Grace Horizon

It’s not a solid blue wall of tank need! There’s DPS need on a dungeon roulette! It’s amazing!

Question of the Day!

What effect did the fall of Dalamud have on your WoL?

(submitted by @GraceHorizon)

At the time, Grace was about 15 years old, and she was a very restless teenager. She was getting bored with her life in the forest, but her foster father didn’t think she was ready to venture out on her own. Tension had been building between them when the red moon gradually started growing in the sky. The two of them watched with growing fear as it gradually descended, but with no understanding of what was happening — they were too isolated to know much about world events. When the Calamity finally occurred, it was a terrifying and incomprehensible event, and it took several weeks before they learned what had happened at Carteneau.

While the two of them were unhurt in the disaster, it left Grace shaken and willing to listen to her foster father’s advice to stay home a while longer. It would be another five years before her skills had grown and the memory of the disaster had faded enough that she finally set off for adventure.

Over the course of the Dragonsong War, Grace had seen Ishgard’s cruelty to its lower classes with incomprehension. Nature inflicted suffering aplenty, but never for its own sake — the wolf killed for food, the bear lashed out to protect her cubs, harm was always a means rather than an end in itself. She had no framework from her isolated forest upbringing in which to understand why these holy knights hurt people for the sake of hurting, so it sat in the back of her mind as a growing sense of wrongness.

Finally, around the end of Ishgard’s war, she found the corpse of a Dark Knight. She had recently started training as a Sage, her first magic job, and the combination of the slain fighter’s soul crystal and her growing magical powers were enough for that part of her that objected to everything that was happening, to the pointless errands and the Echo visions of burning to death and the cruelty of the powerful to the weak, to gain its own identity. And thus Fray was born.

The raid on the Ishgardian holy knights she immediately carried out over their treatment of a defenseless commoner was Grace’s defining moment as a Dark Knight, and ever since then, that part of her has insisted that she should fight as one whenever she encountered cruelty or abuse of power. Her first major battle as a Dark Knight was when she stormed Doma Castle to put an end to Yotsuyu’s reign of terror, but less than a year later when she was pulled into the First, she spent the entire struggle against the sin eaters and Emet-Selch as a Dark Knight. Using powers of darkness against elemental light seemed fitting, but also the presentation of the sin eaters as being holy entities bestowing forgiveness on sinners was another form of cruelty and abuse of power. And Emet-Selch’s cruel and mocking manner only heightened her outrage.

The struggles she’s been through since then have not called up her dark side in the same way, and these days she only fights as a Dark Knight often enough to keep in practice. But Fray is always there, ready to step up when the time to fight abuse comes again.

I’ve been getting tired of leveling jobs, so I decided to give it a rest this week. And lo and behold, on this week’s Wondrous Tails I see dungeons 51-59, 61-69, and 81-89. Should be able to get most or all of those from leveling roulettes on a level 90 job during the normal course of play. Yaaaaaaay! I also got Mathbot for one Wondrous Tails alliance raid, and Aglaia for the other. Double and triple yaaaaaaay!