[hider=Lucias Vypren][center]N A M E / G E N D E R / A G E
[color=gray]Lord Lucias Vypren / Male / 49[/color]

A P P E A R A N C E
[color=gray][hider=Image][img]http://orig11.deviantart.net/f992/f/2011/195/6/e/lord_of_highwayman_by_go_maxpower-d3raalx.jpg[/img][/hider]
Lord Lucias stands at a height of just below six feet, a few hairs' breadths shorter than his son. His dark hair is close-cropped and beginning to gray, and over a square jaw he maintains only a thin layer of stubble. His eyes, a deep cloudy blue-gray, are deep-set into his face. Once a man with a girth to match his height, he would appear something of a gaunt shadow in comparison to those who once saw him -- the lingering effect of a sickness that has not quite finished taking its toll on him. 

Oftentimes Lucias does not share his son's affinity for porting mail in court, and dresses in a more traditional yellow-and-green surcoat and fur cloak. His armor itself, when he chooses to wear it, is a rather expensive and well-made suit of steel, all sharp angles and edges and with two coiled vipers clasping his cloak onto the shoulders.[/color]

P E R S O N A L I T Y
[color=gray]Lucias was once a boy of fiery temper, not unlike his son, quick to anger but just as quick to calm. However, he came back from the War of the Ninepenny Kings particularly shaken, and with every passing year grew more solemn. He attributes this off-handedly to the wisdom of age, though no doubt there are other factors.

Lucias has always been more pragmatic than zealous, viewing his worldly oaths more important than those of the gods. Regardless, he tries to do what is right, first for his family and then in general. Immediately below the desire to honor his oaths and protect his family is a somewhat prickly sense of honor -- Lucias views his House as deserving more than the status it currently holds, frequently lamenting his Andal ancestors' positions as petty kings of the Blue Fork. He views it as a matter of irritation that his dynasty does not receive the same amount of attention as even, say, the Blackwoods or the Mallisters. Perhaps it makes perfect sense, then, that he is quite fond of his Frey relatives by marriage.

Lucias likes to consider himself kind to the common man, but in spite of it he finds it hard to shake the idea of the smallfolk as numbers to be expended. He is perhaps overly cautious even as it relates to the mild rivers of the central riverlands, keeping his granaries perpetually filled with food in case of harvest failure or some similar occurrence.[/color]

P R O S  A N D  C O N S
[/center][color=gray][b]Pros:[/b]
- Practical: In the end, Lucias harbors few illusions when it comes to such ideals as honor and dignity. He tries to maintain them for himself, but is not so naive as to expect others to, or to keep it at all costs.
- Calm: Lucias is not a man quick to be stirred in anger. He knows when to listen before speaking, and when silence is a better answer than fury.
- Capable: Skilled all-around in governance and command by experience, Lucias is also reasonably well-trained with a sword, though perhaps not to the same level as his son or indeed many of the household knights.

[b]Cons:[/b]
- Frail: Lucias has not quite managed to shake off a persistent cold for the last several years, a condition that may be attributed to his age. He does not have the same endurance that he did a decade ago.
- Proud: In his mind, the Vyprens should hold a respect due to them for their loyalty and history, and this status is not given. While he holds a more personal respect for his current liege lord, others may not find the same amount of deference.
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B I O G R A P H Y
[color=gray]Lucias Vypren was born the second and final son of his small family, his father a hard man of little renown and his mother a Blackwood from some distant branch of the dying tree. Lucias' older brother was a good eight years older than him, already a fine page by the time of the boy's birth. Lucias enjoyed a somewhat affluent childhood, for his family maintained (and still does) a reasonably impressive proportion of wealth to their size, and expected to rule some smaller keep or holdfast in service to his brother when he came of age.

When Lucias held about eleven years to his name, however, the War of the Ninepenny Kings broke out. Lucias, enthusiastic and fiery-tempered as only new-made squires might be, served his older brother as he fought at the Stepstones. In the same great battle where the final Blackfyre pretender was slain and a dozen great faces first distinguished themselves, however, Lucias' brother took a wounding. While it did not at first seem fatal, the young man's shoulder turned necrotic on the ship back towards the mainland, and he died miles from the shore.

It fell upon the young Lucias, then, to secure a means of travel back to his home and bring the news and the corpse to his grieving lord father and lady mother. Humbled by his experiences on the Stepstones, Lucias reacted to his new position as his father's heir with a loss of much of the fiery temper for which he had before been known.

A short time after Lucias reached his twentieth year of age, his father passed away from a sudden chill, and Lucias became the Lord of Fairmarket. He set his sights to managing the surrounding lands, improving tax flow and tariffs from the city proper and encouraging its development. This could not last, however -- little more than about five years later, Robert's Rebellion broke out in earnest. Lucias joined the fighting for his liege lord, where he faced off under Lord Hoster Tully at the Battle of the Bells and slew a half-dozen freeriders and one knight of little renown. Though much in the realm found itself fundamentally changed following the toppling of the Targaryens, Lucias still had the same keep and the same town to rule, and so he returned to his home with his young children and his Frey wife and lived happily there for a number more of years. Eventually he sent his only son, Damon, to serve as a squire at Seagard. This was a choice that Lucias would later come to regard as bittersweet -- it is said that when the Greyjoy Rebellion began and the ironborn swept down onto the Mallisters, Lucias had refused to commit his levies to the storming of the Isles until he learned that the ironmen had been swept back into the sea, for fear that he might not receive word if his son had died.

When it became apparent that Damon was not, in fact, dead, Lucias commanded his troops and fought at the siege of Pyke, storming the walls with a number of other notables, including the king himself. Though he took no wound in the battle, Lucias caught a fever at sea that he would not quite manage to be rid of in the coming years, in the end losing a not-insignificant amount of mass and becoming quite a bit more frail. Following the war's end Lucias recalled his newly-knighted son homewards, ostensibly to find him a wife but primarily to keep his family close, and maintained a fruitful and careful rule -- but for a single irritation, in which some stormlander tourney knight managed to catch the favor of his only daughter. After the Wylde boy had won the tournament, however, what could Lucias do but allow it? He kept the two at his own court as the price.

It could be considered a bit of a boon, then, that no further wars broke out until the present. Now the land stands once more on edge, and Lucias must lament seeing a fourth major war in his lifetime. The better question, of course: With whom shall he stand?[/color]

E Q U I P M E N T
[color=gray]On his person at most times is a fur cloak, a surcoat bearing his coat of arms, a reasonably fat coin purse and a sword. In actual battle, of course, he owns a valuable and well-made suit of plate, a destrier, and lance and shield. At his disposal is the moderate wealth of Fairmarket.[/color][/center]
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I might spruce him up a bit more in the future.