Brigur Hadriel Anduin
| Brigur | |||||||
| Male Half Monadic Deva, Half Human | |||||||
| Player: vronsky | |||||||
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| General Information | ||||||||||
| Full Name: | Brigur Hadriel Anduin | |||||||||
| Nicknames: | ||||||||||
| Age: | 22 | |||||||||
| Deity: | Haelyn, Cerilian Greater Power of Noble War | |||||||||
| Alignment: |
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| Occupation: | Crusader, Monument-Builder, Tactician | |||||||||
| Faction/Rank: | Planes-Militant; Watchman | |||||||||
| Place of Birth: | Excelsior | |||||||||
| Physical Attributes | ||||||||||
| Height: | 6'3 | |||||||||
| Weight: | 175-180 lbs | |||||||||
| Eyes: | Sacred-lit emerald | |||||||||
| Hair: | Reflective onyx | |||||||||
| Complexion: | Golden tan | |||||||||
| Physical Build: | Mount-blooded athlete | |||||||||
| Physical Features: | Deliverance from Death, Elemental Ease, Protective Aura | |||||||||
| Skills | ||||||||||
| Persuade, Sense Motive, Craft: Building, Discipline, Heal, Taunt (Shieldbash), Tumble | ||||||||||
| Equipment and Items | ||||||||||
| Trinket: The Wings of Wisdom - a necklace handed down from Marshal Lilian Ero'Myr of the Planes-Militant | ||||||||||
Personality Summary
Traits:
The purpose of my life is to give my life away. I prefer the company of the scum of the multiverse, who need me more than the wealthy do.
Ideals:
Society should care for all - fair laws are its framework. Everyone has an equal right to life. Consider the feelings of all in every action you take.
Flaws:
I follow the law, even if the law causes misery. Law is only just when it protects everyone equally.
Virtues:
Brigur has sworn Sacred Vows of Poverty, Obedience, and Chastity, although not Celibacy.
Appearance
A gallant young man with precisely styled night-colored hair and determined eyes of emerald, flecked impure by streaks of hazel. He speaks kindly but with brevity, a dialect empyrean. The health of his flesh and the caliber of his muscles leaves no question: an upper planar bloodline courses within and bolsters him. With its vitality he reaches a height of 6'3 and hides beneath a cloak strong feathered wings, their plumage the golden-cloud pinions of Mercuria skies. The shine of the Mount rests its glow upon him, catching his hair and eyes with a gleam of the Heavens -- a deva.
On the contrast are mortal qualities to the figure: a tendency to restlessly distract with nearby objects, av oice at once seconde by greatness of the Hebdomad and then again obvious in its youthful human character. He wears scrapes and nicks on his thick forearms, the consequences of aspirations in carpentry and planar expedition.
He is a paladin, this assertion being told by the prominence of a holy symbol: the Sword and Sunburst emblazoned upon the fashions of his chest when he is clothed and strung from a cord on his neck when he is not. His wear is a mix of simple plush fabrics and engraved traditional craftsmanship of the Anuirean Empire of prime-world Cerilia.
Ethnicity & Nature
The son of a Monadic Deva...
As each of their kin, monadic devas have their assigned role: to watch over the monad, the indivisible, the material elements of the multiverse. They are those aasimon sent to fight evil amongst the Inner Planes. Some are dispatched from the Upper Planes to act in the name of good against foes hiding amongst the elements, while others are regular servitors of those powers of Good that dwell within the elements: Ahto, Geb, Shu, and other such gods. They act as both soldiers and diplomats, seeking war and peace interchangeably as befits the situations they find themselves in.
Monadic devas have dark brown skin, jet hair, and piercing green eyes.
The grandson of the Line of Anuire, a shattered God of Cerilia...
Grandson of Paladin-Lord Boeric Riegon. Son of his daughter, Ghesele Riegon. The Riegon dynasty are Anuirean human, Cerilian paladins migrated during the fall of the Anuirean empire to Excelsior, though retaining their regency as blood scions of the fallen god. Lord Riegon occupies a picket keep above Excelsior, faithful to Haelyn and united in cause with the Order of the Planes-Militant.
Brigur was given the surname Anduin after the tribunal of Haelyn and the deva name Hadriel, thereby extricated from the Riegon line of Anuireans to represent his impurity as something more than human (but not something better, for Brigur's cousin will heir the lineage forward instead).
