Vuk Faoladh
In Brief…
Race: Lupin
Gender: Male
Fur: Grey
Eyes: Amber-Yellow
Age: mid-late 20s
Height: Near eight fulms
Weight: Over 400 ponzes
Family: Hiroto and Kaori (biological parents), Clemetaux Breathnach and Mairola (adoptive parents)
Occupation: Chonomancer, Mage Knight, Explorer, Archaeologist, Mercenary
Skill Sets: Summoner/ Astrologian, Dark Knight, Warrior, Scholar (also Chocobo breeding and hunting)
Orientation: Gay
Status: Mated (to Henri Gisoreux)
Residence: Ishgard
Hobbies: Sightseeing/ Traveling, AlchemyHeavier-built than lupin commonly seen in Doma and Hingashi, Vuk's build is a result of a life of hard work living in both Ishgard and the wilds of Dravania.
Biography and Personality
In contrast to the warrior Vuk would become, both of his parents were far less martially-inclined, especially so for lupin. Instead, they were more interested in investigating and learning more about the nature of auspices, kami and eikons - how these entities might be similar and how they differed. In keeping with this, they left Doma for Sharlayan in a time when beast tribes and their ilk were more generally welcome in Aldenard, far as it was from the fanaticism of the Empire. While initially hesitant, understandably so, the lupin's lack of any patron primals of their own allayed the Sharlayans' concerns and they were allowed to conduct their research.Research which would rapidly expand upon their first encounter with a dragon from Dravania - and more specifically witnessing the transformation of Ishgardian heretics into dragons. Already familiar with the concept of aetheric mutation, they wondered if the process might be similar to eikonic corruption or tempering, especially given the nature of the Dragonsong and how great wyrms could use it to rally other dragons during the war versus Ishgard. While they intended such research to help in both the understanding of aether and protecting others from corruption, their investigations drew the attention of the Ishgardian Inquisition, and an inquisitor by the name of Mairola, especially. Making it her 'life's work' to investigate and prove the lupin were in league with the heretics, she pursued them day after day, letting none of their research expeditions go unobserved... But their activities were never suspicious enough to justify accusing them of being heretics, and the act of doing so became harder when their years of research paid off in the form of attracting the attention of one of the Sharlayan Forum members by the name of Clemetaux Breathnach, who saw to it they were registered as citizens of Sharlayan. For Vuk's parents, this was a dream come true, as the political neutrality that Sharlayan citizenship afforded them meant they could finally conduct a research expedition to southern Aldenard and study primals first-hand, Ifrit in particular, given how often he was summoned and how many people he'd tempered.Vuk's birth ended up mostly being just a footnote compared to all their preparations for the expedition, made all the more urgent with the empire's conquest of Ala Mhigo and rumors the colony in the Orn Wild was most likely going to be evacuated back to Old Sharlayan if diplomacy failed. Especially since such a mass evacuation would likely mean their research on primals would be put on hold indefinitely. So they rushed things forward and were able to spend around five years (minus occasional supply runs to Ul'dah) in Paglth'an researching Ifrit, tempering and summoning, drawing conclusions about the relative strength of a primal versus the amount of aether used in its summoning and relative to the current number of followers it had, all in addition to their primary research goals... And all without realizing Mairola had followed them from Ishagard, having convinced her superior officers in the Inquisition that the lupin were obtaining supplies of weapons from Eorzea to continue the war.However, the coming evacuation of Sharlayan to Sharlayan cut their plans short and they were forced to return to the colony to evacuate with the rest...
Entering Mor Dhona just in time for the Battle of Silvertear Skies to begin.
While not wholly strangers to the practice of fighting, this was a battle unlike any they'd encountered and most of the expedition was killed. The crashing ships, flaming hulks raining from the skies and nightmarish beasts devastating anyone in their path before being slain by magitek constructs completely alien to him awakened the Echo in Vuk and inspired a terror she thought she'd never know in Mairola... Seeing the empire slaughter such a horde of dragons shook her to the core, considering they would have won except for the actions of Midgardsormr - and he had died to stop them, while Ishgard struggled to fend off a single one of the wyrmking's sons from devastating a village. But even as she realized this, her training compelled her to rush in to find and help survivors.She was the one who found Vuk, sheltered beneath his parents' bodies, the traumatized pup unable to speak or protest as she carried him to safety and saw to his injuries. Not knowing what his name was and with both him unable to tell her and, as far as she was aware, no one left to care for him, she took him in and took to calling him Vuk as they made their way back to Ishgard, as she wasn't sure where else to go. Getting him past the gate guards was easy by comparison: she simply explained his parents had been killed in combat with dragons, so the pup couldn't be a heretic and they let her through. However, just because he was allowed into the city did not mean he was accepted. Between that and no longer having the confidence in Ishgard's course she'd once had, it proved easy for Mairola to abandon her former home - getting permission from her superior officers in the Inquisition to conduct a survey of Tailfeather... To make sure their supply of war chocobos was secure against any heretic infiltration, of course.So far from the city she raised Vuk to be largely self-sufficient as was necessary on the Dravanian frontier... until Clementaux found her, the Sharlayan scholar having retired from the Forum to handle the search for two of their nation's most unusual scholars - and his friends. For Vuk's sake, the two did not come to blows, and eventually came to an arrangement: Clementaux would take Vuk to Sharlayan for half the year to focus on his mental growth, while Mairola trained his body and survival abilities during the other half of the year, though as the young lupin grew into adolescence and Clementaux and Mairola grew into something approaching friends, Vuk spent more and more time in Sharlayan - much to his dismay, as Celementaux had an entirely unironic love of archon loaf. Upon graduation, Clementaux and Mairola began taking Vuk on trips to explore the wider world and it was during one such trip into the ruins of Sharlayan three years ago that they came across a group of au ra who seemed to be in the middle of some kind of ritual...Exactly what happened is known only to a few people, but after that Vuk became more and more interested in the rest of the world, waiting until both of his caretakers had passed before he left Dravania and Coerthas for Eorzea. Some speculate that the toy Alexander seen constantly in his company could be a hint as to what happened, but whether Vuk confirms, denies or remains quiet on the subject depends entirely on his current mood.In terms of his personality... Vuk seems to be a fairly altruistic, straight-forward and patient individual, always willing to help out others and is fairly optimistic in his outlook. Perhaps at odds with this, he’s also something of a mischievous individual and seems to - on occasion - lose his train of thought mid-sentence or even make non-sequitur commentary. When this happens, he usually tends more toward referring to himself in the third person, almost in a way that implies there's more than one of him.
