Evacandovar Vallengard
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Login: Evacandovar
Character Name: Evacandovar VallengardBannon Vallengard was an outlaw of some notoriety in the North, a spurious effusion of a long line of bastard sons and a man as vicious as he was strong. He stood two-feet well over the average man by human reckoning, and those most wont to trade rumors of him were inclined to believe that the man's veins ran hot with giant-blood from some distant progenitor, the most likely cause for his hugeness and foul disposition. While such rumors are occasionally based on fact, the most widely accepted view is that Vallengard was simply a terrible human being, swollen with a life of sin.
Bannon was the self-proclaimed leader of a small-time mercenary group known as the Black Lions; a loose alliance of thieves, vandals, and murderers whose pasts often led them to the wrong side of the law. They contracted to those offering the most gold, regardless of the nature of the job or of the buyer; they found themselves in the employ of land-barons, despots, and even orc warlords in the midst of civil wars or raids on outlying human towns. They roamed the land between the Spine of the World and Baldur's Gate, the Sword Coast and Anauroch, making their fortune and infamy. Life for Bannon continued thus, crushing ambitious rivals for leadership of the Black Lions intermittently, murdering and pillaging and looting, coupling boisterously with any female worth a second glance. It was through one of these unions that a child was inflicted upon one particularly desperate young woman, De'Maria Heartcrest, a runaway from a wealthy merchant family out of Waterdeep. The closer she was to a man so far from the law, the more protected she believed herself to be from her father's agents, who sought to return the girl home. Only she truly knows why she left home, but regardless, her plan did not succeed. Bannon discarded her as he had many women long before her.
De'Maria scratched out a living on the frontier, surviving from one town to the next, performing small tasks for a few copper here and there. She feared for her life if word of Bannon's child caught up with her; and it did, a few months after the boy, Evacandovar, was born. She left the child with a kindly, but ironic priest of Ilmater, who soon after paired the boy with a benign, lonely firbolg he knew at the foot of the Spine of the World. De'Maria's fate remains unknown.
It must be said that the firbolg, Mathias, was not a gentle being, for he too was forged of dark origins, and though he was harsh in his methods at times, he was a worthy teacher for a student who grew hungry for knowledge. Mathias held true to the god of retribution, Hoar, known as the Doombringer, the Lord of Three Thunders, and Assuran by some. The giant found the Doombringer after the slaughter of his family, and the only thing that kept him alive in the aftermath, he claimed, was the debt to repay the murderers, deep dwellers in the mountains; giants much larger and more powerful than himself. The boy would be his apprentice to carry on that legacy when he finally sought his vengence.
Mathias believed that on the heart of every man and woman, of every living creature of all manners, of all natures, is written the Creed of True Law. No record of its precepts exists, nor need it, nor can it; it is the light in the eye of the just, it is the voice that haunts you when you do evil; it is the forgotten way, the way life should have been lived, the way that our hearts yearn for yet still. The laws and so-called justice that mortals trade amongst themselves as currency is a mockery of this inner light, a crime, Mathias said, for which the only suitable punishment is enlightment. Mathias taught him this, and much more, of live, of wisdom, of death and judgement–of the boy's father and the sacrifice of his mother.
Vengence is the weapon of a disciple of the Doombringer, the staple of a just man; this Mathias also taught him, but never did he instruct the boy as to the implements of its purpose, the methods through which it must be wrought. He told him why these things must be, but never how, and the boy did not raise a weapon until he parted ways with the noble giant. Practice, or sparring, as the outside world called it, was more than a waste of time; it was a waste of violence. The boy would learn how to fight on his own, as Mathias did many years before in exile, and to save his violence for those who deserve it most. Mathias departed into the mountains on his quest of retribution when the boy saw his 16th winter. And then Evacandovar was alone. Over the next two years, his path was aimless and long, his allies few, and his enemies many. He walked off the edge of everything he knew into the unknown, and he continued through forest and desert and mountain, full of doubt and without direction, but determined to find his way. He sees his life as a mission to be accomplished, as the sword with which Assuran will strike into the very heart of the world. That is the goal that guides him above all other things. He searches always for the Creed of True Law both within himself and those whom he blesses with Assuran's vengence. He also grows stronger, preparing for the inevitable day when he will stand face-to-face with his father and the dissolution of that old debt--for good or ill.
However, though he has grown strong and hale, keen of mind and spirit, he is still young and inexperienced in the ways of the world abroad. He knows how to keep himself warm and fed in the wilderness, but he is barely proficient with the most rudimentary of weapons; he cannot hold a blade without risking injuring himself. His sequestered childhood has made him withdrawn and introverted, distant and even sociopathic towards the well-being of others, both physical and emotional. Whether this solitary existence will prove helpful in the indiscriminate dispensation of Hoar's might or drive him to unspeakable depths of depravity in the misguided application of a law that he does not yet fully comprehend, is still to be decided.
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Reviewed - XP Pending.