keybladeorder Application
Player Info
Your Name: Amerou
Your LJ: amerou
Your Age: 25
Contact Information (Email and AIM/MSN/Yahoo): amerouhowling (AT) gmail (DOT) com
Character Info
Character Name: Judge Magister Gabranth (Noah fon Ronsenburg)
Series: Final Fantasy XII
Character Age and Gender: 34, male
Character Personality: The word that immediately springs to mind to describe Gabranth is driven. While underneath the complicated and intense man he has become is someone who genuinely wants to protect others from harm, circumstances early in his development fostered a smouldering, white hot self-hatred, and it spurs and goads him in practically everything he does. Once he sets his sights upon a goal, he will do whatever it takes to accomplish it, come hell or high water, and damn the consequences. Gabranth believes, almost against his better judgement, that the ends will justify the means - and while time doesn't always bear him out on such a viewpoint, it's difficult to argue with the efficiency of his (sometimes ruthless) methods. A pessimist to the core with a fatalistic streak a mile wide, he expects the worst of everything and everyone, and thus occasionally finds himself surprised by the startling goodness that can come from the people around him. Gabranth is damaged goods in many regards, especially when it comes to trusting others (which, as a rule, he doesn't) but every society, and every ruler, has a man like him: the left hand of destruction, a shadow to bear the burdens and commit the acts that others cannot, or will not. His heart is heavy with darkness and the secrets of his past mistakes, but he still holds his head high and forges onward towards the dawn. Even a stray, after all, has pride.
This is not to say that Gabranth is an entirely black character; when he must make sacrifices for the sake of others, he does so without complaint, sometimes without question. While not precisely the friendly sort, to those who can get past his proud, imposing demeanor he is intelligent, patient, polite, quietly kind, loyal almost to a fault, and possessed of an adamant will. Though there is a temper underneath the armored facade, it generally takes quite a lot of abuse to force it to surface. Nearly two decades in the Judges taught him the virtue of patience and how to endure, and endure he does, until enduring breaks him. Interestingly enough, the Judge makes an excellent confidante; he is so used to keeping state secrets and monitoring the flow of information that it rarely occurs to him to blithely spread less important knowledge, though his stoic appearance much of the time tends to preclude anyone seeing this facet of Gabranth.
His usual public face - silent, intimidating, even cold, an unbiased, dispassionate arbiter of the law - is almost entirely a defense mechanism, to protect a surprisingly fragile ego. Betrayals in his past have hit Gabranth harder than any blow he had ever weathered on the battlefield, and though he seems to consider himself in penitence for his past acts, he never tries to justify or explain away his choices, accepting both the responsibility and the guilt for what he has done. Although used to a leadership role as a Judge Magister in Dark Arcadia, he works best with some greater authority to answer to for his autonomy; his military mindset practically requires a commander of some kind, or a greater goal to serve. He has managed to find both in the Order, and though he considers himself too dark of heart to even contemplate inheriting a keyblade, he is a staid soul, and fearless when facing the Heartless.
As an instructor, Gabranth is a hard man, but a fair one. He is only too aware that what knowledge he passes to his students, if flawed, improperly communicated or ill-absorbed, could make the difference between a live Order member and a dead one - and there is enough blood on his heavy conscience as it is, without adding the weight of his young pupils to it. He is not averse to assigning extra work where warranted (either to coach a failing student or to challenge a gifted one) and makes himself available for consultation, though frankly, he wonders about any students that might ask him to tutor them, pondering if they are merely gluttons for punishment.
Brief History: (Kingdom Hearts AU.) The man that would become Judge Magister Gabranth was born Noah fon Ronsenburg in the small city-state of Landis, in the secluded world of Ivalice. The younger of a pair of twins by virtue of two minutes, he and his brother Basch were as close as any boys growing up. Life in Landis was good, if not excellent, but it was not fated to last; the neighboring empire of Archadia was hungry for power and territory, and had an eye on annexing the much less powerful Landis. Noah and Basch were fourteen when their father was marched off to war, there to leave their mother a widow. Heartbroken, she contracted a magic-based wasting disease that left the boys caring for her more often than she could care for them. Landis lost their war with Archades, and the Republic was annexed into the growing empire; far too young for the responsibilities inherent in taking care of their own mother, stress and pressure on the brothers fon Ronsenburg grew until it hit the boiling point. Basch rebelled under the yoke of Archadia, dreaming of a free country in the south called Dalmasca, and of obtaining the power to balk the empire that destroyed Landis - but Noah felt that they could not leave their mother to suffer, and she most certainly would not survive a journey to so distant a place as Rabanastre. The twins fought and argued, until at last Basch left his home and his family behind. It was the first of many betrayals in Noah's life, and the one that hit the hardest.
