The very essence of Balthier began with a single incantation.
Ffamran let the spell run off his tongue one evening and, disgusted, his father scolded him. In Archadia, magick was a toy for the lower classes—even in the Imperial Army, the Mages were isolated from the other soldiers. They were of poor breeding, never pronounced their rs or qs properly, and were made to wear ridiculously high hats. When Ffamran dared suggest he become an Imperial Mage rather than a Judge, the only answer his father dignified him with was the scraping of silver against his dinner plate.
From then on, magick was a secret world he could escape to, far away from Archadia and its high-rise buildings that never reached the sky, its blood lust for science and war (soon enough it was evident the two went hand in hand; Draklor's newest engine could pilot a cab as well as it could a gunner ship), out-dated social hierarchy and triple layered prose. Of course, anyone could cast a spell; anyone could memorise each and every incantation; anyone could buy magicite; but Ffamran took all the old ideas of magick and made them work for him.
First, he visited Old Archades where magick was a marvel, not child's play. He said nothing and smiled. At the age of thirteen he could manipulate a fire spell in his hand so the flames swirled into a perfect orb with such speed that the heat did not only rise upwards, but burnt everything around it. Three months later and he could do the same with blizzard; water and aero proved so easy that he felt no desire to try them again. Eventually he could balance one in each palm, and after hours of scorched knees and wet toes he could throw the spells from hand to hand without damaging either sphere.
By the time he was sixteen he learnt that magick could be more heady than any drug from the slums, if manipulated properly. With enough concentration he could remove time from his senses, and the magick would drain so much energy that he was left physically exhausted, sprawled wide-eyed as the whole world span either too fast or not quick enough. (And it fitted his moods; when there was too much excitement in one day he could speed it out of his system, and when there was nothing but anger he could thus restrain himself.)
But he didn't just abuse magick for his own ends. While working on his first airship, he soon discovered that mixing an ether with the engine oil would let the ship's vanishga cloak stay up for weeks on end. Upon joining the army, it was easy to garner his peers' respect—they took an immediate dislike to him because of his connections, thought he had not earnt his place; though truth be told, he would have happily abandoned his station—by pulling water from the air when the terrain became more demanding, coarse and dry. Still, perhaps they turned the nose up at him as they drank like dogs from their waterskins nonetheless. After that, after the war he never fought, Ffamran stopped stealing water from the clouds.
It was so very unarchadian; it was not losing yourself in experiments and research notes; it gained him neither chops nor gil; and so Ffamran thought himself the only person in the whole of Ivalice who could love such an overlooked art.
And then he met Fran. Fran who used magick as naturally as the sky turned from blue to black, then back to blue again; Fran who reached out as if plucking threads of Mist from the air and weaving them into magicks and mysteries with the same calmness usually reserved for breathing. When they began to fight side by side he listened to her cast the spells as if hypnotised of his own freewill; she pronounced each syllable differently to him (but was certainly never crude with her rs or qs), spoke in her mother tongue and even when he became Balthier, Ffamran believed she was enticing the gods to intervene in the form of hellfire.
One day, when his body was racked with shudders so violent no elixirs could douse, Ffamran told her he thought it sounded beautiful, and languidly compared it to how he had believed freedom would sound as a child. Fran simply shrugged dismissively and said she had not thought of it that way before—and then, several minutes later, said she hadn't thought a Hume would be able to pull magick as if from his veins so naturally.
After months of pirating, Balthier (no longer associated with the long dead Ffamran) learnt he was more skilled with white magicks than he would have ever thought. He scarce used them, and it was Elza who first pointed it out when he returned to port with a particularly unsettled Fran. She had been inches away from loosing an arm. It was a wildly difficult bill to accept, just the two of them; Balthier decided that barely winning was as good as a flawless victory, because he could always gloss over the details if anyone asked; in the end, with his hands glowing green, Fran was not even left with a scar.
