Grymfalk Ketenitarwyn

Passive

• Skirmisher: The first decade of Grymfalk’s career saw her in a traditional pirate crew. Whether raiding other ships or defending her own, she has years of experience in chaotic close-quarters combat and can use a variety of improvised weapons in a pinch.
• Guarded: Without first throwing her off, it is nearly impossible to catch Grymfalk off-guard with a psychic attack.
• Lightning: Grymfalk’s star shaman soul crystal enables her to catch, reshape, and expel lightning-aspected aether nearby, with strict conditions. One (1), she cannot choose not to absorb lightning near her; it’s drawn to her like metal to magnets. Two (2), she must catch it with her own aether, shape it, and immediately expel it. If she tries to hold it even for a second, the lightning will tear apart the aether she’s using to contain it. If she were too slow to expel it, enough lightning aether could destroy her from the inside out. Three (3), she cannot spawn it on a distant location. No matter where she aims it, the aether she expels will travel away from her in a straight line. This is one of the few ways to exhaust Grymfalk quickly.
• Balance: Fighting aboard ships on the high seas has given her an uncanny ability to right herself or to know when to stay down. Abilities targeting the ground beneath her feet may not be so effective, and opponents looking to use her size against her may be surprised.
• Reserves: A few years before obtaining her left prosthetic, Grymfalk suddenly developed an overabundance of aether.
• Resilient: Now a full-fledged paladin, Grymfalk recovers quickly from severe physical damage and can endure heavier blows.

Fighting Styles

Boarder: The first style Grymfalk learned allows her to engage with enemies in close quarters, making use of a pole-arm or her hand-axes, using aether to augment her movement and the damage and spread of her attacks. The style was later honed to allow boarding of Imperial vessels under gunfire, incorporating long-distance jumps and the use of a conical aetheric barrier to deflect projectiles like bullets. Once aboard, using a pole-arm to keep enemies at range, infused with wind aether, enabled Grymfalk and her team to cut down enemies swiftly while sustaining minimal damage to themselves. However, these techniques use a tremendous amount of aether quickly and require the user to be far from allies to avoid any possibility of friendly fire. Given how offensively-focused and messy this fighting style is, Grymfalk avoids using it nowadays.

Back-line defense: Armed with her soul crystals and barrier spells, Grymfalk prefers to plant herself among the casters and see to their defense with shields and deflective bursts of aether. On occasion, she will pick a specific caster or group of casters to guard, though she will not stay at their side if it means forsaking others in greater need.

Damage control: Grymfalk’s primary priority, above all else, is to ensure the safety of her crew. The magic she has chosen to learn from Floernwaen and her allies is designed for battlefield triage, defense, urgent medical measures, and handling a variety of other emergencies. Prior to Eliseo’s kidnapping, she learned from him how to cast Cure II and Medica. She excels at locking down a small section of the battlefield to protect vulnerable people, and providing short-term care to keep them stable until more robust treatment can be administered. The only instance in which Grymfalk abandons triage for offense is when the party is engaged with a particularly lethal enemy, and their survival is wholly dependent upon fending off the enemy before the enemy kills them all.

Notable Spells

• Constellation: To make up for her inability to use her aether at range, Grymfalk creates an ‘anchor’ for herself to cast at in the shape of a star and sticks those stars to her allies. She can only attach these anchors to allies that she can see. So far, the stars have enabled her to cast shields on allies at range, channel mild healing magics to her allies at range, sense her allies’ locations, and tell if her allies are under psychic attack. She can use these stars as a mental anchor and help an ally fight off a psychic compulsion from a distance. This spell doesn’t require effort to maintain; once established, it remains in place until broken or dismissed. Should an enemy breach her psychic defenses and gain access to her magic, this spell would become quite dangerous, as the enemy would be able to use those open connections to her allies to harm them.
• Living Shield: Aether envelops Grymfalk and arranges itself into a pattern that looks much like feathers, or perhaps scales, which seem to swim around her. This shield has no ability to deflect spells, but has seemingly-endless ability to guard against physical attacks. It functions like a non-Newtonian fluid, wherein the more force is used to attack it, the stronger it becomes to repel that force. This shield can be made large enough to fit several people within it. Those with stars attached to them can pass freely in and out of the barrier. Previously, forcing Grymfalk to handle lightning aether would briefly interrupt the shield, but she has started learning how to maintain the shield in spite of mild lightning exposure.
• Galaxy: By etching dozens of stars into the air around her, Grymfalk creates an anti-aether shield. Once a star absorbs its limit of aether, it will expel that magic back at the caster and disappear. This spell does nothing to defend against physical attacks and requires constant replenishing under heavy magical fire.
• Mandate: Anchoring herself to her allies with stars and sealing them with patterns akin to constellations or runes, Grymfalk ordains the psychic sovereignty of her allies, taunting any incoming psychic attacks to target her mental defenses before affecting others. This spell takes time to set up. It can only be maintained for a short period before the weight and complexity of the spell begin to undermine its integrity, unless Grymfalk diverts all her attention to maintaining the spell. In this case, she falls unconscious and is vulnerable to attack, although she can maintain the spell like this until physically attacked or psychically overwhelmed.
• Just A Fuck-Ton Of Aether: Many problems can be solved with a massive blast of wind aether of varying sharpness or bluntness. Poison fog? Blow it away. Fusillade of arrows? Blow them away. Dangerous voidsent sword? Coat that pole-arm with a thousand razorblades and hack it in half. Aetheric barrier? Coat that pole-arm with a thousand razorblades and chew it apart. It’s hardly elegant, but it often works.

