[center][color=ed1c24][h2]Wigstan[/h2][/color][/center]

[color=ed1c24][b]Gender:[/b][/color] Male

[color=ed1c24][b]Age:[/b][/color] 26

[b][color=ed1c24]Appearance:[/color][/b] Wigstan is remarkably well preserved complexion, spending much of his life downwind of the sedgy, untainted expanse of the brecon mountains and far from the near-glowing-green hulks of decaying cities to the east. 
A wanderer at heart, he grows his hair thick and matted, a crude first-line against the winters, made ever more bitter by the scattered trees and dusty atmosphere thrown up over 200 years ago, and his face is smoothed and wind-beaten,
 pinking at the rounds of his cheek and on the bridge of his too-short nose. His face casts a stoic picture - his lips almost perma-chapped and tucked into the mouth, and his eyes plumped from squinting at the winds and the cold of
 the exposed flatland-midlands. Nonetheless, he is considered to be of a mild, bland sort of attractiveness, despite a just north of lithe build.  

[b][color=ed1c24]Race:[/color][/b] Human

[b][color=ed1c24]Personality:[/color][/b] Wigstan has grown to be tired and revulsed at the sedentary, subsistent lifestyle that abounds by necesity in the wasteland, finding himself much more at home on the road, camped out and freezing in one England's more 
dramatic landmarks, ones ancient even to the pre-war world. As a result, he has become rather brusk and condescending with the more "simple" folk he encounters in villages, but becomes all the more animated when talk turns to the 
curisoities and wonders to be found away from the bounds of villages and farms. Having grown up in the relatively untouched midlands, he reacts with depression and hopelessness when shown the scars left on the old world - so much of his drive
life derived from a hope for the future. Nonetheless, he is not openly rude or anti-social, and makes for an excitable travelling companion. 


[color=ed1c24][b]Skills/Attributes:[/b][/color] Masterful swordsman, owed to his time spent in the The Ordinem Caelitum, Wigstan is less adept at hand-to-hand encounters, relying instead on dodging the clumsy swings of his opponent and revealing a crippling weakspot. This is not an exact science, and through his travels Wigstan has accumulated quite a few mis-set bones from mistimed steps and aborted parries. He is also an acomplished trekker and survivalist, having spent many years onthe road, learning the tropes of the land so as to find likely shelter and food. Unlike most in the wasteland, he can also read and write well. 

[color=ed1c24][b]Back-story: [/b][/color]
[hider=Parental Information]
Wigstan's parents were well into their thrities when they finally resolved to have a child, far above the "safe" age in the virulent and tumutltous wasteland which has kept life expectancy to a barbaric minimum. They had metas travellers, his mother in the ethnic sense, the daughter of the remenants of the English rooted sect of "Irish travellers" turned to horse-cart trading and roaming once more with the destruction of the roots of the cities. Wigstan's father had been a soldier-of-fortune for a decade of his twenty-eight year life when he stumbled into to the trading forum of his future-wife, Rosy, and whilst the travellers were habitually insular, marrying their offspring only to membersof what now constitutes a tribe, the air of the foreign, of individuality about a man who made a living apart from a family and a band drew Wigstan's mother to elope. 

Together, they roamed the crumbling "Great Em-Six" as far north as Manchester and Carlile and south to where the severn met the irradiated sea and was absorbed by it, where bone-ridged, cripple-like dolphins could been seen poking a long,irradiated snout from beneath the foam. They became a couple of some fame, and oftetimes being sought out by desperate town-dwellers beset by maddened ghouls or those who would much rather take than wait and let grow their sustenance fora swift, and invariably deadly solution. 

[b]This notority, however, begot a bitter price. To thrive, the famously chaste Ordinem demanded tribute from those it ministered to, including, with pious generoisty, the Traveller clans. It had been many years since the Ordinem last exacted their gambit, and tales of a mercenary couple, one half sporting orange-tinged locks and an almost alien manner of speech provided the promise of a renege on their investment. They sent a lone emissary to track down Wigstan's parents, demanding that Rosy forsake her roving spouse and devote herself and her skills to the service of the Lord - no other candidate suited their needs and if she refused, the Ordinem would forsake the patronage and protection they affordedRose's family and declare them "ungodly". Backed into a corner, Wigstan's father sought to exploit and bargain the Ordinem's fatal flaw. Devout Catholics, the Ordinem celebrated the gendered theology of the ruined Church, the claimthat humility, receptiveness and nuturing were the cornerstones of the female, not the body-giving, protective nature of the man, and for this reason, very few women were accepted into their Knightly ranks. To this end, Wigstan's fatheroffered a deal - he claimed his wife was "with child",  not a week or two past, a child who a "wizard" master of the old world discipline of "medicine" had confirmed was male. Wigstan's father promised that when this child was old enough to walk, that he would personally carry him to the Ordinem's nearest hearth.[/b]

Satisfied, the Knight departed, eager to report news of the boon reaped from his endeavour, but Wigstan's father had lied - there was no child, and he knew of no way to know if it was male, at any rate. It seemed a faultless ruse, the mercenary would keep his beloved wife and travelling companion, and the ordinem would never bother them again, in return the couple would simply dissappear into unremarkable ignominity. 

To this end, Wigstan's father slowly lead the couple to the north, towards a settlement he had promised himself that, one day, he would settle himself in - Warwick Castle. Far from the nuclear blasts that had levelled so much of England'smonuments, Warwick Castle stood, an uncrumbling, thousand year old fort, walled, watered and protected against anything Wigstan's father had heard of beseting it.  Too, the settlment, grown around the encircled green, was exceptionallyselective when admitting reisdents, and largely ignorant of its ducal past. In the shadow of this settlement, Wigstan's father professed his exhaustion at what he called his "hollow life", and his enduring desire for an honest family to care for. Rosy accepted the proposal, and, discarding their weapons and donning more humble attire, they approached the gates. 

