Name: Karliege
Race: Human, perhaps it should be considered formerly human
Nationality: Aldebarani
Occupation: Sorcerer
Religion: None. Karliege holds that there are no Gods, or that if there are then they are insane. He has seen the other side and all it holds is darkness and terror.
Appearance:
A battered and skeletal waif, with his stooped shoulders and his crooked leg Karliege stands a little under five feet and nine inches and probably weighs half of what a man his size should. He is pitifully thin, every last one of the ribs which make up his hollow chest is bared on display beneath his luminous pale skin. All over he covered in markings, scars, tattoos, some ritual in nature, others demarking his former life as slave to the God-Emperor Dagon, and all the cruelties that it entailed. The left knee is a snarl of scar tissue and fused solid, the result of one too many vigorous beating and years spent in chains. The right arm is hidden beneath a web of bandages, but hangs withered and trembling at his side.
His face is half covered by his lank dark blonde hair, thin and greasy it hangs down to the left to obscure dark red branding scars, ones that permanently etched his station under Dagon’s Empire into this face. It crosses over his left eye and the trauma inflicted by the burning iron has left it milky white and unseeing. The other eye is a soft grey, and usually stares vacantly, whatever intelligence flickering within is distant, sometimes there is great sorrow in that one remaining eye, at other times there is an even greater madness. The rest of the face would have once been considered well-made, slightly effeminate and elfin perhaps, but handsome none the less. A slender nose, now slightly crooked from an old break, leads down to thin and cracked lips the colour of ash. Hunger and privation has made the angles of Karliege’s face even more pronounced, but not for the better, gauntness is the lasting impression rather than beauty. He is only a young man, but he seems old before his time.
Normally the worse of these abuses are well hidden beneath a great woollen cloak of dark gray, its deep hood used to further hide Karliege’s appearance. Underneath he wears whatever clothes he can find, caring for warmth over any form of aesthetic. His boots are mismatched, a necessity brought about by his now uneven legs and limping gait.
Personality:
Karliege is cold and reserved, not in a cruel or uncaring way, but as if separated from all others around him by an immense unseen chasm. Distant is probably the lasting impression that he leaves on others. Even when he is direct conversation with his peers he has a habit of gazing off into the middle distance, almost as if he’s looking right though someone to something beyond. He’s quiet, in particular about himself and his history, and when pressed upon a subject he does want to discuss, instead of becoming irritated or hostile, he is more like to introvert and become despairing and defeatist. If he were to smile it would be a sad one, and only when he thinks he is alone. He sleeps little, haunted by nightmares that make him wake in fits of terrible screams
And yet at the same time there is another side of Karliege, one that shows itself rarely. It seems a kind of madness that manifests itself sometimes, when he is threatened or finds himself in danger. It starts with fear, despair, and terror. His eyes struggle wide in their sockets and he displays a rare outburst of emotion and becomes much more vocal. After this he might may briefly fit or seize up, at other times he faints. When he recovers from this, he is changed. He is silent and moves and acts with a boldness and arrogance completely unlike his normal cautious self, there is also a sense of hardness and cruelty in this other Karliege. He seems to take pleasure in the pain of others and his unscarred eye has an intense burning focus very dissimilar to its normal gaze.
Biography:
Karliege is a native of Kuranes, one of few residents of that accursed place that have improbably survived its terror and escaped. He was raised without the love of a mother or a father, only a master, and a cruel one at that. In Aldebaran, children who are born with the gift of power are often taken at a young age to be inducted as acolytes in the Cult of Dagon. The same was much true of the days before the Red Night. The crown had always taken interest in the powers of sorcery and had attempted to monopolise upon, so sorcerers sworn to the crown were given royal assent in the abduction of children from their mothers’ breast. Karliege was one such child.
He remembers little of his birth parents, although he does recall hazy memories of living as a child somewhere in the countryside. It used to bother him that he couldn’t recall his parents’ faces, but as the nightmare that is consuming Geryon continues, he is strangely relieved by it. Something which is forgotten cannot cause more pain or aguish. He does not have to worry about what could have happened to his parents in this new hell, because they were nought but phantoms to him already. There are many things however, that Karliege cannot forgot, events and faces that are burned into his mind like the slave brand burned into his face. One of those things is Colndil.
Colndil was his master, and the first face that he truly recalls. His terror of the man has barely even receded in adulthood. Tall and broad, with a pointed beard and a great black mane, the mere thought of that piercing gaze from his ice like eyes was enough to send shivers down Karliege’s spine. He had been powerful in the ways of dark magic, and one of the closest associates of Dagon before his ascendance to godhood. He had kept a veritable stable of young apprentices to use to further his own power. He abused them all, both physically and mentally, and some, those he took particular dislike to, he abused in ways to sordid to describe here. And where did Karliege stand in all of this? Karliege was his most despised pupil.
Colndil saw him as weak and effeminate, and hated him for it. Karliege was skilled in the ways of sorcery in a way that many of the other boys would never obtain, but he did not have great reserves of power in himself, like most of Colndil’s other pupils, instead he had to rely on more devious and secretive ways to manipulate this veil we call reality. Karliege has always wondered why that irked Colndil so, perhaps it was because in many ways it was the same as how Colndil himself worked his magic. Colndil was a master of the art, the most skilled and knowledgeable of his generation, but still he relied on the reserves of small boys to accomplish his greatest feats. But no matter, whatever the root of Colndil’s abuse it created a mutual hatred between master and apprentice, one that would eventually prove nearly fatal to the pupil.
