{
  "character": {
    "id": "0e233456-0f60-4f81-b1e2-9cdee42fd480",
    "slug": "marrik-vane",
    "name": "Marrik Vane",
    "race": "Human",
    "character_class": "Eater",
    "jan_favorite": false,
    "is_ff_portrait": false,
    "profile_url": "https://framedfantasy.com/pages/hero?h=marrik-vane",
    "character_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/characters/marrik-vane",
    "character_json_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/characters/marrik-vane.json",
    "character_markdown_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/characters/marrik-vane.md",
    "original_image_url": "https://obadckrukccwkjgpbsxa.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/portraits/quest_1779669320494_0.jpg",
    "image_url": "https://hall-library.framedfantasy.com/images/marrik-vane",
    "thumbnail_url": "https://obadckrukccwkjgpbsxa.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/portraits/quest_1779669320494_0.jpg",
    "crop": {
      "x": 50,
      "y": 10,
      "zoom": 100
    },
    "story_excerpt": "You are a hero forged by restraint, the kind who rode Old Yost's Cart and learned patience before power. What brought you back was not the Core's hunger but the voice that told you to stay human. The axe glows red because you feed it what you refuse to become, and that cost never stops compounding. ",
    "story": "You are a hero forged by restraint, the kind who rode Old Yost's Cart and learned patience before power. What brought you back was not the Core's hunger but the voice that told you to stay human. The axe glows red because you feed it what you refuse to become, and that cost never stops compounding. Tables will remember you as the one who proved something fiercer than rage: that surviving can be an act of defiance.\n\nDefining moment: Marrik Vane still remembered the sound before he remembered the blood.\nRain hammered the steel rooftops of Low Meridian, turning the alleyways into rivers of oil and neon. He was thirteen, small enough to hide beneath the rusted undercarriage of a cargo hauler while the city above screamed in static and gunfire. His mother’s hand covered his mouth so tightly he could barely breathe. Her palm trembled.\n“Don’t move,” she whispered.\nThe hunters wore white visors with hollow blue optics. Corporate reclamation teams. They had come for the Symbiotic Core hidden inside Marrik’s chest — an experimental relic his father had stolen from a forgotten Precursor vault beneath the Black Trenches. Marrik didn’t understand what the Core was back then. Only that people killed for it.\nHis father stood in the alley entrance with an old shock rifle shaking in his hands. One man against armored executioners.\nMarrik watched the rifle overheat after only three shots.\nThe visor-men advanced without urgency.\nHis father screamed for them to run.\nThen the alley lit white.\nThe blast split metal apart like paper. Marrik felt fragments tear across his face. His ears rang so violently the world became silent. When the smoke cleared, half the alley was gone. His father’s body had vanished with it.\nHis mother pulled him from hiding and ran through the rain, dragging him through flooded streets glowing with holographic advertisements that kept smiling while people died beneath them. She kept apologizing between breaths.\n“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”\nHe never understood why until they reached the magrail bridge.\nShe stopped.\nThe hunters were already there.\nCornered between the void below and rifles ahead, she knelt before him and pressed both hands against the faint blue glow beneath his ribs. The Symbiotic Core pulsed in response.\n“You cannot let them take this,” she said. “Promise me.”\nMarrik was crying too hard to answer.\nOne of the hunters raised his weapon.\nHis mother smiled anyway.\nThen she shoved him off the bridge.\nThe fall should have killed him.\nInstead, the Core awakened.\nHe remembered drowning in black water while something ancient unfolded inside his spine. Cold mechanical tendrils wrapped around his bones. He heard voices speaking in dead machine-language. Hunger. Endless hunger.\nWhen Marrik clawed his way back onto shore three days later, the city listed him as deceased.\nHis mother’s body was never found.\nBut sometimes, late at night, when the Core whispers through the hollow spaces of his mind, Marrik still hears her final words beneath the static:\n“Stay human.”\n\nCame to prove something"
  }
}