“Akhilleus”

A well-loved hat. It will last you several more years, should you continue to take good care of it.

The careful way Akhilleus handles this hat signals its emotional significance to her loud and clear. Nobody has yet worked up the courage ask him about the details, though.

Instant fire, at your fingertips. On your fingertips, if you aren't careful.

Duration: <1m
(Duration should probably not be extended for safety reasons)

He should probably quit.

On first inspection, a cheap rifle—but several enhancements have been made to the weapon that makes it quite the weapon indeed.

Stephanivien de Haillenarte would like everyone to know it was he who taught the Warrior of Light how to be a machinist!

Not for the weak.

Effects:
Grants status effect Drunkenness.
With appropriate Tolerance stat, grants Sleep.

Thanalan's The Coffer & Coffin keeps this in stock specifically for Akhilleus.

Childhood

As is fitting of one who would become hero, the child that would come to be known as Akhilleus—then the Warrior of Light—was an orphan. He has no memories of his birth parents. Perhaps they were gone before he had enough of a consciousness to make any. Perhaps they were discarded in his desperation to make it to the next rising of the sun.

So, for as far back as he can remember—he had always been alone, in the deserts of Thanalan. Charity was rare. At best, he was ignored by the Amalj'aa-fearing inhabitants of his village. Every bit of his energy went toward staying alive, even though he would later wonder why he had even struggled so.

Perhaps he'd known.

That one day, someone would come for him.

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Glenn

[ONE FATEFUL DAY...]

A hush stole over the desert.

The village inhabitants all paused in their work. Someone had come over the hill—a lone cowboy.

Visitors were rare, even less so those with the means to help with the ever-present sandworm problem, so swiftly did they take advantage of the cowboy's stop to let his horse drink to ply him with what baubles they had to deal with it.

Of course, the child took no part. He had nothing to give—likely was not even aware of said sandworm problem. Why warn him, anyway? If the sandworm got him, maybe it'd spare one of their sheep. And the feast they threw when the cowboy returned, covered in slime, but with the sandworm's corpse in tow—no, he was not invited to that either.

Skulking about the shadows for perhaps a bit of food forgotten in tipsy revelry was how he was when the cowboy caught sight of him. Ignoring the villagers' hushed warnings, he approached. His voice was gruff—but the child had long since stopped flinching at harsh words—:

“Wanna get the hell out of here?”

★

A misanthropic bastard, the cowboy was. His name was Glenn. He raised the child clumsily, and nowhere near well, but managed to teach him how to shoot a gun and ride a horse. He took on Glenn's... less-than-inviting personality. The name “Akhilleus,” that was given to him by Glenn too.

They slept outside, and rarely ate hot meals. Work was hard to find.

For the first time, Akhi would've said he was happy.

But what he didn't know—would never know for how long for sure—was that Glenn was sick. Having doled out his revenge, he had been picking his way back to his partner's grave to lay down and die when he came across that village, with the sandworm problem, with the blank-eyed Au Ra child. He had never had children; never wanted children; did not even particularly like children—but prior to their untimely death, his partner had longed fiercely for one (though their nomadic lifestyle saw it nigh-impossible). There were not many Au Ra in Ul'dah, and in his stormy mental state, he saw the orphan as a message from his late lover. [Keep on living.]

So he offered his hand to that child.

As their time together stretched and grew, he went to great lengths to hide his illness from Akhi.

It was just a matter of time. Glenn's steadily increasing age, and their being a lone pair, made them seem an easy target. One day, they were ambushed and robbed of most everything but the weapons on their hips and the clothes on their back. Their horses, their food. Without his medicine, a mere few days saw Glenn's illness able to sink its claws into him, and it did so with a vengeance. Even as his vision swam and body shook and his mind splintered, Glenn refused to go into town for a doctor. The town had people, and it was people that had killed his partner. And now Akhilleus wanted them to kill him too?

No. No. If that was what he was going to do, Glenn would be better off by himself. He made it perhaps two yalms before crumpling to the ground.

[What else was Akhi to do?] Finding a safe place deep in the desert, he left Glenn to try and find medicine on his own. A desperate bid to save the one person who'd shown him kindness—the man who'd saved his life.

How was he to know?

The choice would haunt him for the rest of his life.

For when he returned, having walked nonstop for several days, Glenn was, as he dreaded, dead—but from a gunshot wound, his pistol still clenched in his hand.

Why? he asked into the silence.

Why?

That Glenn had not only taken his life, but—from the decomposition and the scavengers picking at the body—had done so very soon after Akhi left, was a fact he struggled to accept. He stood shell-shocked over Glenn's corpse for a day and a night. Any scavenger tempted by the smell was dispatched with little prejudice.

Eventually, as with all lucky children, he dug a grave in the collapsing sand with his own hands and buried the one parent he'd ever known.

• Chevron Right

No Graves Have Been Dug For This Quest of Revenge

Some time later, as Akhilleus numbly wandered the desert, he came across his horse. His bags. Glenn's clothes. He must've looked frightful to the robbers—eyes bloodshot from sleeplessness, clothes matted with sweat and dirt and stained with blood.

They had stolen from Akhi and Glenn because they were desperate and starving. The food they'd taken just barely fed the children among their group. They had children in their group. Akhilleus became aware to these facts immediately after the clouds settled. In a grief-stricken rage, he'd loosed every single bullet in his guns into their bodies. Blood ate up the sand, licking at his boots. If they had said anything, if they begged, he wouldn't have known.

This was how travellers found him some says later: sitting a ways away from the mutilated, decaying corpses. He was still covered in blood.

It did not take a genius to put together what happened. Why, though, nobody knew. Upon being accused, Akhilleus' fragmented mental state saw him riding off without an explanation.

He never saw a point to explaining afterward either. If the people rightfully saw him as a monster because of this, well—they already had before.

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