In the Chant
Chant is some bloody halo's about the Cage, crossing gates gearward and taking a dip at the Flame Pits. The lily deva's got some zills -- been spotted carrying top-shelf armaments over shoulder to some clocktower alley in the Chessboard. A tick later, halo comes out a different door -- Palace of Pain proper, piking off the jester.
It's a square deal when a deva's involved, a body can be sure, but why's this cutter so productive a wagger might ask? Here's the true dark. This blood's a recruiter, one of them squareheads from the Planes-Miltiant it figures. Some say a Watchman but the OPM can't keep their own straight. The lots high-ups in Sigil keep getting boxed -- you'd think they'd earn a book and bolt the cage entire, back to that shiny burg.
Not this halo. He's got a good gatekey and now the blood is rattling for paladins and true squareheads like himself to come for a ride. Follow a Monadic opium dreamer on some cakewalk? Your risk berk. Best bring your ears for a lot of 'Belief screed.
The Deep Dark
125 FHR, on a plain of burnt dreams...
After a year of service as a layperson soldier within the Children of Heaven, assailing contested territories in the Outlands, Lord Riegon’s grandson falls in combat to a Baatezu ambush, paralyzed by a shard of greensteel shrapnel and divided from his allies. A minor victory on the part of the Planes-Militant shifts the Outlands cavern mountward far enough to connect the half-monadic’s Lay on Hands with his power's realm, healing him. He performs a rescue of the prisoners both ally and fiend, reuniting with the Order where his rank is elevated to Crusader.
Brigur is summoned to the First Monastery of the Planes-Militant and dispatched to the Inner Plane of Fire for his bloodline’s immunity to its danger. A great battle has waged between the Lord of Evil Fire Elementals, Imix, and his son and opposite Zaamon Rul. The battalion of good Azer and renegade Efreet has been all but destroyed by the canny warfare of a Pit Fiend of the Hells, Asgeroth, who intends now to hunt the Lord of Good Fire in his place of hiding. The slaying of the Lord, should it be allowed to occur, would eliminate one of the few anchors of goodness within the crucible of Fire. The Planes-Militant believe that it even threatens the balance of the inner planes (while this was largely untrue due to the planes unchanging nature, the Children were right that [i]growing[/i] an evil unchecked on the Inners, and having it breach into the Outers, would be a consequence most dire). What’s more, an artifact of the upper planes, of untold Good, had been lost in the conflict and is unaccounted for in the Blazing Sea, and Prefect Increase wants it recovered.
Arriving and residencing himself on a pocket of feldspar, the half-monadic locates the roaming entourage of the Azer general Amaimon, securing a role of advisorship in the Azer military under the Sword & Sunburst banner of Haelyn. Together unable to locate the enclave of Zaamon Rul, the company formally establishes itself as the Army of Light’s Veneration, pulling soldiers from colonies of a Lawful Good fire elemental called a Helion. The Helions were pacifist, preferring to negotiate and philosophize, but their physical structures acted as ‘trap rings’ of fire that could smother and bind opposing salamanders.
Under Brigur's advisorship as an adjutant, the Army of Light’s Veneration unifies and rekindles the strength of the Azer fortifications on the Plain of Burnt Dreams. They await the return of Zaamon Rul, mapping a strategy with pitfalls of shadow-fire and pockets of paraelemental smoke in advance of Asgeroth's legion.
126 FHR, Nectar of Life...
Still the portal flickers its maw as Prefect Increase VII of the Order of the Planes-Militant stands upon the platform of the Pinnacle of Indigo. Beneath the tower’s balcony, a sunny valley lays out through ordered study-halls and libraries toward the silver of the Mount’s seashore. The portal to Sigil before her is now a fortified site of retreat and the subject of vigilance. On its exit side, a labyrinth of halls and antechambers tangles into the Court of Pain in The Lady’s Ward.
Nearby, the slow breaths of the Prefect's Planetar attendant rise and fall as the being nods with judicious agreement.
Chant is that when the Lady learned of the ousting of the Planes-Militant from Sigil, that Her Serenity sent word by letter to Factol Sarin, and herself stationed Dabus and fortified patrols at the Morgue, in the Hive, outside the Temple of the Abyss, and in the Jester's Palace. She allowed (or rather she did not intervene) as the Hardheads saw fit to bring through their portals reinforcing numbers from Melodia, Fortitude, and Ortho.
