In the fairytales, grand castles struck a clear silhouette. The body often evoked its surrounding landscape, whether it was baileys emerging from the cliff shape below or spires towering over the forest trees nearby.
She couldn't deny the possibility that the artist's hand willed the buildings to play nice with their backdrops. Still, architecture was also an art, and many creative minds were cross-discipline by necessity. Those illustrators might've gone on to erect castles with that same harmonious intent.
Not Eulmore's architect. The beast of a fortress had no body, instead a greed of buttresses spiralling aimlessly towards the sky. The bottom barely supported its overgrowth of limbs. Its designers may have cited the yew tree as an inspiration, but she knew better; the city was a hand grasping at the sky. It couldn't get more manmade than that.
It was futile to compare Eulmore to a fairytale, of course.
Reading the same five books repeatedly was an art Minfilia had mastered beautifully. Over the years, she found ways to appreciate them for more than their legible contents. This time she spent ages poring over the illustrations, something you weren't really supposed to do when you were being introduced to advanced reading, but it was a last resort. The last time she'd "read" this one, she indulged in the coarse texture and compared the worn corners of each page systematically. Books had become vessels of sensation in a flavorless room, where all vibrant colours blended into a dull brown.
"Um... I'd like a new book." How diligently she had practiced this request. How easily it crumbled at the sight of him.
Ran'jit didn't match his surroundings well either. He stood grey amid rich maroon and shimmering teal, and for that he was impossible to ignore. No sunlight found its way into this part of the building despite light's abundance, yet he cast a sharp shadow everywhere he walked. He only ever looked straight through her, like there was someone else more important to perceive.
"Few books remain. What do you want to learn about?"
He was always willing to answer her questions, until he wasn't. Her lips pinched tight as she weighed the pros and cons of asking. She had been diligent in her training all sennight, so she decided to ask in earnest. (Had it been a sennight? She could never tell.)
"I want to know about the outside world. What's happened in the last few years... What it looks like."
Ran'jit's silver gaze winked out of sight.
"No."
"B... But..."
She said it before she thought it. He was well on his way to the stairs; he stopped dead before the first step. She cowered away from his shadow, ready for the bite—
"I forbid it." His final reiteration. She never knew what she was scared of when it came to him, because he never, ever hurt her. Perhaps it was that she cared for him, and she knew he would so happily die on this hill. She wanted desperately to spare him the pain of saying no to a girl who had nothing.
"I understand," she said. Maybe the sentiment would soothe a wound somewhere. Marble-smooth despite the two scars she could see. Impenetrable, unknowable, as a fortress.
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A Ran'jit Lives AU heavily inspired by the recent Lodestone side story.
Ran'jit took stock of his body the way a general tookstock of his troops. He laid still, his attention going from one limb to the next, gathering information. The material beneath him was soft, like a mattress. Around his limbs, cold like metal. Chains, perhaps. They weighed heavy on him. Pain, too, was there, but faint and hazy around the edges. They had drugged him and the drugs eased the pain as well.Â
He opened his eyes. He was in a small room. Eulmore still, by the banners and architecture. Perhaps Vauthry had imprisoned him as punishment for his failure.Â
The light, though, was strange. He can't put his finger to what it was. Slowly he turned his head from the barred door to the single high window above. At first he thought it must be tinted glass, until he'd stared to the point his eyes hurt and were leaving spots floating about his vision.
It was the sky. The sky was blue. If it was blue that means the light hadn't returned, which means Vauthry was….
Ran'jit bided his time, waiting on the drugs to wear off, floating in the soup of his own brain, and watched that tiny little window as the blue was marred by white clouds floating across it. Blue sky and clouds. He's seen artwork of such things. They were never meant to be seen by his eyes.
The clouds changed. They went to red and orange, as if there was a fire outside, but Ran'jit did not smell smoke or hear screams. The clouds dimmed to purple and ochre as the wind began to clear them and now Ran'jit watched in fascination and horror, as they finally cleared themselves away to reveal a dark sky shot through with bright twinkling specks. The cursed night that Lord Vauthry had sworn to destroy forever now reigned resplendent across the skies of Kholusia.
If it still remained, then Ran'jit had failed. Vauthry had failed.Then there was nothing left but the horrific wheel of sin, turning again and again to harrow this vile world.
The helpless noise that escaped his throat, barked loud like an animal's cry, was both laughter and sob, and it lasted until he ran out of breath.Â
The door opened. He expected the Crystal Exarch, or perhaps the Warrior of Darkness. He did not expect a slim figure in a white dress quietly easing into the room, the Exarch's hired thug at her back. Ran'jit, still bound on his back, did not dare to meet her face.