Both were accepted without much deliberation - goodly, toughened people, strong enough to police and protect the settlement were in far too short supply, and they were both given roles as watchmen. The settlement was generally peaceful,and over six years of living, they had scarcely seen a hostile soul crest the only accesible horizon and between the half-burnt trees to assail the enormous fortification. In their security, Wigstan neglected his oath to the Ordinem, and he and his wife finally sired a son, Wigstan himself, though that was not his original name.
[/hider]


For the first ten years of his life, Wigstan lived in idellic bordem. Aprenticed as a farmhand at the age of six, Wigstan longed for the evenings, when he would sit around the fire and demand his parents regail him with tales of theirtravels, now long even in their memories, enamoured with the twisted spires of metal and glass that spoked from the southern grounds, and terrified at the prospect of the shuffling ghouls that dotted the roads and roved around the farmlands just beyond the walls. Most days, whilst permitted to leave his studies as a farmer, he would exploit his father to let him climb the battlements to the tallest of the spires, to look out over the green-land, stretching just enough to meet the smoking desolation of the cities to the north. The uniquely verdant landscape, the chance for blissful monotony seemed poisioned to the young Wigstan, the tales of his parents exploiting ringing in his ears and pulling,unerringly, from the heaving battlements and out into the vast and decidedly un-monotonous world beyond. 

Within two years, though, at the age of 12, Wigstan got what he wished. The Marauders, a confederation of the most vicious raders that remain, picking at the husk of England, freshy formed, needed to make markers of what little unpicked-scraps remain. Warwick was the perfect target. Resolving to carve their name into the folkloric physche of the wasteland, they besieged the settlement - their leader challenging Warwick's fiercest "champion" to a duel to save their town.

Desperate, Warwick's leadership turned to the outside. Evesham Abbey, a stronghold of The Ordinem Caelitum, was only three days walk away, and it was clear that Warwick now needed a kind of protection they could never provide, whateverthe personal cost. Wigstan's father overheard the plans and, knowing that if they were summoned, the Ordinem would claim its tribute in recruits from him too, his son, and so took drastic measures to avert it. One dawn, the castle looked down in horror as Wigstan's father, crude machete and piecemeal leather in hand. The old mercenary fought valiantly, but even with the salvation of his son to drive him, time and comfort had taken their terrible toll, and with one, maddened swing of board, the Marauder launched Wigstan's father's skull into the sky. In horror, his wife ran to bring save his corpse from becoming their trophy, but mistaking her grief for agression, the marauders felled her, too. 

It took three more days for the Ordinem to relieve the siege, and once they strode, triumphant through the groaning portcullus to collect their prize, Wigstan was far too reclusive and numb to care, not when he was carted off to the Abbey, not when he was branded in the cross and cooled in baptisimal fonts. 

Over many years, they filled the bitter memories of his old, sedintary life with the tinge of revulsion. Wigstan, a name gifted to him by the Abbott of the order, was taught that his presence here was to absolve and oppose the sins  that had plagued his progenitors. Wigstan's parents, he was told, had been brash hedonists, trapsing the world and killing with abandon in the pursuit of wealth, and then "settling" to reap their own selfish sustenance. The Travellers, he was taught, flew in the face of the untity brought by "Christ", their insular nature a backwards, trivial extension of selfish self-preservation.  All this could be absolved through his service to the Ordinem, through his blind obedience to the Abbott, and through his zealous destrtuction of those that sought to test man's Stewardship of God's creation. 

For most of his life, Wigstan subscribed fully to the ideals of his order. When he became a Knight, he relished he savants into the wasteland, hunting down and destroying the tainted, restoring duty and alturism to the human race.

That was, until he found damning disproof of the Ordinem's xenophobia. Whilst pursuing a Ghoul, one who had been thieving from a nearby town, he stumbled upon a baby, crying in a cloistered cave deep in some thicket. Reaching out to save the child, he heard a cruch of twigs behind him. Turning, there was the ghoul, stolen grain and sweet-things in hand. It had been a friend's, a woman, a great love kept apart from him by the trappings of his decaying features, whonow had no-one but him. This ghoul, the ordinem saw as an infiltrator, a plague to be irradicated, but beneath his creased exterior law a soul capable of all the beauty he had once though reserved for humans. 

Shaken, Wigstan let the creature depart, though he took the child back to the abbey, to give it a future worth living. There, he asked his Abbott to send him south, beyond the bounds of the Ordinem's purview, to expand and evangalise,co-opt the wasetland to their beliefs. In truth, he felt moved to some time away from the Ordinem's beliefs and practices after his experience, but the Abbott believed his intentions were pure, and it was agreed that he was to be sentsouth the day after christmas, to return not more than two years later.

And so, Wigstan set out, in the snow, frigid and stumbling, in the hope of clarity to guide his future path.  
 

[color=ed1c24][b]Other: [/b][/color]

 - Weapons : A crude sword made from melted brass and bronze, wrapped at the hild in tapered leather. A small bronze dagger fastened at his back.
 - Apparel : A woven silk and salvage nylon cloak, complete with hood - blue. A gas mask, one eye cracked, painted in the colours of the cross of Saint George. Painted curiass of salvaged kevlar and carbon-weave, though weak   
	where the patches are sown. Thick, fur stuffed boots.