Mister Raven
| Mister Raven | |||||||
| Male Aasimar | |||||||
| Player: Freefall945 | |||||||
| [[Image:|300x600px|]] |
| General Information | ||||||||||
| Full Name: | Raven | |||||||||
| Nicknames: | None | |||||||||
| Age: | 54 | |||||||||
| Deity: | The Celestial Hebdomad | |||||||||
| Alignment: |
| |||||||||
| Occupation: | Musician, Philosopher, Adventurer | |||||||||
| Faction/Rank: | None | |||||||||
| Place of Birth: | Possibly Brux. | |||||||||
| Physical Attributes | ||||||||||
| Height: | 6'1" | |||||||||
| Weight: | 172 lbs | |||||||||
| Eyes: | Pearlescent Black | |||||||||
| Hair: | Black | |||||||||
| Complexion: | Polished Bone White | |||||||||
| Physical Build: | Unremarkable | |||||||||
| Physical Features: | Always masked, suggesting disfigurement | |||||||||
| Skills | ||||||||||
| Song, rhyme, subtlety, diplomacy, logic. | ||||||||||
| Equipment and Items | ||||||||||
| Bow, hooded cloak, writing kit, light chain mesh armour, long sword and shield. Raven emblazoned, meaningless heraldry. | ||||||||||
The bard calling himself Mister Raven is a recent arrival to Sigil. It is difficult to know much about him – he rarely speaks in great detail of his history and only appears in public with his hood up, and a cloth mask around his face. Stray curls of coal black hair are visible at his crown, framing skin white as snow and eyes like black pearls with no discernible iris or pupil. Just taller than six feet, he rarely wears cloths designed to flatter his form, but there is proportionally to his limbs and ease wearing heavy steel scale that suggests the rugged strength of a long-term traveller.
Queerly, even when not plucking at a guitar or reciting some lyrical verse, he often speaks in rhyme (a habit that has classically produced a varied response). He is not unpleasant, perhaps even witty, and does not easily make enemies. Though he is prone to stretches of personal melancholy, he seems a fairly simple fellow at heart.
The truth is considerably more complicated.
Mister Raven's mother was half-Celestial, and his father a human paladin of virtue sufficient to attract such a lover. His father vanished into the pages of the book soon after his mother began to carry him; and not long after he was born, that woman vanished too – though more deliberately. She submitted the child to the Beastlands amidst the intelligent native ravens there, from which he would later derive his name, and then abandoned him. It has taken a lifetime of forensic journey to establish why.
The ravens were not easy foster parents – they constantly feuded with the neighbouring crows, and were helplessly animal. Bizarre behaviours which are the norm in the animal kingdom – cannibalism, and mothers eating dissatisfying young – defined his environment. The creatures failed to understand his nature and, while watching him master the skill of walking, could not fathom why his small, silver feathered wings did not yet allow him to fly. In petulant animal response, they shunned him, and pecked and twisted those wings off. Further suffering was averted by the crows -equally bestial but, in that time, preferable custodians. He changed between them several times in his youth.
At maturity, it was an epiphany of moral things that drove him out of the Beastlands. He knew he was a different kind to the animals – but he knew also that he was not trivially different. Justice, mercy, compassion, life, death - these are not understood by beasts in the same realm as men and women, and the celestial blood in him demanded a higher adherence. Thus he left, walking the a prime according to the song in his blood – the bells of Celestia, that drove him toward Law, and Good.
This, too, disillusioned him after a time. Law did not always seem to provide the just answers – and good became blurred between a moral place and the trajectory of upper planes. Slowly, he sagged into moral agnosticism and his purposes became inward turned – a selfish need to understand truth. Neither nature nor nurture seemed to hold the truth of the planes in it. It was Sigil where he would finally look for it.
Alas – it is the last place he will look. Mister Raven is haunted by what he calls the “Bells of Celestia” or the “Bells of Chronias”. Once they called him to righteousness, now they call him to mount Celestia. This is a source of dread to him: his celestial progenitor, a Solar named Tal, entered into the presence of Zaphkiel in the seventh heaven and was subsumed into the goodness of that place. By some strange tilt of nature, this event caused the Bells. All of Tal's descendants are called to join the light of Chronias, and one at a time, they come. Mister Raven's mother yielded to the bells when she abandoned him on Brux. One day, he knows he will yield too.
What he does not know is whether he will be subsumed into the goodness, or eradicated by purity. He is not in a hurry to find out.