The Knives Across the Sea – Finn’s Connection to Limsa Lominsa

As Finn grew older, the errands sent by the Tonberries became less obscure and more ambitious. One such dispatch brought him west — to Limsa Lominsa, a city bursting with noise, trade, and danger. A place almost allergic to silence.

Finn hated it.

The chaos, the people, the bluster — it was everything the Tonberries were not. But amid the clamor, something caught his eye: a small gathering near the piers, laughter and shouts rising from a makeshift ring. At the center, knives flew through the air — clean, precise, fast.

A dagger-throwing competition.

It wasn’t the noise that drew him in — it was the precision. The calculations. The millisecond choices that made the difference between a dull thud and a perfect strike.

Finn watched silently from the edge. Until he stepped up.

Meeting Jacke Swallow – Blades, Banter, and Brotherhood

Among the crowd was a brash, fast-talking Lominsan youth — a thieves’ guild trainee with a crooked smile and hands faster than most eyes could follow: Jacke Swallow.

When Finn stepped into the ring and landed a near-perfect set of throws — without flair, without words — Jacke took notice.

What followed was the first of many dagger duels that would span years. The two could not be more different:

• Jacke was loud, flashy, and full of grin.
• Finn was quiet, calm, and impossibly hard to read.

And yet, they understood each other completely — not through chatter, but through knives.

Each year, they’d meet at the Annual Lominsan Dagger Toss, alternating first and second place. Each tried to beat the other, but only by merit — never malice. Their rivalry was sharp, but never cruel.

When asked, Jacke would say:

“That little shadow? Best throw I ever saw — second only to mine, o’ course.”

Finn would simply shrug. But his eyes would say otherwise.

Friends, Rivals, Reflections

Though their paths diverged — Jacke into the spotlight of guild leadership, Finn into the shadows between systems — they stayed connected.

• Jacke admired Finn’s precision and calm.
  “That quiet one’s more dangerous than half the pirates on the sea,” he once joked — though he never laughed when he said it.
• Finn respected Jacke’s instinct and adaptability.
  He would never admit it, but Jacke’s flair and spontaneity made Finn question his own rigid methods — and kept him sharp.

They trained together when they could. Sparred without needing to speak. And every now and then, Finn would vanish from Limsa just before trouble began — only for Jacke to find a message scrawled on a crate lid, or a target already taken care of.

The Tonberry Tie to the Sea

Though many associate Tonberries with ancient ruins and underground passages, some clans settled near coastal caves east of Limsa Lominsa, far from the city’s reach. They preferred the cool damp, the fog, the silence.

For Finn, this made Limsa a second home — one he never fully embraced, but one he came to know well. The sea breeze never quite agreed with him, but the knives did.

And perhaps, in Jacke Swallow, he found one of the few people who didn’t need words to understand what a knife really means.