With Basch gone, his mother sick and no further reason to remain in an Archadian-occupied Landis, Noah moved the small family back to Archades, the city of his mother's birth - and to further distance himself from the now-hated connotations of the name fon Ronsenburg, took his mother's maiden name as his own, becoming Gabranth. At fifteen, Gabranth was just tall enough to pass for his majority, and entered the Archadian military as a way of supporting his mother; once there, his keen mind and sound tactical reasoning caught the eye of one of his superior officers, who recommended the boy directly to Emperor Gramis. Gramis then requested a meeting with the young prospective soldier, and after an interview bore out the potential that the officer had spotted in the half-Archadian lad, Gramis offered Gabranth a chance to enter the Judges, with imperial sponsorship. Even as a teenager, Gabranth was no fool - the Judges were Archadian elite, a special corps of knights under the Ministry of Law who were, in a sense, laws unto themselves. He leapt at the chance, and after experiencing Gramis's unimaginable benevolence and generosity firsthand, Gabranth responded by throwing his lot and his heart wholly in with Archadia, embracing the conqueror country with the utmost loyalty. Though what happened to Landis was a terrible thing, Gramis was a man worth serving, and serve Gabranth did, gladly.
It was a brief, shining time in what would soon become very dark days indeed. Gramis's sons comprised House Solidor, and the then-youngest brother, Vayne, was most ambitious of all. While Gabranth climbed the ranks of the Ministry, Vayne plotted for the throne - and when he made his coup, it was not without outside help. A mysterious woman arrived in Ivalice, with no past Gabranth could unearth and precious little information about her - and she did not come alone. Though Archades scarce knew it at the time, she arrived with a handful of shadows, the first Heartless to enter pure and unplundered Ivalice. Vayne's brothers died at the hands of the woman's dark minions, sending Archades into a state of chaos as two of the heirs to the Imperial Throne were suddenly wiped from the face of the earth. Though Vayne played his cards smartly, and suppressed all the information he could about the murders, the woman and her Heartless alike, the stigma of death remained about him for the rest of his existence. Gabranth, then twenty-two and a Judge Major forbidden by Gramis from direct interference, could do nothing as the strange woman and the Heartless disappeared, spirited away by Vayne, a trump card to be played at a later date. That same year, the youngest and last scion of House Solidor was born, Larsa, but at the cost of his mother's life. By the will of Gramis, Gabranth and another Judge, then-Judge General Drace, were assigned to Larsa's care. It was of utmost importance that Larsa not become a plaything, a figurehead of either his brother or anyone else with delusions of power, and Gabranth loved that child as much as if he had been his own flesh and blood. When Gabranth's own mother died, finally falling victim to her illness, he sympathized all the more with the unfortunate boy, who had done nothing more than been born into the wrong bloodline at the wrong time.
Two years would pass before another sighting of the woman and her Heartless, while Archadia continued her conquering and her wars with the other countries of Ivalice; this time, the Heartless' appearance was a sanctioned use of their destructive power on the forefront of the battle-lines, with devastating effectiveness. The Heartless, once a strong few, were now innumerable shadows, a legion of darkness left to fester and multiply once out of the public eye. Gabranth was at once both horrified at the destruction they wrought and grudgingly respectful of their power - but power without control was useless, and the mysterious woman who had once dictated the Heartless' every move was now reduced to little more than a battlefield director. The war marched on, and Archadia started to rely less and less on mortal soldiers and more and more on the Heartless - a bad decision, Gabranth attempted to counsel the Emperor, but Gramis would not hear him. The Heartless won victory after victory, and the more they fought, the fewer Archadians need must sacrifice their lives for their country. But what Emperor and Senate both failed to realize was that with each victory - with each death on field of war, as the Heartless overran their enemies like a black tide that could not be fought or even controlled - they grew more powerful and more numerous, feeding on the darkness in the hearts of friend and foe alike. The only blessing was that the Heartless were easily distracted - and while the cities and territories they left behind them were often burnt and razed to the ground, the front line of the war crept south at a snail's pace.
