Merval

Dhampir / Rogue/Ranger

Submitted character story

You are the Shadow Investigator, the kind of hero who stalks prey with questions before blades. What brought you back was the memory of waking beneath ash and silence, alone and transformed. You carry the weight of every innocent you could not save, documented in careful script and hunger never indulged. The table will remember you as the tracker who passed judgment only after the evidence condemned them.

Defining moment: In the lightless empire of the Underdark, Merval Glothven was born on the wrong side of faith. A Seldarine Drow among the Lolth-sworn, he was marked early as a traitor, a thief, apostate - a rogue in a city that considered mercy synonymous with heresy. Among his own kind he was a criminal, but among the surface folk, not half bad. His justice was quiet, unsanctioned, and absolute.

For a time, he found belonging in the Moonlight Vigil -- a brotherhood of hunters sworn to purge what should not walk. Their blades silent, their work sacred. Merval's mind was his first weapon, his psychic blades the second. He stalked horrors through tunnels slick with fungus, light, and silence. He slew aberrations in the caverns of the Deepmarch, having once drove a vampire lord into sunlight with nothing but a broken silver blade and sheer willpower and cross-examed a lich until it condemned itself.

Then came the night of the burning rain.
The Vigil took shelter in a lonely waystation carved into the obsidian cliffs on what they'd consider a light mission of rescuing a noble's son from a vampiric enclave. The place smelled of lamp oil, dry wine, with a hint of spores. The hosts were polite, and a little too careful with their words, but exhaustion and alcohol dulls suspicion. They rested.
Merval woke beneath a corpse cold weight. The barkeep's mouth on his throat. Then the sharp cold prick as teeth punctured his neck, the unholy rhythm of another's pulse inside his own. He tried to yell, a clawed hand over his mouth, he bit down hard ; a mistake, some blood poured into his mouth. It didn't stop the barkeep only enraged him as he drained even more blood from Merval. The one thing it did do, was alert the rest of the Vigil. Merval's last memory as a living man was the flash of a silver bolt flying through the air, and the vampire being turned to ash on his chest. A blurry image of his friend's face distraught over his own. And then Merval died.

He rose to the quiet aftermath, the smell of blood, the silence of his comrades, the smell of ash. Flashes - screams - a faint memory of a blinding white light that felt like it had emitted from within him. By the next dawnnless hour, he walked out of that inn alone, too alive for the grave, too cursed for dawn.

Now he hunts the creatures that skulk in the shadows - not for coin alone, but for his own atonement. His mind almost as sharp as the day he swore his first oath, his every kill documented in careful notes and quiet reflection. He swears he’ll never feed on this innocent and to save as many from the same fate he suffered as he possibly can.  
In cities above and caverns below, people whisper of a red eyed tracker who never misses a mark and doesn't draw his blade without cause. He listens more that he speaks, studies before he strikes. Merval Glothven hunts the darkness - cross examines it, really. He passes judgement with a steady hand, because in a land where the law bends to power, someone still has to keep the record straight. 

Has names to find, an investigator through and through