Varis Siannodel

Half-Elf / Rogue / Warlock

Submitted character story

You are the hero who walks the Blackfen and faces danger head-on because proving yourself demands the hardest roads. The ruin that marked your eye also marked your path: power born from falling, from trading one burden for another. Every victory now whispers the question you can't silence: which parts of you are still yours, and which belong to what found you below. They'll remember the blade that cuts through magic, but you'll remember the price of every spell you didn't choose to know.

Defining moment: That first Ruin. Before we even knew the race that had built it was called Nokerai. Theo and I knew it was dangerous, but he was an Artificer eager to learn all he could about where the tech he'd been learning to reverse engineer had come from; and I had grown impatient to follow in my parents and my grandfather's footsteps as a Reclaimer, one of the elite who enter these ruins to bring back lost technology for the Empire. So we entered in secret.

The subterranean structure was made entirely of smooth black metal that shimmered blue in the light, so smooth and so seamlessly assembled it seemed sterile and impersonal, if it weren't for all the dust and the fact they had been lying it wait for who knows how many centuries before they split the earth and revealed themselves, it would almost seem wrong to call them ruins at all.

This particular ruin had been thoroughly explored by several teams of Reclaimers already, or so we thought. All had gone well so far, to the point was almost... boring. Nothing interesting or dangerous had happened at all, aside from the excitement of simply being there, in the ancient and otherworldly architecture; and the equal parts nauseating and intoxicating hum of the Siren: The magical defense that permeated all of the many ruins scattered across the continent, growing louder and more debilitating the deeper you descend. Then the floor gave out.

Varis dove to push his friend out of the way, and tumbled into the darkness in his place.. He remembered falling, the much louder thrum of the Siren, a hard impact, and then.. nothing. Next thing he knew he was coming to as Theo dragged him out of the ruin. That was the day Varis was irrevocably changed. The day he became a warlock, and his psionic powers awakened. Though few knew what it meant, his left eye was marked for all to see, a spiral pattern of what looked like extra pupils, or windows to the inky blackness of space.

Came to prove something. Varis is a serious and intelligent character that often overthinks things, and almost always has a lot on his mind. He tends to be sad when he's left alone with his thoughts, as he has a few key regrets he thinks about often, and immense self-imposed pressure to live up to his parent's reputation as renowned Reclaimers (see Defining Moment), and his grandfather's reputation as a respected general and hero of the empire's most recent war.