Weaknesses

• Melee fighter: Because her prosthetic sculpts her magic so tightly to prevent it from giving her aether sickness, Grymfalk cannot cast any magic that uses her own aether at range.
• Overabundance: Having too much aether makes Grymfalk a beacon to aether-sensitive enemies, can draw voidsent to her, and will poison her if her prosthetics are rendered non-functional for too long.
• Chronic sickness: During the years in which she suffered aether sickness without the aid of her prosthetic, the chronic damage done to her body resulted in an exceptional susceptibility to most kinds of poisons, especially toxins targeting muscles and nerves. Consequently, psychic compulsions administered as a toxin, aetheric or chemical, bypass her mental defenses entirely.
• Hearing: Years in proximity to cannon fire has left Grymfalk with considerable hearing loss. She has chosen not to compensate for this with hearing aids or enchantments. Whenever possible, she positions herself in view of miqo’te, au ra, or viera and keeps an eye on their reactions to their environment to tell when she might be missing an audio cue. If forced to fight alone, she will try to put her back to a wall to make it easier to keep track of her opponents with sight alone.
• Lingering injury: When Coladbogh and Loptr ambushed Grymfalk, Rahai, and Qel, both paladins took heavy damage when the voidsent’s arrows ruptured into shrapnel inside their bodies. Heavy scarring remains on her left bicep, and she retains a chronic limp in her left hip.
• Lightning rod: Grymfalk’s inability to turn off her passive trait of attracting lightning aether can get dangerous quickly, especially if void lightning is involved. If faced with an enemy using relentless lightning aether, Grymfalk would have no choice but to take off her star shaman crystal to stop attracting lightning, or else risk her aether — and eventually, her body — atomizing.
• Conscientious objector: Taking life for any reason, even against soldiers in battle — potentially, even at the cost of her own — is abhorrent to Grymfalk. If fighting without killing her opponent is impossible, she will lay down arms.

Items

• Sun Torc: A golden torc embellished with motifs of flames and solar rays, infused by Amal’jaan sun-seers who practice a form of astromancy. It grants perfect sight even in magical darkness, and in daylight, heightens its wearer’s reflexes.
• Sea Serpent’s Guile: This compass was made from the bones, teeth, and claws of ancient dragons, and its owner will always know which direction is north. Additionally, if its owner thinks of a location they have knowledge of, the compass will both point in that direction and give the user a mental map of the path to that location, including all terrain details and hazards. It is also said the owner of this compass will have an uncanny feeling for inclement weather.
• Heavensfall: Forged of a white metal which gleams under the layer of grime and filth it has accumulated over the years, this lance is of a quality to put Ishgard’s modern masterworks to shame. It was possessed of great power to both pierce wards and shields, and to siphon the very life from its foes to heal its wielder. The lance seems to have fallen dormant, but Grymfalk learned it may be able to be restored to its former glory with the help of a dragon’s magic.
• Halberd and Mithril: Enhanced with several enchantments and engraved runes, which fortify the weapon against breaking, allow its user to magically recall it, and augment the channeling and casting of aether through it, the halberd is a gift from Sanarisse which has been attuned to Grymfalk’s astral aspect. The mithril coat was commissioned from Thinarielle after Caiside’s protective vestments. Heavensfall recently punctured a gap in the back of the coat, behind her heart, which has yet to be fixed.

Prosthetics

• Left leg: Engineered and built by the late Norbert Fiske, one of Grymfalk’s crew-mates from the sunken Southern Pearl, this device serves a number of purposes. Making up Grymfalk’s leg to halfway up her thigh, the heavily-enchanted mithril alloy is grafted onto her femur for maximum stability. The device was engineered to have a weight roughly comparable to her natural leg so that it doesn’t weigh her down in water. A sequence of small, low power-drain crystals in the prosthetic’s casing support the enchantment that allows her fine-tune control of the leg. A sophisticated array of medium-sized crystals inside the prosthetic, cut and positioned to exacting specificity, shape Grymfalk’s aether and siphon it into a large battery crystal in the device’s foot. Two separate siphoning systems run simultaneously in the prosthetic to ensure her safety through redundancy: should one system fail or be disrupted, the other can continue to function. The technology that allows this device to siphon, shape, and store Grym’s aether is unprecedented, and she’s rather tight-lipped about its secrets; in the wrong hands, the same technology that’s restored her mobility and alleviated her aether sickness might be used to engineer horrific new magitek monsters or rig impossibly large bombs.
• Right foot: Small and simple in comparison to her left leg, Grym’s right prosthetic makes up part of her foot below the ankle. It contains another crystal for storing aether, but doesn’t have any other complex systems, nor does it play a part in shaping her aether. Unlike the sophisticated design of her left leg, her right prosthetic does weigh more than her natural foot did.

Crystals

• Floernwaen: Meaning “guiding wind,” this crystal has been passed down from first mate to first mate for centuries and holds the key to visiting one of the great spirits of the Ahctgeiss, or River of Ghosts, an ancestral training ground. It comes from the traditions of the star shamans, a population of mostly-roegadyn sailors from the northern isles who didn’t settle in Limsa with the rest of their brethren and instead chose to wander the seas and live aboard their vessels. Because star shamans were traditionally charged with broadening the base of knowledge stored within their crystals during their lives, Floernwaen is designed to interface with other soul crystals.
• Unnamed: One of the soul crystals from the Order of the White Flame, Grymfalk has no intentions of using this crystal’s traditional name, though she has yet to give it a name of her own. It protects her from possession and allows her to sense the presence of nearby voidsent by growing cold.