Slowly, the warfront came to Nabudis, the capitol of Nabradia, shortly after Gabranth was promoted to Judge Magister. Few are aware of what truly happened, when the combined might of Nabradia and its ally Dalmasca faced Archadia's Heartless, under the eye of Judge Zecht and a new weapon the Midlight Shard. Gabranth is one of those few. What occurred there was less a massacre than a small apocalypse - the Midlight Shard reacted explosively to the presence of the Heartless, and its attempts to eradicate the Archadian army resulted in the utter destruction of Nabudis and nearly three quarters of the Heartless legion, the power draining entirely from the Shard and levelling the capitol in a massive ball of light. The might of Archades made apparent, Nabradia crippled if not outright destroyed, and Dalmasca's own position being made weaker by the second, they acquiesced only too readily to an offer of treaty from Emperor Gramis. Basch fon Ronsenburg, Gabranth's estranged twin and now a general in Dalmasca's forces, was sent as part of the delegation to the Fortress at Nalbina, an escort for Dalmasca's King Raminas. It would turn out to be a fatal mistake. Gabranth, armed with the information of his brother's presence and with the true intentions of his Emperorm infiltrated Nalbina, posed himself as Basch, and in three strokes of his swords sealed Dalmasca's fate - slaying King Raminas and the soldier Reks, and scarring the hated face of his brother, the mirror of the one he himself wore.
Bereft of its king, Dalmasca's resistance folded, and Archadia rolled over the smaller country with precious little care or mercy. The Heartless' director, the mysterious woman, sustained terrible injuries in the battle at Nalbina, surviving just long enough to direct her minions back into the darkness before succumbing to her fate. Rumour has it that on the battlefield she dissolved into blackness and nothing. (For this reason, Gabranth would suspect in coming years that she was the first Nobody to appear in Ivalice, though he has no proof to support the claim.) They would not, unfortunately for Ivalice, stay in the shadows and out of the sight for long. With no one to direct or control them, no constraint on their numbers and an endless supply of darkness in the hearts of all the men of Ivalice, they went forth and multiplied, and turned their ire and destruction upon the very forces they had once served. Wildly out of control, they swept back across the country, leaving Rabanastre a smoking ruin and slowly driving its survivors north, into the heart of Archades. Initial conflicts between Dalmascan refugees and Archadian soldiers turned to negotiations, as both sides of the war realized just how much danger they were in, fighting each other as well as the Heartless threat. Former sworn enemies became the strangest of bedfellows.
The death of Emperor Gramis came amidst this tangle of chaos, to the shock and grief of all - all of the evidence pointed to a Heartless assassination, but Gabranth was not the only Judge in Archades who suspected Vayne had a hand in the attack. Drace, now a Judge Magister as well, outright accused Vayne of killing his father, baring her sword at what was now the Archadian Emperor, and thereby fell victim to the fickle vagaries of the law she had so passionately sworn to protect. When Drace attacked Vayne, he retaliated with a seething force of blackness, a crippling, agonizing thing like dark flame that left Drace writhing in excruciating pain, to the collective horror of the Judge Magisters attendant to the scene. Gabranth made a costly mistake when he drew attention upon himself, giving Vayne all the opportunity he needed to wound his father's former hound - and in a test of loyalty to the new Emperor, Gabranth was forced to execute Drace, one of his few true friends, with her own blade. It was the darkest of times in Gabranth's already black life, and he still regularly loses sleep to nightmares of that moment when he put Drace to her own sword.
With Gramis gone, Vayne assumed command of Archadia's forces, meager as they were, and the Judges soon found themselves on the front lines - the elite of the city fighting and dying for every inch of Archadian ground, as much to keep them out of Vayne's way and in the line of fire as they were to protect the people. When Ashelia B'nargin Dalmasca, the deposed princess of the destroyed country, and the supposed betrayer-general Basch fon Ronsenburg resurfaced alive and in odd company, circumstances forced their cooperation with Vayne and Archadia - though inner strife between the two factions was tense enough to threaten inner collapse at any moment, and Basch's presence alone nearly had the Dalmascans rioting. Communications with distant Rozarria, the only other country in Ivalice able to defend itself against the tide of the Heartless, slowed and eventually stopped. A single Rozarrian airship made it into Archadian airspace with what few survivors could be rescued, and though the appearance of the airship briefly gave rise to hope, it was soon made clear that all of Ivalice was little more than a wasteland. Ivalice was no more - it was become a Dark Arcadia, a Garden of Eden left to rot and waste away. Archades was the last bastion of humanity left upon Ivalice, and the desperation of the situation made even more clear, tensions grew ever higher in the disparate factions shoved shoulder to shoulder in the crowded streets of Archades. If the Imperial City fell, there was nowhere left to go.
