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Sex: Male

Place of Origin: Silesia

Appearance: Hakim is an olive-skinned man standing at five feet and nine inches. He is a wiry man with toned muscles hidden beneath his layers of simple garb designed for travel. As such, he is easily dismissed and underestimated. Bandages wrapped up to his forearms cover an intricate tattoo across his right hand. He has a collection of scars across his arms, torso, and some even on his face from his years of training. Hakim’s face has sharp, hawkish features with a nose to match. He can usually be seen with a layer of dark stubble across his cheeks and jawline. Thick dark eyebrows rest over a pair of bright golden eyes with an unnerving feeling they are looking right through you. To stave off the sun, Hakim is known to obscure his features with a set of wraps. Beneath these wraps, his dark hair falls just short of his shoulders in a mess of curls.

Psyche: At his core, Hakim is a simple man. He was once content to sit idle and be someone’s blade, but he has recently broken away from that life and struggles to see himself as more than just a tool. He has been described as harsh and quiet. He is rarely known to speak, and when he does it is simplistic, blunt ideas that he shares. Philosophy and scholarship are completely foreign ideas to him, and one time he thought them to be things that only further complicated matters at hand. Recently, however, he has been shown how valuable they can be, and he struggles too with trying to learn new ideas.

Skills: Through years of training, Hakim has developed a range of abilities. He has become a near-master swordsman in the use of the two swords strapped to his waist. Though he is not a master by any means, Hakim is able to hold his own in hand-to-hand combat. Hakim is able to move about unseen and unheard when necessary. When fighting, he relies more upon his agility and chooses to forgo wearing heavier armor.

Equipment: Hakim’s main pieces of equipment are his swords with their long, curved blades fastened to his belt. Other than his weapons, Hakim carries simple travel rations, spare clothing, tools to care for his blades, and simple medicinal supplies all in a leather satchel slung over his shoulder with a bedroll made of horsehide strapped over it.

Bio: From an early age, Hakim’s life was rife with hardships; both parents died when he was barely seven years of age. After their deaths, he was left to fend for himself. To survive, he became like a feral animal, shrinking away from people and stealing scraps whenever he could, from whoever he could. Hakim became no stranger to beatings, and he went without food more than a few times. Many times while living on the streets Hakim was forced to fight others living like him. All the hardships of the street taught him to trust no one and do whatever he had to in order to survive. For years, he struggled and fought to survive until he and other children from the street were rounded up by the tribe leader’s men and were taken to a space of newly constructed barracks. The leader himself met them there and told them they would have a home and be fed, but they would have to earn it. For that first night they were all permitted to eat and sleep in the assemblage of tents erected for them. The beds and food provided were comfortable and feeling, but still the gathered children were on edge; they either broke off into groups of familiar faces or by themselves.

After that first night, the tribe leader returned with his man and showed the children how they would earn their food and bed. From then on, the leader’s men subjected the children to harsh training to mold them into blades for the leader’s use. Their training began with running them ragged with laboring tasks. The training slowly moved into training the children to fight with their hands against armed opponents. The division amongst the children grew as the training wore on, with several groups of the children attempting to gain power and influence over the others. This resulted in several fights, which the soldiers in charge of training did nothing to quell. They encouraged this behavior for a time, but eventually as the training grew more harsh and the soldiers began actually breaking the children down they began to punish any sort of disobedience severely. To further break the children, they began pitting them against one another and would force them even to go so far as to kill one another.

By the end of their training, the children had been broken down to the point of thinking of themselves as blades to be pointed. To show this, each was marked by an intricate tattoo, resembling a henna, across their right hand. For years, Hakim worked as one of these marked assassins for his tribe leader. He was as close to feeling content in this life as one could be after enduring what he did. He carried out his orders and silenced those who needed to be silenced, until he was sent to end the life of an elderly philosopher who spoke out against the tribe leader. Hakim paid him a visit under the cloak of night and found he was also a religious radical and adhered to ideals both of Ill’llii as well as other gods worshipped and spoken about throughout the Cradle. This alone was grounds to kill the man upon, especially on top of how outspoken he was against the tribe leader. Something stayed Hakim’s blade though, some strange sense of curiosity for the first time in a long time. Instead, he spoke with the man, and he told Hakim of other gods and philosophies and theories of how everything could traced back with a small singular strand of familiarity and of how much bigger a place the world was than their tribe’s home and even the Cradle.

Though the ideas largely flew over his head, he was fascinated and wanted to see more than what he had been told and led to believe. He returned to his leader and told him the radical had fled and was nowhere to be found. Unfortunately, the leader was not a man to be tested ot to let grudges go easily. He sent Hakim and several other Hands to hunt this man on the road. Being trained as they were, they quickly caught up to him. When they moved in for the kill something in Hakim snapped, and before he fully realized what he was doing his blades were drawn and slashing through two of the four sent with him. The remaining did not fall as easily, and before he could dispose of them both they had managed to deliver a fatal wound to the radical. Injured himself, Hakim held the man as he died. His departing wisdom was to tell Hakim to travel, to learn, and hopefully to come to think of himself as more than a weapon to be used by another. As he breathed his last, he gifted Hakim a chain decorated with the symbols of gods worshipped all over the Cradle. Taking what he could from the dead around him, Hakim left his old life behind and struck out on the road.