"It's Taranis. Just... Taranis."

Age: 42

Race: Human

Physical Description:
A gruff soldier, Taranis bears the marks of decades of fighting. His armor, given to him on the day of his ascent into the ranks of the Silver Hand, is now battered and dented, and spotty with grime its wearer couldn't be bothered to clean. His sword and shield are in better state, thankfully, given their importance to his daily survival. The blade is short and evidently built for practicality rather than aesthetics.

He is a bit short, built stocky rather than tall. Taranis sports a gruff blond beard, though in recent years it has begun to turn white. He smiles often and easily, though it is usually without humor. His wider smiles, revealing the large gap in his front teeth where an orc smashed his face in, are downright intimidating.

Personality:
Taranis is easy-going, apathetic, and occasionally sociopathic; dubious qualities for a Paladin of the Order of the Silver Hand. Once, when he was young, he was the model of a Paladin, virtuous and courageous. But the war against the orcs had cost him in more than just blood, and he left something of his humanity on those desolate battlefields. The young knight was particularly marked by the ravaging of Alterac, and the massacres he participated in there. Faced with such wholesale slaughter and butchery, he coped by caring less and less about the world around him.

In spite of the glory he earned, he remains humble, seeing nothing to be particularly proud of in the act of killing, and always guilty of his secret pleasure in the act. He still strives to the Order's goals, though perhaps straying from their spirit.

Background:
At the tender age of seventeen, the young knight Taranis was admitted into the newly created order, the Knights of the Silver Hand. These paladins wielded the power of the Holy Light to defend the northern kingdoms, as the orcish hordes spilled from the ruins of Azeroth. The Second War had begun.

The model paladin, Taranis made a name for himself on the battlefield, defending the realms of man. His great claim to fame came when a sizable orcish force attempted to sneak into a town and massacre the garrison; discovering them, he fought his way to a nearby guard tower and rang the great bell, alerting the defenders of their peril. It is from this incident that he has derived his epithet, to his great consternation.

He was never the same after the War. So many of his friends had died, or disappeared through the Dark Portal in a doomed expedition to the orcish homeland. Faced with an end to the killing, Taranis found that he could not handle the new peace. His restlessness was looked down on by his holy peers, who saw something vile in his fascination with death. In the decades since the war ended, he has been kept busy on near constant hunts against renegade orcs. Naturally, he has become something of an expert in the killing of greenskins in the time since.

And then everything changed. During one of his rare stays in the capital, the prince, Arthas, returned from an expedition to Northrend and unexpectedly forced the succession. The city became a living hell, where seemingly innocent neighbors turned on their former friends with mad fanaticism, butchering them in the name of their dark god, and the dead rose to prey on the living. Few survived, and Taranis only barely so. He hewed his way out of the massacre, and rode hard in no particular direction, driven by primal fear. He stopped in the first settlement he came across, near Silverpine, to warn them of the danger.

That village was Brittlepond.