Few weapons were found to work against the Heartless; blades and other mundane items were of limited effectiveness, but magic was a precious commodity, with even half-competent sorcerers worth their weight in gold. When Archadian scientists, led by Dr. Cid Bunansa, found a way to manufacture nethicite similar to the Midlight Shard and use its explosive reactions to the Heartless in controlled detonations, the tide of the war seemed to square up somewhat, if not exactly turn. It was into this situation that the first keyblade wielder came to Dark Arcadia - a young man from the Keyblade Order named Kyrian, an itinerant Master who patrolled the more rural worlds in search of the Heartless. When Kyrian arrived in Archades in his gummi ship, wielding a strange weapon like a key turned sword, Gabranth and the other natives hardly knew what to think.... but when they saw how easily the boy could dispatch the Heartless with such an odd weapon, they quickly came to respect what he could contribute to their war. With Kyrian's help, the Heartless were pushed back, and ground that had been lost for months was regained for the first time, giving the survivors genuine hope for the first time since the Battle of Nabradia.
In the midst of this frail sign of recovery, however, there came one last blow that nearly crippled what little resistance the soldiers and civilians of Dark Arcadia could muster. Vayne, long advised by a mysterious being called Venat, became overcome by the darkness in his heart - infected from the corrupted Occuria, who was in turn infected from the Heartless themselves. Mad with power and full of enough darkness to destroy Archades and everyone within it, Kyrian gathered what brave soldiers he could - Larsa, Ashe, Basch, a handful of their allies, taken altogether a motley crew at best - and went to face Vayne. Gabranth, his heart still aching for Drace's death and realizing now that he had been serving the wrong side in the war the entire time, went as well; one last betrayal, this time of the oaths that he should have foresworn long ago. It was on that last battlefield that Gabranth's fate took a strange turn - for though he made to strike a fatal blow against Vayne, a sacrifice to atone for all the terrible things he had done, it was Kyrian that was crushed beneath the darkness-tainted monstrosity's claws. When Kyrian fell, Vaan, one of Ashe's companions, took up the fallen keyblade and charged Vayne, to strike the final blow himself.
With Vayne defeated, most thought the Heartless would vanish; unfortunately, Dark Arcadia remained as engulfed in shadow as before, only now the survivors of the destruction were not forced to deal with strife within as well as without. After much discussion, the only possible conclusion was reached - that someone must take Kyrian's ship to whatever other worlds lay beyond the distant sky, to find the keyblade wielder's origin, and if there were others like him. Gabranth volounteered to go, as atonement for all the things he had done - it was seen as almost assuredly a suicide mission. But with Larsa's permission, Gabranth boarded the gummi ship and managed to activate the autopilot, which took him to Disney Town - and the Keyblade Order. Since his arrival, he has been firmly ensconced as the unofficial liasion for Dark Arcadia, and the very official weapons instructor, at his request for something useful to do during his tenure off his home world.
Rank: Other (weapons instructor).
Special Powers: Aside from being a consummate swordsman and perhaps the only surviving practitioner of the Landisian double swallow-blade, as a Judge, Gabranth has access to a small number of spells - namely, Protect and the lowest rank of Cure.
Other Skills: Gabranth is a leader, first and foremost. He's experienced in battle, a sound tactical mind and intellectually quick on his feet.
Keyblade: N/A
Reason for having a keyblade: N/A. Gabranth has not consciously attempted to attune to a keyblade, and likely never will - the darkness in his heart is too great a burden.
RP Sample:
When he had offered up himself on the altar of sacrifice for the good of all that remained in Dark Arcadia, he had expected a harrowing journey, and a dark city on the distant horizon at the end of it; he had made his peace with those he had wronged, said his farewells, and stepped upon that strange contraption of a ship expecting never to see his homeland again. Not for the first time in his wretched existence, he had gazed out across the ruin of Ivalice's lands, smouldering still from their razing to the ground, and turned his back upon it. Forward, always forward. A man who spent his life with his head turned back could not see the future before it was upon him.
Still, though Gabranth had expected the worst, and though he had been prepared for anything, he had not been prepared for.... this: bright colours and loud noises, song and shouting, children and adults running through the streets - some with the large key-shapes weapons on their hips, or slung over their shoulders. The Judge in him bridled at such disrespect for a weapon, such lack of discipline, until he reminded himself that he was a stranger here, even if he was by no means the strangest looking. Archades had been a melting pot, once upon a time, but Disney Town was something different altogether. A distant clock tower was striking noon somewhere he could not see, and he turned his head in its direction, noting how the flow of traffic on the sidewalks had begun to shift. Such an odd town. The fact that no one so much as gave him a second glance, despite his stature, weaponry and dark armor, was enough to make him wonder if peoples from other worlds such as he merely fell out of the sky every day -
"Oof!" One of the figures running down the street plowed into him - as much his fault as theirs, what with his head turned - but the Judge Magister was made of sterner stuff than most, and while the youth before him had rebounded and tumbled backwards off his armor, he had barely been shifted in place. Still, he felt it prudent to offer one gauntleted hand to the poor creature, wondering if the hectic running meant someone was late for class, somewhere.
"My apologies. Are you hurt?"