Although raised to be independent, he understands and values others, as well as working with them, having mostly grown up in a hunting camp where survival was a matter of individual as well as group effort.
Chronomancy and Other Spellcraft
The following is a loosely-bound collection of pages purported to be the work of one Vuk Faoladh, ward of Clemetaux Breathnach, member of the Etymon Hume order and formerly elected to The Forum in 6-1551.
Chronomancy - also known as 'Time Magic' or 'Time Magick' in the common vernacular, is not an easily-understood discipline under the best of circumstances.As my circumstances don't even qualify as the best-understood of circumstances, much less the 'best of circumstances', I have committed this record to paper in an effort to provide information future scholars may be able to use to either form new theories of their own or used as corroborative evidence in defending a thesis.With the formalities out of the way, I'll first apologize for the horrible penmanship - as a lupin, my claws can sometimes be an impediment to writing, especially when I have a lot to say.
Second, while chronomancy lends itself well to debates and discourses of great length and rarified esotericism, I'm going to keep this simple: a list of the chronomantic spells I can use and their effects.
Why?
Because the best learning starts with simple observations of an unknown... not in being told what to think about it.
Thanks Clemetaux.
Third, this list is in an order that makes sense to me, as a practicing chronomancer. If you can figure out why I listed things in the order I did, then odds are you're a chronomancy and are probably reading this for amusement............ If so, adjust your entropy phase flux until the series of ellipsis up above forms a simple clock face and enjoy the temporal in-jokes.
So, one of the biggest things you should keep in mind is that, unlike other types of magic, time only has eight states it can exist in. I'll leave it to you to figure out what those states are at your own leisure/ risk.
Onto the spells - plus some comments on how the less intuitive ones work. I'd say I'll keep it brief - but since I can alter time, that really doesn't mean anything.
- SLOW (SLOWGA): single versus group/ area spell that slows time down for all those in the affected area
- IMMOBILIZE: halts all movement over a part of the target's body; and there are area versions of this spell I don't use
- DISABLE: locks down a target, preventing them from taking any action
- STOP: halts all time for the target - I'll say this, knowing why this is different from the three spells above is one of the keys to better understanding chronomancy
- HASTE (HASTEGA): single versus area spell that accelerates time for those affected, often viewed as the opposite of Slow
- OLD: also called 'Decay' or 'Entropy', this weakens those affected by aging them into an elderly individual, complete with the various afflictions one might expect - it's also a good preview of what's to come for anyone's who is affected
- COUNTDOWN: often confused with 'Doom', this spell - if it takes - results in whoever is affected suddenly dying a set time later, regardless of their health otherwise
- BREAK/ PETRIFY: this can be a confusing one, so I'll keep it simple: you're fossilizing a person or thing. Don't worry, like similar spells, you have to take extra steps to make it stick - it takes both time and mineral-rich water to actually petrify a biological creature, so any spell that isn't a combination of those can only maintain a petrified state temporarily
- TELEPORT: this spell is really one of the more complicated to explain... to start, there's two varieties of this spell: an instant form that can move you or another person (or object) from one place to another in a flash, and another that creates a static - but temporary - 'gate' between two fixed points... But enough about the effects and on to the real question: how what most consider a spatial magic spell works from a chronomantic standpoint. In truth, any spell which involves teleportation necessitates a manipulation of space and time, because the two aspects are inexorably linked (since this isn't a paper on advanced aetherophysics, I'm not going to go into the details of this statement here), it's more an issue of which aspect you're manipulating - I'd recommend you read Cerveau Bordeaux's Fundaments of Corporeality Interchange, for a more thorough treatment of the subject, both basics and more advanced principles
- BALANCE: simply put, this spell allows you to inflict any injuries you've suffered to any and all around you - due to its nature, this spell can bypass magical barriers
- COMET/ METEOR: these are basically the same spell, just of different power levels and either bringing an icy comet or rocky (or metallic) meteor down on the target, which is useful if you need water or want an easy source of material for use either in construction or smithing projects... all this aside, the spell works because of one basic principle: at some point, over a long enough time span, anywhere (and, in fact, everywhere) on our world will be hit by at least one bolide of some sort - this spell is just making that the present time
- REFLECT: this spell works via a barrier that reverses the time for anything that strikes it, making it seem as if projectiles are reflected by it; there's also a version of this spell called REFLECTGA that affects multiple allies -or enemies- at a time