A sixteen year old Ffamran in the back of his head told him how skilled he was with time magick. From then on they matched magicks with jobs in the same way they would decided on whether to use swords or ranged weapons, or what wine went best with dinner.
Next came Vaan. Like most things in his life, the boy never had the chance to learn magick properly. He used it like a street performer but a lacked reason to be so confident. Flashy spells were his favourite—fire, Holy, flare and the like—and he saw no reasons for green magick when he could wash away the damage with spells. Balthier would always be there to cure him, anyway.
Vaan used magick not like something he could create on a whim, but as an extension of his body: using fire was the rough equivalent of exhaling, as if he was ridding himself of a great heat in the pit of his stomach. His fingers would curl to form a funnel around his lips and he'd raise his last two fingers as he burnt the air away. Balthier soon came to learn that he couldn't stay still and do it, would always run and spread that damage, some part of him convinced that the spell would backfire. As he grew more confident he'd make the spell last longer, or use his sword to reflect it. (He did this one times to many once, and the handle became so hot he threw it from his hands, and was subsequently paralysed by a malboro.)
Penelo, Balthier noted, tried to use magick in the same way that Fran did, and had there not been a margin of some eighty years worth of experience between them, he didn't think there would be a great contrast in skill. She was a little too cautious though; to her, each and every spell had to be perfectly placed, like a step in a dance. After battles she would scold Vaan for getting the names of spells wrong, (fi-ra-ga, not fire-guh!) and at night she looked after the party's magicite, as if it needed motherly hands to hold it.
The first spell Ffamran had uttered—the one that lead him to the conclusion that there was more to life than pouring over Lord Avon's plays in the Akedemy—was thunder. At ten he fabricated a bolt between his fingertips, and had been so overwhelmed and utterly terrified that he threw it far away from his body. It shattered a vase as it fizzled out of being by his bed stand. You see, he had not really expected it to work; if magick was so easy, if it was real, then why wasn't his father using it, why hadn't his brothers shown off yet? Why didn't the professors, well-bred men with perfectly formed accents, not teach magick in class? The answer was, of course, that they thought themselves above such a fantastical and absurd world. If they could mix chemikals, bottle cure and wrap blizzard up in a mote, then why dirty their own hands? Ffamran suddenly felt that he did not want to live in a country that thought obscene what he thought awe inspiring.
All at once, he felt as if he belonged in some fairytale or epic poem; and in all the books he owned, even those without pictures, the sky was always painted such a beautiful colour. Up there, in the blue and white infinity, there were no vases to be smashed.
Despite being skilled with the sword, Balthier was disappointed to learn that the Princess had no apparently talent with magick whatsoever. Oh, she could do damage to be sure. At times her power was as devastating as it was beautiful, but in truth it was blunt. Her offense was so extreme it became a defense in its own right. She did not mutter incantations to herself on the battlefield, believing that it would show some weakness. But without words, when she was trying to bring peace, what did she have? She did not sing like the wind rushing though leaves as Fran would, but swung her spells like Vossler did his broadsword.
Ashe used magick as a weapon, as a way forwards, while Balthier treated it as an art and a way out. And curiously, even as the Princess's firaga left another landscape scorched red, Balthier found that he had a kindling sense of respect for it.
The first magick she had learnt, Fran explained one night as they lay on the Strahl's hull, was water. Everything, she went on to say, came back to water, and nothing was exempt: it fell from the heavens, ran through the earth, and all of sudden rivers and oceans seemed insignificant. Balthier listened as she spoke about the Green Word and Mist, the Wood itself and how everything became entwined, and magick was not so very magic when they thought about a human heartbeat; in the same way that Ffamran had not wanted to be part of Archades's world, Balthier felt horribly separated from the breathing earth. All that he could think of when she created metaphors and punctuated sentences with foreign words were equations and twisted engine coils.
