Griffith

A young man of arresting beauty, Griffith has silver hair, blue eyes, and a lean frame near 178 centimeters tall. His looks won admiration even during his mercenary days, and after his incarnation they become something almost otherworldly, striking Holy See soldiers and hardened apostles alike into wonder, some coveting his face and others aching to defile it. In the field he is unmistakable, encased in ornate silver-white plate chased with feathers and bird motifs and mounted on a matching white steed. Reborn as the demon Femto, he takes the shape of a dark-armored, winged being, riding on the raven-black wings that carry him aloft.

Griffith bears himself with a grace and refinement that seem at odds with his lowborn roots, his sharp mind and calm leaving onlookers amazed. No one can overlook his presence; people meet him with worship or with dread, and his charisma draws followers from every station in life. Under the polish burns a limitless ambition, alive since boyhood, when he first fixed his gaze on a far-off castle and swore to seize a kingdom of his own. He feels real warmth for his comrades, mourning the men who fall in his name and once even selling his own body to a lecherous lord so they might live, yet in private he holds them beneath him, tools for his dream rather than his equals. In his mind a true friend must be an equal who holds a dream that is theirs alone, a bar he feels only Guts comes near. Guts alone can still that hunger, and the swordsman's leaving cracks his composure and sets his downfall in motion. Remade as Femto, he is emptied of human feeling while keeping his memories, his ego, and his ambition whole, calling himself free with a heart gone cold after facing the anguish of those he sacrificed. Only the lingering emotions of the boy fused into his new vessel now and then move him against his own will, even wringing a single tear of longing from him.

Born into poverty, Griffith raised the Band of the Falcon in his youth and forged it into a dreaded mercenary company, gathering figures such as Casca, whom he saved from a predatory nobleman. To bankroll his swelling army, he sold himself to the rich Tudor lord Gennon. His fortunes turned when he claimed the fearsome young mercenary Guts through a duel, taken with the man's raw power. As his band racked up victories in Midland's war against Tudor, Griffith earned a knighthood and the rank of viscount, edging ever nearer his dream. The crowning blow came at the fortress of Doldrey, where his forces cracked Tudor's hold and effectively ended the century-long conflict, a triumph that made him a celebrated savior across the land. Along that climb he outfoxed his court rivals, feigning his own death to torch a tower packed with plotting nobles and having Guts quietly dispatch threats like General Julius.

It all came apart when Guts left the band to follow his own path. Reeling and stripped of his usual reason, Griffith bedded Princess Charlotte that very night and was arrested for treason. A year of savage torture in the Tower of Rebirth left him crippled and voiceless, his dream seemingly in ashes even once his comrades tore him free. Faced with his broken body and unslaked ambition, and summoned by his Crimson Beherit as a solar eclipse descended, he invoked the Eclipse and surrendered the band as a sacrifice. Accepting at last who he truly was, and naming Guts the one man who had ever drawn his mind off his ambition, he rose again as Femto, fifth of the God Hand, the moment sealed by his violation of Casca before a helpless Guts. Two years on, still unable to take full form in the physical world, he swatted Guts aside with contempt when the Count's beherit briefly called the God Hand forth.

Across a Midland torn by plague and Kushan invasion, prophecy told of a coming deliverer, the Falcon of Light. Turning a throng of Albion refugees into sacrifices, Femto took on a physical body wearing Griffith's face and drew a new Band of the Falcon of mighty apostles around himself. His reunion with Guts and Rickert on the Hill of Swords was ice-cold, disturbed only by the faint pulse of the child bound into his vessel, after which he set to driving the Kushan from Midland. He reclaimed Charlotte, brought Emperor Ganishka to heel, and at Vritannis forced the emperor into retreat. When Ganishka rose again as a monstrous horror, Griffith turned the Skull Knight's space-cleaving stroke into him, unleashing the Great Wave that welded the physical realm to the astral one and gave rise to Fantasia, lifting up his ideal capital, Falconia. As Supreme Commander of Midland's army and the foretold Falcon of Light, he now leads humankind and demonkind together, beyond the reach of any mortal blade save on full-moon nights, when he turns into the Moonlight Boy, and against those who stand outside his 'story'. Spurned by a grieving Rickert yet unshaken, he finally bore a memory-lost Casca home to Falconia, his eyes already turning eastward toward whatever his dream demands next.