- RETURN: a simple spell which returns you to a set point in time - most often used to return to the start of a fight you're not sure you'll perform well in
- GRAVITY (GRAVIGA): proper understanding of this spell requires reading Cerveau Bordeaux's Fundaments of Corporeality Interchange at a minimum - plus additional study on the nature of gravity, subjects far beyond the intended scope of this simple dissertation... suffice to say, much like Teleport, this spell is based upon complex manipulation of space-time in such a way to use gravity to cause damage
- VANISH (VANISHGA): it is the reflection of light that allows us to see - Vanish allows one to effectively become invisible by displacing the reflected light through time, spreading it out so much that there's too little light for others to actually detect you - as well as any affected allies, in the case of Vanishga
- BLEED: while basic versions of this spell simply prevent wounds from healing, thus allowing them to continue to bleed in perpetuity, more advanced versions cause injuries in and of themselves - the exact mechanism by which they do so is known as temporal shearing (which, sadly, is a complicated subject which only my fellow chronomancers can fully understand)
- FLOAT: simply put, this spell is 'arrested falling', the act of slowing or even outright halting a fall to earth such it seems you're floating and allowing you to move horizontally by 'pushing' off of the stasis field surrounding you
- BERSERK: to most outsiders' perspective, one under the effects of this spell attacks any and all opponent(s) before them with a single-minded relentlessness - I challenge you to figure out how a mage with control over time might achieve this effect
- BANISH (WARP): both the single target as well as the area-effect versions of this spell function by desynching the target(s) from time via temporal shearing
Having covered the time magics which I'm most familiar with and employ most often, I'll note two additional things before I wrap this up:
1) While there are other time magic spell you can learn, most of them can be replicated by combining one or more of the above spells
2) Like all other forms of magic, time spells are limited by one's available aether... but you may notice some time mages carrying around pocket watches: this is because some chronomancers (like myself) are limited to only being able to maintain time magics for a certain duration or can only cast them so many times within a certain time period - you should be wary of such individuals, as they usually have something augmenting their time magic (and I'm not saying this to 'toot my own horn', as it were, this is a legitimate concern), either its potency or duration
My relationship to Alexander...
What was it that happened three years ago, when Alexander was summoned in the Orn Wilds, when he determined the perpetual spiral of his existence, and endless loop that would move back and forth through time?
I suppose here, at the end of time, is as good a time as any to set the record straight.
Alexander knew, at that moment, that the best option would be to remove himself from time, or rather from the future, as any actions he took would inevitably be balanced by greater suffering stemming from those self-same actions, no matter how benevolent. He could've prevented the awakening of Bahamut, but doing so would've caused Eorzeans to depend on him - and then we wouldn't be in charge of our own destiny. It was only years later that I understood why that was important, why he would only let me correct certain injustices - ones so grievous I refused to live with them. Or, if not increasing dependence on him, then draining the land of aether, inevitably killing the very people he desired to protect and walk beside.
That I was there when Mide and Dayan first tried to summon Alexander was an unlikely but calculated outcome. So when it happened, it didn't take Alexander by surprise and so he took that opportunity to contact me - to tell me not to worry about the events I saw.
Why? Because, as he revealed, I had gained the Echo from my experiences in the Battle of Silvertear Skies and had studied time magics in my time living in Sharlayan. I could help him, if I wanted, act in his stead to ensure that once his plan to seal himself away reached its completion it could never be undone, that if anyone tried, there would be someone outside the temporal stasis seal to deal with the attempt to undo his plan - or someone who could summon him in an egi form to work together to stop them.
How could I have refused to help?
Like Alexander, my existence is disconnected from time, I now exist in all times. It's a unified existence - in that all my past, present and future selves have lived my life. But it's also not: they do not know any changes they may occur to me, they cannot tell me when my adoptive parents will die, because it hasn't happened for them until it's happened for me. Despite this, they can tell me of the happenings in their eras and how things are going.
By both of us talking to Alexander Prime through our egi, we can form bridges across time, allowing me to travel in person to the future and the past, while my other self manages all of my present affairs. If actual travel isn't required, we can swap mentally, but in such cases I remain in my body and am able to kick myself out of control and take control myself.
Which sounds confusing... but there's no better way to say it, truthfully.
This is the totality of our bargain and I am loyal to it, forever, until the start and end of time.