Prefect Increase had not been idle to react: the death of a prominent Brethren noble, the loss of an important holy book, the falling of a principled champion, were things that gained her sharp attention, and she puzzled over her errors that lead to this backslide. Never the one to shy of using resources available to her, the Prefect calls a council at the sect's leading portal into Sigil, within Brahispati's divine realm of Nectar of Life (therein is constructed a tower of the sect's leading wizard, Inigo the Stutterer, within which the portal resides). She parleys a valuable Abellio plot belonging to her proselytizers to the Harmonium in trade for Factol Sarin's political championship. Temporarily, she reigns in her military, drawing upon Crusaders whose merit have been outstanding.
From his station at watch within crematorium Fire, Brigur is given command to reinforce position and withdraw to Lunia. Expeditiously, he is assembled into a diplomatic accessory of six Crusaders, under three Watchmen, who are themselves under a Marshal reporting to the Keeper; the bottom three layers of which are sent through the Indigo portal into the Lady's Ward of Sigil.
116 FHR, rule of fours...
It is said that on the inner planes that the rule of fours, of coupling material opposites, directs the multiversal order. The fourth part of Brigur's story takes place on the quasielemental plane of Salt, where we return to the monadic deva Hadriphael, his father, the victim of an evil plot. For in all of the conviction of Increase VII, the faith in life and the bulwarking of the armies of Good, there should be some wickedness its balance.
When Hadriphael crossed into the plane of salt from paraelemental ice, he did not understand immediately that he had been targeted with a trap. The entropic devourer he chased was a construct directly under the control of the Doomguard, and it had been specifically searching for a monadic deva to lure into the boundary of Citadel Sealtiel. Why would Hadriphiel chase the entropic worm? Because its consumption of Good and Lawful elemental creatures directly opposed the deva’s mandate to protect such things. What did the Doomguard want with a monadic deva? That answer was more complex:
The specific splinter of Doomguard responsible for the trap were accelerationists, those believing that the faction should force the multiverse’s hand on entropy, helping it along. A few of them were evil, and knew of an unholy rite in the Abyss that supplied the faction with Ships of Chaos: enormous two-headed vehicles of entropy sewn together of manes, capable of transporting a small army through the planes by scrambling and reassembling them. The Doomguard invented the blueprints of the ship, but only 1 of 7 come their way. The others are kept by the tanar’ri and used in the blood war, and the Sinkers think that’s a bad deal.
The dark of the ship’s construction is a truly dark layer of the Abyss called Twelvetrees. There the tanar’ri keep an altar of twelve encircling trees, and within each is the eternally tortured soul of an astral deva. Now the evil Doomguard-splinter is looking to replicate the altar, but keep it close to their ring of Citadels on the inner planes, out of the hands of fiends. They may even make some improvements to the Ship.
Hadriphael enters quasielemental salt, but he doesn’t feel the thirsting loss of fluid that most planars do. He’s immune to the salt blizzards of the Stinging Storm, and he flies through it on his way to the Crystal Ranges, where the entropic devourer is headed. He arrives at the site of two curious trees; around them, half of the accelerationists have been so drained of fluid that they’ve formed into briny statues. The entire area is void of light, but Hadriphael notices the Sinkers handle reception of the devourer, and the monadic deva becomes canny to the plot.
With a great beat of wings, he halts his flight. He isn’t about to fly right into a trap. But just as he is about to depart, the dying screams of dryads reach him. An accelerationist has driven bores of pocket magma into the heartwood of the Arborean trees, brutalizing the fey who cling to life. The trees have been fed the blood of their dryads, a fluid thirstily absorbed on the plane of salt. Hadriphael dives in close to intervene -- the very trees reach out to this celestial being, desperate for his comforting essence, and it is the trees themselves that subdue him. When the ritual is complete, the Monadic Deva has been locked deep within in a state of unlife, leeching his soul out through root systems into the earthen brine, replenishing the soil in damned suspension.
Were the Doomguard successful? Likely not. The Inner Planes just aren't as suffused with depravity as the Abyss. But not a body knows for sure outside of Citadel Sealtiel, if a traveler comes that far through Salt, and few do. Chant is the odd cry of Monadic Deva; a third, a fourth; can be heard in all of the cycles since then, waterward as far as the Saline Sea, or across the bog near to border-Ooze.