It was not so for all of Colndil’s students however, some rose to this cruelty and sought to overcome it through the proving of their own might and drive. One such pupil was Frior. He was child of even lower birth than Karliege, taken from gutter in Colndil’s own words, but he had strength above all them and rose to be Colndil’s right hand and acolyte. At first it just Colndil that would go to the Palace to visit the Emperor, then after a particularly long and late meeting with his liege, he began to take Frior with him. These meetings became more and more frequent as the weeks went by and eventually the two would be gone for days at a time. The other apprentices, Karliege included, welcome to the respite from their master and his dog. But this peace was shattered, when they were summoned, every last one of them, to Dagon’s Palace.
They gathered them in the throne room, sorcerers and apprentices from across the land, a larger gathering than Karliege ever heard of in his lifetime. Then it began.
He remembers nothing of the Red Night and what unspeakable horror was done in Dagon’s throne room. He remembers that they lied to him, told him they were doing the greatest of works and were to bring about an era of peace and prosperity for the world. He remembers that he poured his skill and his power in doing whatever was done. But he remembers no more.
After the Red Night, everything was changed. The wars began, and the enslavement of peoples of Geryon was underway. Karliege and the rest of the apprentices were confined to the lower regions of the palace and worked as slaves in the blood magic of Dagon. They saw little of Colndil and Frior now, both had been raised to the status of Perfecti and had been changed in the process. When the sacrifices began, they were the ones to administer them. They were ones required to the work the rights take the blood. The things… the things that they did. Unspeakable. Terrible.
One day it all proved too much. Karliege and another one of the former apprentices, Raul, decided to try and flee the capital or die trying. They escaped from their quarters and roamed the palace searching for a way out, but they failed, and were both captured. Karliege tried to use his magic to kill the legionaries, but there was too many, and by the time he thought to try and turn it on himself, it was too late and he was too weak to even end his own life.
From then on the days were a blur of beatings, and the nights full of lonely freezing solitude. It was then that they branded his face, and smashed his knee. Sometimes the Perfecti would call upon him to use his magic, other times he was left to starve and rot in the darkness. But somehow he survived. He survived long enough, that is, for a shadow from his past to return to torment him.
Colndil. Colndil returned to Karliege and his hell, brought him up out of it and delivered him to another. He… did something to Karliege, something that changed him in ways like no other abuse or torture had. He did not take something away… he added something to Karliege, something dark, something dangerous. They carved it into his arm, this magick, with knives of obsidian and powered grave dust. The plucked something forth from the darkness beyond the veil, and implanted it within his soul.
What it is exactly, Karliege does not know, but is powerful and is alive in its own fashion. He does not fully control it, but neither does it hold mastery over him. Sometimes it feels like it is within him, crawling in the back of his mind, at other times it seems to exist outside of him. He knows that he has seen it on the edge of his vision, a dark shadow roughly hinting the shape of a man. Why it was put there? Karliege has long suspected that he was only a trial run of a ritual that Colndil may have intended for himself, to amplify his own powers even more. Karliege had only been subjected to it because of how he and Colndil had once worked in a similar way. Whatever the matter, it was his salvation, and it allowed him to escape.
It used his body and its power to break down the cell doors and run faster than Karliege’s own crippled body could have imagined possible. It combined his skill of reading and manipulating the veil of reality with its own strength to hide them from the legions, from Colndil, from Dagon. The price was dear though, after their flight, Karliege had lain in a forest, under a great oak tree, vomiting blood , half blind and mad for a week. Never again did either of them push the boundaries of their endurance than in that desperate escape.
After months in the wilds, living on acorns and berries, they finally found their way to the relative safety of the mountainous forests of Varyon, and the rebels under the Scarred King.
Equipment:
- Silver basin, used for scrying in moonlight
- Bag of knucklebone runes, used as a method of divination
- Ritual knife, a simple single edged blade used for drawing blood or reading entrails
- A stout yew staff, iron shod, gently thickening towards the upper end
- Gray woollen travelling cloak
- Undyed tunic, woollen leggings, and a set of mismatched boots in soft leather
Skills:
DivinationKarliege is a somewhat skilled in the use of arcane mysteries, in particular the abilities of scrying and divination. He can learn of events transpiring far away and consult with both the fates and the spirits as to the events of the future – however, they are not forthcoming in their prophecies and will often speak in riddles or intentionally mislead the asker if they fail to ask the right question.
Colndil’s CurseA shadow follows Karliege. It is bound to him in blood and sorcery. It shares its strength with him, but it also makes us of his body and invades his mind. When the shadow is in control Karliege becomes incredibly powerful and is able to kill his enemies with a wave of his hand, however, this comes at a great cost, both mental and physical. The dark powers that exist beyond this world do not co-exist well with mortals, and the longer Karliege prolongs his contact with this shadow the more power it will exercise over him, until he is little more than a husk.
Motivation:
Karliege wants to see Dagon and his former master, Colndil, dead and all the evil they have wrought undone. It is both personal revenge and a sense of moral duty, for Karliege assisted in the creation of this nightmare and feels the burden to atone. But more than this, they have robbed him of his mind and crippled his body – they had destroyed Karliege’s life even as it barely begun. His existence is pain, and the only thing that drives him onward is thought of revenge and to make sure that Dagon can never do to another that which was done to him. After that, Karliege intends to end his own suffering, as it is the only thing that he believes can set him free of Colndil’s curse.
As for the shadow that follows Karliege, its desires remain a secret to itself, but for now it seems to aid Karliege in his quest. Although considering the circumstances of its creation, it is unlikely to be benevolent.
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