Orthander

Information

Player: Sol

Character Full Name: Orthander. He has never answered to a surname.

Character Name: Orthander

Nicknames: Desertman, traveller, friend, ascetic, zealot, heretic, and a host of other titles, some flattering, others not, and none of his own choosing. Sir Orthander the Steadfast, in the minds of some. “Man of few words, are you?”

Assocations: The Church of the Holy Light (formerly), the Argent Dawn (formerly), the Argent Crusade (formerly)

Race: Human

Class: Argent Dawn Templar

Age: 43

Sex: Male

Hair: Black, greying but shaven-headed

Eyes: Naturally hazel, but his Templar training and connection to the Light have left his irises a metallic, silvery grey.

Height: 6'3”

Weight: 164lbs.

Appearance

A lanky, wiry creature, Orthander is shaven-headed, but cultivates a short beard. Seeing the gilt and gaudy ornamentation worn by many paladins and priests as indulgent and impure, he typically garbs himself in a dark monk's robe of itchy cloth with a trim of faded white thread, complete with a shirt of mail worn under it and half a suit of plate secured to his arms and torso. Strapped to his back is the threadbare scabbard of a well-used claymore sword that's been similarly blackened, but his armour and weapons are meticulously maintained.

He carries no libram, having committed most important scriptures to memory. Nor does he bear any icons of faith, for those who must augment the power of their faith with focal objects like a common wizard have little faith to begin with in his eyes. No – instead, he has sculpted his body into an icon in itself. Amidst lines of age and scars of battle, his dark skin positively crawls with tattoos, ritual scariffications, brands and markings of all kinds, all with some kind of religious significance – be they sigils, runes, passages of prayer or things even more abstract, there's barely four inches of skin on him spared of them. (It may be worth noting that most of these markings are from his time as a prisoner of the Scarlet Crusade and not of his own undertaking.)

Personality

Orthander is a creature of practical means and straightforward intention who is nonetheless committed to living his life by intangible abstractions. He is above all else a man of obligation and principle, taking his abundance of vows and oaths seriously as a means for bringing him into closer connection with the Light. His own interpretation of that philosophy is more deeply influenced by his native Tanari faith and morality than he would ever care to admit or think to consider, but nonetheless, he is pious to the point of zealotry, planting himself and a select few others on a pedestal and judging everyone else harshly. The Light is less a faith of strict doctrine, you say, and more concerned with the fundamental goodness of people? Frankly, Orthander doesn't think there's enough goodness in people, and so has turned to doctrine and oath to compensate.

The high standard he holds himself to might permit narcissism in some, but Orthander is entirely, cripplingly convinced of his own insignificance on a cosmic scale and his own impurity on a personal one. He believes that everyday speech lends itself to sin and idleness and that anything worth being expressed can be expressed through deeds alone. This has left him very slow, careful and deliberate in his doings – after all, his actions speak very loudly and he must be careful what they say. Ultimately, his intricate, overlapping vows and pledges influence his behaviour in such an overlapping, convoluted way that, while he ostensibly lives a life by the Virtues, his morals are actually extremely warped and twisted.

Two things motivate him on his dark and crooked path: compassion and fear. Fear for himself and his own soul, and fear for those of others. Convinced that those of no or lacking faith will face oblivion or torment after death, Orthander is out to save your soul whether you like it or not.

History

Without the first hint of where his parents called their home, the boy who would be known as Orthander grew up with his family at sea. They and several others, having first stumbled aboard a boat of buccaneers on the South Seas, eventually deserted when they were docked at the Undermine and later found legitimate employment as mariners in the Tirasian merchant navy. And so while he grew up amidst a Common-speaking crew, the language of his forefathers, their stories, their culture was fed to him through a drip of bedtime stories and anecdotes from this band of seaborne expatriates. But eventually, after a bad run-in with some trollish islanders in the South Seas, it was determined that the next time they took port in Boralus, he'd be left in the care of the church, although his parents would make a point of visiting him as often as they could.

And so they did. But eventually, they stopped seeing the point. Although he had a rough start, speaking little Common and being obviously different from other human orphans in the church's care, it became apparent to the pair of them that he was increasingly becoming the Light's child and not theirs. The chores of the church became a diligent routine to him, and the preachings and prattle of many priests were the tales that helped him sleep at night, now, readily absorbed by his eager ears and impressionable mind. His final decision came when he saw a clergyman of the Light bring a wounded dockworker back from the brink of death in a flash of blinding power. In all the stories he'd been spun, no cleric of his family could ever muster such a feat. Thirteen years old and from a foreign land and Orthander was already convinced that he had found the true path. And there was nobody around to argue with him otherwise.

Although he had some run-ins with his fellow orphans over the years, Orthander was an upstanding young man at sixteen, well-trained, well-read and well-spoken. It was at sixteen that, with his priest's blessings, that he too ventured off to the nearest seminary to take on the robe. Here he would learn the ways of the Light proper, studying the histories of the formation of the church in the Arathi Empire, of saints, of archbishops and of humble friars. He read extensively in theology and philosophy and even magical theory to bolster his understanding of the Light and how it manifested itself in the world. There was a spark of Light in every human soul, he decided, and from this was derived the innate will towards goodness present in all men, elves and dwarves, and to act against this will was to deny the Light within your soul. Upon death, if the person had lived a pious life, these souls would return to the greater whole of the celestial Light.