Water, she came back to say, is part of everything. From then on Balthier was not stuck between two worlds, just struggling through the fog to where he wanted to be. So touched was he in that moment that he cast water between his palms, even after his idle resolve not to use it ever again, and it was as if he was staring into liquid orichalcum.
Out of the party, Basch surprised him the most. Not only was the captain a Knight worthy of his reputation, a King Slayer unfairly branded so, but he was remarkably clever. Just by cutting into a piece of magicite and noting the colour of the smooth side he could read the stone's properties, and by counting the ridges could measure its potency. Still, he rarely used magick, if ever. Balthier could count the number of times on one hand—the time that stuck out most predominately in his mind was when the thought of facing Gabranth had him more shaken than any dragon or demon, and quietly he had forced bravery on himself.
In Archadia, Jules briefly shared his passion for magick. Jules, two years younger than him, pronounced more than two letters incorrectly. Ffamran cast an iffy haste spell he'd haggled from a traveling Seeq on the both of them, and they'd spent much of the day running around Tsenoble in circles and squares, and then shapes so bizarre that they lost each other more than once. In that moment, no one in the world was fast enough to touch them. When they finally began to come down, Jules threw float into the air so that neither of them had to bother taking the stairs down to Old Archades.
The day Ffamran became a Judge, Jules realised he could make a better living off information than he could magicks, and Ffamran was trapped all over again. Not only inside the empire this time, for there was a wall of steel all around him. If he were to fight for his country he wanted to be a Mage, but the hats, his father said, the hats were ridiculous. Not quite bold enough to betray his father so obviously, Ffamran began wearing the high-collared shirts Cid hated so.
Eventually Balthier used magick so much his whole body became exhausted. He couldn't think straight for the pain in his head was persistent, and every time he tried so much as to move he was violently sick. Even magickal drugs refused to stay down, and ethers only made him feel worse when they ought have refreshed him. Fran had not been his partner for long and probably thought him a fool. Days later, when what he later came to realise was what Fran felt every time the Mist became too thick cleared a little, Fran brought him a gun and did not say a word. The first time he fired it he broke his wrist. From then on, he learnt the very painful lesson that magick was to be used in moderation, even if there was a crystal nearby, never not to be abused. It took him years to work out the exact same thing when it came to the subject of alcohol.
One day Vaan saw Balthier carving tiny globes out of fire and ice and, as with all things, wanted to learn from the pirate. They sat cross-legged on the floor so that Balthier could better explain the process, and after several hours Vaan had managed to manipulate fire so that it resembled some sort of whip. He could swing it for three whole seconds before it vanished into nothing, but ice just splintered in his hands. Privately Balthier was impressed, and so taught Vaan how to adjust an airship's lift that same day. The boy took it for coincidence, and from then on lashed out with fire whenever the opportunity arose.
When the nasty business of Bahamut was dealt with, because with a broken arm he could not very well take to the skies again straight away, Balthier wrinkled his nose to keep his glasses in place and took a pen in a vague, honest attempt to formulate some sort of meaning for magick. In the end he wrote in circles, and it became a long-winded dictionary; in the corner he scrawled the blueprints for a new airship and drew a gun and a bow on the side. What he wrote came down a several key ideals: if Vaan was spontaneous whereas Penelo was cautious, then Ashe was blunt in contrast to Basch's sharpness; so certainly, if Fran was malleable then he was coarse and unrefined.
Eventually, Balthier forgot whether he was talking about magick or the human heart. Of all the hundreds of vulgar, poetic things he could say about the fire spinning in his palms or the water running over his skin, not a single thing was untrue; a thousand ideas he came up with, and they did not even give the page a pulse.
The very essence of Balthier began with a single incantation, and Ffamran ended in much the same way. One perfectly formed fire spell burnt what was unnecessary away, was all it took to leave his past in ashes. Smiling, the Sky Pirate relaxed against the Strahl's cold metal plating. Up there, in the blue and white infinity, there were no vases to be smashed.