"Minfilia." He noticed for the first time how dry his throat was, when even summoning the word was harsh.
"It's. Ryne now. It's Ryne, actually. I'm Ryne." Minfilia's voice was hesitant but bore steel inside it. Ran'jit's eyes cast upward out of reflex and he finally realized what was wrong. Her hair, the wrong color. Her eyes, no longer that unearthly blue.Â
"Do you think to hide from your fate, like this? To color your hair and conceal your eyes?" He could not even beg Minfilia to come home. If he was prisoner at Eulmore than even the Citadel of Pleasure had fallen, and there would be no place left to keep her safe. These people would feed her into the meat grinder, just as they did every girl before her.Â
"It's not dye. I–it's a lot to explain, really–"
"And you don't owe him any of it," snapped the hired thug, one hand on her shoulder.
"Aye, but our charge may find some succor in it regardless, and such would be the matter of greatest import." The fortune teller who cavortws with the pixies was lurking in the shadows behind them. Ran'jit could sense naught but his voice and see the glimmer of light off his jewelry, but he seemed to have some hand on the thug's leash all the same.
Ran'jit turnws away from the sordid lot of them. "My lord is dead, and you have doomed my child. If there is aught satisfaction you need from this withered body of mine before you execute me, take it quickly and then let me leave in peace."
Eulmore performed its executions publicly and with great fanfare. The Crystarium, in its weakness, only exiled its worst criminals and let the sin eaters do the work for them. At his age, injured, alone and friendless, the only difference would be how many people saw him die.Â
Minfilia stepped into the room, sliding out from under her bodyguard's hand. She raised his head over his bed and closed her eyes. The chains that bound him, solid and metal despite their aetherial glow, suddenly warmed and then vanished into glittering dust that evaporated out into the darkened sky.
"Ryne!" the thug snapped.Â
"He won't hurt me." Her soft blue grey eyes rested on him. Ran'jit sat up slowly, mindful of the bandages he now saw wrapped around his lower section and legs.
"I am your enemy, child. I am your guardian's enemy. To spare my life is to risk that of your precious cabal–"
"No! You listen to me for once, Ran'jit!" She was nearly shaking but she had her heart in her throat, her voice sharp and strong as a blade. When Ran'jit looked into those soft eyes he found it hard to locate a trace of the timid creature he'd kept in a gilded cage in Vauthry's vaults.
"I'm tired of hard choices. I'm tired of sacrificing one life for another - my life, your life, his life, anyone. I'm tired of being told nothing can be bought without blood!" Her voice cracked, tears hesitating at the corners of her eyes, but she kept speaking.Â
"Why are men bloody like this? We have so little left and you have to keep ripping apart the shreds further and then telling me it's just the way of things. No. I'm done with it. Thancred's told me about the other girls, I know what happened and I'm sorry but that's not enough reason to just start burning everything down. I don't want anyone else to die stupidly, no matter what they've done."
Ran'jit's hand moved without his consent, as autonomous as Gukumatz. A frail reflexive reaction to embrace her, one he thought he'd burned out of his brain ages ago. He heard the sound of metal scraping as the thug in the doorway readied his gunblade. Perhaps that would be how General Ran'jit would choose his death: letting the bodyguard cut him down because the fool assumed that if Ran'jit wanted someone dead, there'd be anything he could do to stop it.
…but not in front of Minfilia.Â
The hand settled on his knee instead. Ran'jit took in a slow breath, feeling the places where his injuries kept his lungs from fully expanding. No reaction to the pain, just as he was trained, it was nothing but a status report from a soldier to its general. "Then what is to be done with this old war dog, that you will neither slaughter nor throw out to fight again?"
"I want you to live!" Minfilia angrily rubbed the heel of her hand against her face, trying to pretend the tears weren't there. "I don't think I want to see you again. Or–or maybe not for a long time, at least. But I want you to live out the rest of your life in peace, the same as everyone else, and I don't care what else you do with it besides that. We're going to fix what the Light took from us and I want you to be there to see it. I want you to live. That's all."
She hunched her shoulders and whirled to face away from him, stalking out of the small room. In the shadows Ran'jit could see the glinting, gaudy form of the fortune teller resting a comforting arm on her shoulder before drawing her away. The bodyguard remained, gunblade up on his shoulder, glaring at him.
