carries piety in his heart but never speaks the names of gods. Prayers and the names of saints are said bitterly, like a bad joke, to lighten his bankrupt heart and his fists are at ironing out his destiny through violence. He will repent and blaspheme with the same tongue, in the same breath.
Witch-raised - In the streets he was raised under firelight and smoke and the fevered murmurings of the witch; she was his first mentor and shaped him from clay into an image of her choosing. He fails.
A Circle Broken - His brotherhood has all gone under now, save he. Either dead or lost, he now carries the weight of his guilt on the road in solitude or poor company, never in a single place for long. On most days, he just tries to keep his head above water and hopes that he doesn’t drown and he knows that this is his birthright.
Incorrigible Flirt - A gilded grin, a bright-eyed stare, and all the hymns of an angel are used to play, to draw, and to tease the wayward soul, for in the slums and on the road pleasure comes scarce and must be had where it is found.
■"I remember him, he used to run some rackets on Pearl Lane. Haven’t seen him in at least a year, though. A blessing, that, last thing Ul’dah needs is more criminals.”
■“Heard he was using that rifle out in Thanalan for the Flames. A devil of a shot, that one, but the first to run, too.”
■“Heard he was working aboard a galley. Protecting shipments for the Maelstrom.”
■“That farmgirl from La Noscea that follows him around sure talks him up a storm. Says he’s the greatest hero the realm’s ever seen. He’s got her conned good.”
■"Saw him skulking around Saint Nikolaj's the other night. Maybe hoping he could sniff up some opium left behind after the fire.”
■“I once caught him in the public steambaths. I don’t much like the look of that ink. It’s got bad meaning to it.”
■“Heard there was a witch somewhere in his story.”
■"They say he's a murderer."
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