Brigur Hadriel Anduin
| Brigur | |||||||
| Male Half Monadic Deva, Half Human | |||||||
| Player: vronsky | |||||||
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| General Information | ||||||||||
| Full Name: | Brigur Hadriel Anduin | |||||||||
| Nicknames: | Half-breed, Hadriel | |||||||||
| 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.
Flaws:
I follow the law, even if the law causes misery. Law is only just when it protects everyone equally.
Virtues:
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
Brigur is the grandson of venerable Paladin-Lord Boeric Riegon. Son of his daughter, Ghesele, and a Monadic Deva. The Riegon dynasty emigrated during the fall of the Anuirean empire to Excelsior but the family retains their regency as blood scions of the shattered god. Lord Riegon occupies a picket keep above the Gate-Town to Celestia, faithful to the God of Leadership, Anuire's Heir -- Haelyn. The family is united in cause with the Order of the Planes-Militant.
To extricate him, Brigur was given the surname Anduin after the tribunal of Haelyn and the deva name Hadriel. By this ceremony he was removed 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. So named, Brigur holds no claim to regency.
Hadriphael the monadic deva was a soldier of Haelyn’s realm on Mercuria and once a marshal of the Planes-Militant. He was known in his life to lead military response to fiendish incursions on the inner planes. Now a decade has passed since Hadriphael’s crossing into the quaiselemental plane of salt, pursuing a worm-like entropic devourer. The prayers of Haelyn’s faithful are full with hope of the deva’s return.
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.
In Sigil 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 Ladybug
Sentiment is a fickle thing, cutter. Most bodies just bunch the Market Ward and Guild Ward together as afterthought, but half-a-turn back the Guild Ward had a much greater flavor to it. Dozens of cases belonging to labor and service guilds once lined the streets, but they lacked one critical element: faction support. Under the edifice of 'divided loyalties', the factions pressured them until most piked off, fell apart, or fled to the dark.
Why the history lesson? Simple. The Hardheads recently raided the vestige of the old Healer's Association. A case going by "The Ladybug", which operated as a low staffed clinic for those down on jink. The dead book swelled with the sods they carted out, let me tell you. The juicy dark? The corpses are said to have been ... altered, covered in surgical scars, amputation, and/or implanted with strange mechanical devices. Whispers abound about flesh-traders and sadistic vivisection. A real gruesome procession the locals won't soon forget!
The Law are assigning blame to tanar'ri and the infestation of chaos, using the incident as proof of the necessity of greater vigilance. In fact, several guild-houses were subject to search and seizure protocol in the hours that followed. The Indep, on the other hand, are frothing over the "heavy-handed response" and trying to flip the script. They say such mibix would have never occurred if the factions weren't so insecure over competition, driving hard working bodies out until only sycophants and barmies remained.
'Oh, a few are rattling about a Planes-Militant busybody in the area after the street was locked down, dragging some shambling scar wrapped up in cloak and cloth. Considering recent sightings, it makes a cutter wonder if they intend to embarrass themselves in the Cage again.'
Letters in Record
A letter surfaces... Its content is in spare detail, a print in black upon a Thebestyn sheet:
Watchman:
Find presented report of chant within the market that a species of fiend, a Loumara, is said to conceal within the Society of Sensation faction. Word is shared that the fiend is of the Dreaming Gulf, and may seek the coming Society celebration to secure vessels for possession.
The intended event's invitation is for families and children. These guardless beings may be especially vulnerable to occupancy.
Chant dispirits me: it is not easily that I propose an inquiry into our ally, the sorceress Serina Daeth. It is believed broadly, whether accurate or false, that Serina constructs her event with intention to draw the fiend from its place of hiding, at a cost of Life understood by her. The Good beings she invites so exposed and without awareness may prove the very lure required for her gambit.
If it is true, Serina may knowingly commit an act in compromise of the lives of each attending.
I ask for urgent response and escalation to Marshal Lillian Ero'Myr, though I will take action myself until her command finds me.
It is signed, a rough Celestial symbol: BHA.
The Deep Dark
((The dark tales of the further sections are only known on a limited basis to Brigur himself, and are not IC-friendly.))
124 Factol Hashkar's Reign (FHR), ringward of the Court of Light, a windswept badland duned in snow...
A siege engine throttles its mortar; the missile arcs into the snow near to two Planes-Militant cavalry. A third is struck directly, whinnying as it plods quietly onto the powder. The mortars spin and explode in shock-clouds of greensteel spines, devil’s metal.
It is Hecatomb, philosophical winter. Lord Riegon's company of paladin riders has joined the Faithful's cavalry. Five riders of the picket keep remain astride celestial horses, and still only three are healthy for capable combat. The Hinterland journey has blackened the legs and thinned the spirits of their steeds, yet the riders use the cover of sleet to execute an ambush, coming upon tanar'ri outposts in the dunes with only the jingle of saddles ringing muffled against the storm. Mercy and reformation is offered – the fiends answer with arms.
A flanking unit of Baatezu, stray of the blood war, has brought down Watchman Bertrand’s pegasus with a hellish bolt-thrown spear. Out of sight of a nearby cleft, they roll forward and load siege devices with armaments and fire.
There is a zone of never-dispersing smoke above the frozen field where dozens of Faithful are killed that cycle, and where the intensely concentrated siege, spell, and missile-fire of the enemy is directed. Out of the mysterious zone of smoke ahead fly mortars, infernal orbs against the grey. They whistle as they strike, greensteel whinging away like blades.
A streak of eldritch light, and then a splintering sound as if a window’s pane of glass has shattered. Brigur hears his celestial warhorse snort: it rears and throws him into the snow before falling nearby. He is aware of the greensteel shrapnel as it pierces his armour, separating the strong bones of his wings and thrusting near to his airway.
The paladin awakens hours or days later to the first sensation that disturbs his unconsciousness. It is a smell, pungent as incense, but earthy and complex. He cries out at the sudden pinching weight between his shoulder-blades. He is naked from the waist, prone upon a stretch of stone whose temperature he cannot feel. A pool of brackish water glimmers beneath him, and yet he understands its fluid coolness only upon his cheek. Battle-instinct comes to him and he wills his faith with all of his energy into his arm and down to his fingertips. He watches his hand lay limp, not picking up the light of divinity for healing. The symbol of Haelyn is stripped from him – he feels its conduit instead within his spirit; stronger for the lack of sensation, it is one of his only feelings.
The pit that holds Brigur is in parts a tomb, a treasury, and a site of foul experiments. Here and there are the dying and dead, both Baatezu and Brethren, many retching or calling out in despair. Directly before him, the Planes-Militant crusader Carmichael has succumbed to his wounds and stiffens into a ball.
Now for cycles Brigur contemplates his actions. Could he have done more to spare the fallen? Was there a hint at the siege engines hidden beyond the cleft? He reasons of the defeat: they were precisely in formation with orders. A required casualty of his riders caused a victory of positioning elsewhere.
He practices the flexibility to take a small nearby rock in his teeth. He drinks from the cavern pool metallic with his blood and fouled by the ringward Abyss. His celestial flesh rejects the rot of the gash within his spine and he deteriorates instead from a wasting isolation.
He does not relent his insistence upon the worth of life, for he is full in his heart with resolve. The steadfast spirit springing outward from his bloodline; the call of the Mount, untarnished by despair, understanding of grand sacrifice. He sharpens the feeling within his heart and imagines that it must make its way into his wound, and the light soars within him.
125 Factol Hashkar's Reign (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 Factol Hashkar's Reign (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 Brihaspati'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 Factol Hashkar's Reign (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.