Perhaps the man would kill him anyway, and simply tell Minfilia that he'd escaped in the night. It was what Ran'jit would do. You saw a threat and you removed it, one of the simplest lessons his people learned. (And if he'd finished the job back in Amh Areng and slit the thug's throat, perhaps things would have gone very differently.)
But instead the bodyguard slid his arm back and returned the gunblade to its holder behind his shoulderblades. "She's more than you deserve, you know," he said.Â
"I'm aware."
"More than either of us deserves. I can't…" He wavered, his hand on the doorknob. "I can't say I wasn't headed down your path either."
And then the door was quickly closed again, before the thug could let more slip. Ran'jit gingerly laid back on the bed, casting his gaze up to the tiny square of stars.
<i>Live.</i>
At eighty-eight, wasn't that enough living? He'd already far outlived his father. His children too, save the final stolen one. To live and still bear the weight seemed a terrible punishment compared to the blissful benefits of death.
I think Ran’jit was a Very Cool Villain actually but no one talks about it. Clearly the solution to this is to make him a babygirl and I’m willing to do it.
Non-joke rambling abt this Old Man under the cut bc he goes through So Much More than people give him credit for.
[This meta was written before the new Ran’jit-focused short story was released, and I have not updated it accordingly, though there is little that conflicts with it]
[shaking people who misinterpret him] Ran'jit is NOT simply a stuck up old man he is a dad heartbroken over his daughters dying time and time again. He’s had to outlive so many of them and its even worse that he's partially at fault for their deaths since he taught them to fight.
“Who armed you? Trained you? Fought and killed a thousand sin eaters with you!? And when you were inevitably cut down and lay lifeless in my arms─who sought out your successor to carry on the futile struggle again and again!?”
He can't let Ryne learn. She'll die like the rest of them. They always do no matter how hard he trains them -- again and again and again. The only solution is to keep her from fighting altogether. Reject Minfilia’s harsh burden for these poor girls so they can at least live. It’s a bitter task, but what parent wants to outfit their child for war and then their inevitable death?
The first idolizes the Minfilias and accepts sending young maidens to their doom as a necessary evil, but Ran’jit realizes how cruel it is to place the weight of the world onto them, especially when they can’t truly win. What is the point? No amount of dead sin eaters will actually save the world, they just keep coming back and reforming and killing and killing and--
You can actually read a translation of the JP version of one of the quests here, and I do like parts of it more. Particularly Ryne’s answer, the focus on memories ties in so well to Eden. The fact that she tells Ran’jit “I know there is pain, but the outside world is important enough for me that it makes the pain worth it. It will hurt me more if I simply go back to my cell.” In addition, the localization makes it seem like Ran’jit hates Minfilia? While JP makes it more clear that he wants her to be safe.
I really like the Eulmore villains, as their motivations are born of desperation in a doomed world. Is it wrong to seek a semblance of peace rather than fight an endless war against light? As far as anyone knew, there was no way to resolve the way sin eaters reform. It takes a hero pulled from another world that a majority of people are unaware of to actually get rid of them. If not for that, their path could have been the path of least pain -- if only it weren’t purporting a class divide and abuse of the lower class.
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In 9/1/23's Tales Under the New Moon "Bringer of Shadow, Bringer of Light" we finally get long-awaited Ran'jit lore, as Thancred recalls the research he did into the General after Eulmore's liberation from Vauthry.
Part of the story details Ran'jit's father, Zal'bard, and his transformation into a Lightwarden after dealing the killing blow to one. And then I remembered Huracan.
Huracan is a Rank A Hunt target, a giant red flying snake creature, similar in appearance to Ran'jit's familiar (and the Alte Roite model out of the Omega raids). The lore entry from the Clan Nutsy guys is:
Are you familiar with General Ran'jit's familiar, Gukumatz? It is a creature born of forbidden foreign magicks, passed down from general to general. Familiars such as these are usually sustained by the aether of their master, which is why when they fall in battle, their minions fall as well. There are, however, certain notable exceptions. Ran'jit's father commanded a familiar as well, but when he was slain by a sin eater, Huracan somehow survived, and has been seen on several occasions since. One theory posits that since the master was transformed into an eater, the familiar endures, though it is no more than conjecture...
The old General's aether persisted in some form in Norvrandt while the Lightwardens were active.
Now, the Hunts are a gameplay mechanic and the Lightwardens are gone, but it definitely adds to the horror aspect of the sin eaters and the stagnancy of the Flood of Light for over a century.
