Crowley

Information

Player: Muhaha8

Character Full Name: Edward Crowley

Character In-Game Name: Crowley

Nickname(s): Geoff van Horn

Association(s): Stormwind, Darkshire

Race: Human

Class: Necromancer

Age: 37

Sex: Male

Hair: Fairly long and braided, a deep shade of brown.

Eyes: Hazel

Weight: 185 pounds

Height: 5' 9"

Appearance

Edward, for a thoroughly corrupted Necromancer, maintains a meticulous appearance. While he makes little attempt to hide his sunken features, he dresses well in dark robes, shades of grey and red intermixed across their surface. He often wears bloodied handwraps, or just straight gloves, of the same make of cloth as his robes.

Personality

Edward is, at the core, a naturally unpleasant individual. He is snide, arrogant and overconfident in himself. He is not, however, overtly sadistic, and he has a tendency to draw people into his web of lies with a fake, charming persona and a bright smile. It is all fake, though, as the man is really in it for himself. Unlike some of his counterparts, Edward works well within the confines of the law, even while performing illegal and unsavory activities, namely his study and usage of Necromancy, as well as the delving into human anatomy via grave robbing that often comes in tow. The stigma attached to such taboo acts seems to be lost to this man. However unsavory his actions in private may be, he does not actively break moral or de facto law in any public setting.

Edward has no solid grasp of faction due to much of his parentless upbringing, believing that most other people are just in it for themselves and are willing to stab anyone else in the back if it benefits themselves. He, as such, rebels against most leadership figures, as he believes them to be the worst of all, holding power with no intentions of spreading the inevitable wealth they hold to others.

History

Edward was born to a poor farming family in what is now known as Duskwood, in the years before the opening of the Dark Portal. Life, for him, was fairly simple. He worked on the farm daily with his father and six older brothers. In the area surrounding the Crowley family farm lived Edward's six uncles, each owning their own piece of land. Edward and his father, Alexander, shared something of a unique bond, both being the youngest among their respective brothers. They were always treated as the babies, the runts of the litter, by their older siblings, and neither entirely enjoyed the treatment.

The village of Burrshire was a very superstitious place, and no superstition was more terrifying to the people of the village than that of the Burrshire Banshee. Legend had it that the Banshee was the spirit of a long-dead young girl, and her arrival at a family's home heralded the death of a family member. This became all too real when the spirit visited the Crowley family farm a week after Alexander fell gravely ill. The day was Edward's sixth birthday, and the Banshee wailed outside Alexander's window until the early hours of the morning. The ear-shattering sound only grew louder until, at the break of dawn, all fell silent, and Alexander had died.

The loss of his father has left life-long scars on this young man. Edward felt cheated by death, and he still does to this day. When the Dark Portal opened, many of the concerned villagers began to flee. The Crowley family's neighbor, a man by the name of Geoff van Horn, approached the widowed Miss Crowley, and offered to take her children on the hard journey north. A broken woman, she took him up on the offer and sent her sons north with van Horn.

The journey north to the Kingdom of Strom was long and rough. Nature was brutal and often unforgiving, disposing of the weak among Edward's brothers. By the time the group had arrived north with the rest of the refugees from the Kingdom of Azeroth, only he, van Horn, and the eldest brother, Jacob, remained. The three joined a growing refugee camp on the outskirts of the city of Strom, where they lived for several years.

When the Orcs came across the Thandol Span, the three fled to Lordaeron's Capital City. It was during the hysteria that Jacob was struck down by a rage-fueled Orc, leaving Edward alone with van Horn. After the two arrived at Capital City, they opted to live outside of it. Edward learned of van Horn's past at this time, something he had known little of his entire life. The man was a mage, a practicioner of the darker arts of Necromancy. He represented the path as one of survival and redemption, an idea that appealed heavily to the growing young man. Edward was taken under the tutelage of van Horn, where he learned the art of Arcane and Necromancy, although in limited amounts, merely as a way to survive and fend off the many foes that would seek the two dead.

As the two trained through the years, the conservative nature of van Horn's practicion became highly apparent to Edward. The two began to constantly debate the usage of the magic, van Horn arguing for conservative use for survival, Edward arguing for something more sinister: to make the Orcs suffer for destroying his people's home. While van Horn recognized it as a worthy cause, the old man saw Edward's execution of the plan as far too dark and deadly than he saw fit. The debates ended in blood.

During one of the many heated arguments the two had on the subject, Edward struck down the man he saw as holding him back from exacting his revenge. The young man murdered van Horn, stabbing him to death in his sleep. He left the bloodied and massacred corpse laying in a small tent. After he recovered from his rage, Edward fled, disgust and contempt battling for supremacy in his mind. It was around this time, at the end of the Second War, that Edward moved back south with the effort to rehabilitate Stormwind once again.

Edward found his family's old farmland again, as well as some of his old neighbors, whom he swiftly discovered had been Necromancers, just like van Horn. He learned that van Horn had been among them, and that he was one of the more conservative of their kind, and was also very poorly liked for his attempts to restrain the group. The small group took in Edward as he took van Horn's name for himself; after all, it had been over a decade, and names of strangers were often forgotten.

Edward, now under the guise of Geoff van Horn, continued his training with his former villagers. They saw his cold, calculating, surgical ruthlessness as befitting of someone to manipulate the necrotic diseases of the art, and thus began to train him as such. He learned to manipulate Necrotic plague to the fullest extent, using it in both precision and blunt force to eliminate his foes. Slowly, the man began to descend from his morally high horse of using the magic to exact revenge to using it solely for his own gain. Careful to not openly break any laws, the man performed increasingly immoral acts, covering himself with the guise of a toddering cripple whenever he may be suspected of crime.

Slowly but surely, the old men who trained Edward died off, leaving him to fend for himself. As he descended into the darker depths of his training, so too did he watch as his homeland descended into darkness. It was around this time he learned of the settlement to the east, buried in the harsh, murderous, unforgiving hills of Deadwind Pass, under the watching eye of the Ivory Tower of Karazhan. He moved into the Catacombs to continue his practice, again among those of a more morally ambiguous nature, where he remains today, under the same guise of Geoff van Horn. He often can be found traveling between the cursed Deadwind Pass and the darkened Duskwood, one of the few brave, or stupid enough to wade the corruption of both.

Skills and Abilities

Edward's primary skill choice deals heavily with plague- and disease-based Necromancy. He can, among most basic Necromancy spells, apply a plague or disease to a target, shift plague or disease from one target to another, and cause it to spread en-masse to targets in the immediate vicinity of the original victim.