Yari no Suna

Hooks

Personality

To someone whose roles in life involve duty and ritual, Suna does not think too deeply about things. She cannot, not really, for a life of complete submission to her beliefs means that she has been molded by her training to be a blank slate, wiping away preconceptions of things as they seem. She is bound, as all Yari are, to the idea that their lives are far less important than even the most common of men. Their pledge to ensure that the good are safe under Azim's sky means that they will lay down their lives for it if the spear willed it.This lack of value in her own existence is a concept, she knows, that many Eorzeans do not understand. It was not as if she wished to die, or that she would have liked to, it was simply that she placed priority over others more than herself. A desire, and perhaps a declaration that others were more than her and that she would do things for their benefit than for her. It was not, she would say, a bad life. Simply a different one.She thinks of things in simplistic terms, the nuance lost on a woman who had been trained from a very young age in the martial art of the spear, Doman court rituals, maintaining temples. Eorzean individualism confuses her, and the lack of mountain paths causes her no shortage of trouble. And yet, behind them is a woman slowly learning to become one, a someone in the world that she now finds herself inhabiting. The clean slate being written upon by no one but herself in the indelible ink of experience, and yet still bound by her spear and yet her own person. No longer just a vessel, but a... a Suna.She smiles more often now, and her laughter is like the sound of a thousand tiny bells. She finds slapstick the funniest, and anyone who hits anyone else in the back of the head admonishingly is bound to get at least a giggle out of her.And yet some things do not change. She dislikes veiling the truth, and has heard one too many lies. She leaves when people push their luck in those aspects, perhaps for their own safety lest the spear command her to slay them. For Suna in all her changes was still a spearmaiden, though one that has reached an accord with it. She speaks to it and the kami within less as a servant and more as a old, dear, friend. Perhaps the elders left the fire behind Suna's dull eyes for this very purpose, that it might grow more controlled.Still, if one was at a loss on how to get on her good side, food is always an option, for Suna is ravenous having to sustain both the kami in the spear and herself with vast quantities of aether. It is part of her training that she be able to have a deep aetherpool, and she eats for four or five. Tinkering too is the best way to get her talking, her eyes light up showcasing models of her airships that she manages within her free company, and the small things she creates. Mammets, and the like. Bound to never make a weapon, she busies herself instead with other things. Airships, for example, are a hobby. Nails, which she still enjoys making vast quantities of. Mammets, which she diligently repairs even if they call her, unkindly, a tyrant.And yet through all of this, Suna still finds herself automatically diffusing the attention to things around her, she would not know what to do with any focus on her and those that notice her would be surprised at how surprised she would be to be noticed. A lifetime of being in the background has formed a person wary of the spotlight, and her unwavering belief that the important people doing important things should have it on them at all times. After all, through all the changes in her life, through all her growth she would always be a spearmaiden.

History

In the mountain valleys of the Western Tail Mountains, where spring meant “less snow” was the village of the Yari. A village of Raen Au Ra, wholeheartedly consumed by the drive to perfect their worship and practice of the spear. From making, to wielding, and trading the rare metals found in the high altitudes for produce and goods to supplement the few things they can plant.The Lancers of Gridania and the Dragoons of Ishgard believe the spear to be an extension of their bodies. The Yari, however, believed the opposite, that their bodies were an extension of the spear, whose will was carried out by the spearmasters and spearmaidens that devoted their lives to the craft. High up in the mountain valleys of Northern Othard, flanked by the Skypiercer and the other, jagged spires of the Tail Mountains, where good footing was a luxury, the Yari family had grown from one, to several smaller families all claiming the name of the spear.By tradition, the second child of every household of the Yari was offered to the temple of the Dawn Father on their eighth nameday, where hewn rocks had been molded into a suitable training ground for the future defenders of their village. Suna’s parents had two children, a boy and a girl. She was the second.She would never speak of it, but sometimes, she had to strain to remember their faces when they came to visit on her name day, the only time of the year during her apprenticeship that she would get a reprieve from the painful task of training her body and mind into the singular devotion of the spear. Her parents were always happy to see her though her brother seemed ill at ease around her for reasons unable to be explained in one full day. The only day they had.How could they, when they saw what she was changing into? For nine years she was taught that she was a vessel to the kami of the spear. Its will was her will and she surrendered all to it. She was not a person, but a tool and everyone else was far more important than she was. Her body and spirit honed to be able to carry them out. Arduous physical training from sunrise to sunset, a small meal and then prayers and rituals to increase her pool of aether. To them she was turning into a warrior, to Suna it was a life of agony that she could tell nobody. In her silence did she change but she did it for her family, for her village.She loved them, in her own strange way, and they loved her. Although they knew that the young child that had run around their home as her father toiled in his workshop was gone, replaced by a spearmaiden who they could be proud of one day. Gone was the little girl that had demanded to be brought to the market to watch the merchants from Doma go by on their way to the inn. Suna had turned quiet, closed to them. Hours upon hours of meditating and training had changed her. On her 17th name day, they did not visit. Suna understood. She shed many tears that night, and very rarely ever since.What little personality young Suna had vanished after this. Her final year in the temple she talked little and spoke less. She knew she was not abandoned, for she knew her parents were still in the village but they did not speak to Suna and Suna, in turn, had nothing left to say to them. Should she have been angry that she was forsaken? No, she had changed and so had they. She was the one placed upon the temple, the wiping of her sense of self, worth, and dignity was all for their beliefs. Her family did nothing wrong. They had simply shielded themselves from the changes that Suna was having. They could do that, for they were important. Yari no Suna was not.On her 18th nameday, she went to the marketplace, standing inconscipuously and watched the people, committing their faces, their actions and reactions into memory. It reminded her of what it meant to be a person, to be less of the vessel that she had now become. It would be, she thought, her final indulgence.She wed her spear the next day.The Wedding of the Spear was the end of her apprenticeship. Now she was to journey through the mountains, giving succor to those in need and helping others in their journeys with the knowledge and hopes of her village on her shoulders. Up and down the mountain paths she helped tradesmen, other adventurers, miners, and merchants coming up to trade with the Yari. One day she arrived at the Eastern Foothills of the Fanged Crescent, still a moons-long journey to the Doman Capital and kept walking. She would only look back once, with eyes at once devoid of emotion and full of hope.