The week he graduated seminary was the week the Orcish Horde crossed the Thandol Span. From the stories he heard, there could be no innate goodness in those monsters - they were terminally outside of the Light's grace. Or could there? Eager both to see this new people and to better do the Light's work, in places of great strife and suffering, he signed up with the Kul Tiras Marines as a chaplain.

No, he swiftly decided, he had been right the first time. For once in his life, against all the Light's teachings, Orthander looked at the demon-crazed Horde and saw what could only be described as pure, objective evil, entirely beyond any kind of redemption. And so where pure, objective evil was found, it could only be matched by pure, objective good - and if this evil fought on the battlefield, it had to be met on the battlefield. It's no surprise in retrospect that he immediately sought out one of the Clerics of Northshire in the Alliance base camp his Marine unit was stationed at and asked to be able to stand alongside the Order of the Silver Hand. One of these holy knights took the young cleric as a squire for a time, and he served diligently through the hostilities.

In a few years' time, Orthander, too, was anointed and ordained as a Knight of the Silver Hand, strapping a breastplate on over his robes and taking up a dwarven battle hammer. For years after he roamed the northern kingdoms, but quietly he pined for the moral clarity that came with the battles of the Second War - good versus evil, rather than the shades of grey that coloured everyday life. Eventually, he got what he was hoping for - in the worst way imaginable. The Scourge would sweep across the land and with it came their Cultists of the Damned, otherwise upstanding men and women who had been drawn in by the promise of immortality. To see such irrevocable, unambiguous evil clothed in the skin of mere men and women deeply troubled Orthander, and as he struggled to survive in the plagued lands of Lordaeron he came to seriously reassess his values.

The Church of the Holy Light's hierarchy was abruptly decapitated, and the southern bishops who abruptly found themselves in charge declared Lordaeron a tainted land, a lost cause to be abandoned. Orthander, amongst many others abandoned in the land, was incensed, for he knew there were still innocent people trapped in Lordaeron, and that there was still a great foe to fight - perhaps the greatest of them all. As the butchered remnants of Grand Marshal Garithos' forces went into retreat, Orthander and those scant few of the faith who chose to remain in the shattered north became founding members of the Argent Dawn.

It is difficult to overstate the difficulties faced by the Dawn in those early days. Ill-equipped and understaffed, divided internally by theological, ideological and racial differences, fighting alone in a war against a vast legion of the dead that walked with one mind, it is nothing short of a miracle that the Argents not only survived, but thrived. Orthander, faithful Orthander, would fight alongside his former brothers of the Silver Hand for many years. But the Scourge wasn't the only foe to face in the tainted north. Far from it. And the most treacherous foe of all, in Orthander's eyes, came in the form of some of those very brothers.

Many of the 'innocents' Orthander had remained in Lordaeron to save had rallied to the fortresses and fastholds of Lordaeron that still stood proud, and most of them now flew red banners. The Scarlet Crusade, built on principles of unswerving orthodoxy and grim necessity, had many times the manpower of the Argent Dawn and declared them to be craven curs and heretics for refusing to rally alongside them. Orthander would partake in many battles and missions against the Scarlets and in doing so, he realised that the sheer magnitude of their 'faith' was leading them to murder travelers on sight on the suspicion that they were tainted. When he himself was captured by the Crusade, he sincerely expected them to merely execute him, too. But he was an enemy soldier.

You can make any kind of accusation, and if you repeat them often enough and punctuate them with starvation, sensory deprivation and an abundance of physical and mental tortures, the accused will eventually start to see the truth in them. And so when Orthander was accused of hypocrisy, of betrayal, of weakness and of lacking faith by the Inquisitors who grilled him for information, you bet he believed them. They wanted to make the paladin talk, to share his secrets, and within two weeks, he was singing like a choirboy. His third escape attempt unexpectedly succeeded, however, when it coincided with the camp he was being held in coming under joint attack by the Scourge and the Dawn. A ghoul found him before a Dawnsman did, however, and in his weakened, emotionally shattered state, he could not put up much of a fight before his colleague found him half-dead.

Lying on a precarious boundary between life or death, Orthander to this day believes that he received a glimpse of the next world. And in the hereafter, Orthander saw only darkness. Upon awakening from his coma, he was terrified beyond reason. That was what waited for him beyond the veil? That was what waited for all souls? All his life he'd been told that the souls of the faithful would join with the Light after death, that the spark of goodness and life in their souls would be extricated to rejoin with the source of all the universe's goodness and life. But no – in Orthander's glimpse of death, he'd seen a haunted land of shadows and decay, a blackened, broken mirror image of the world he knew and loved. Was his faith insufficient to ensure him passage into the Light? And if he, whose faith knew no bounds in his eyes, was unworthy . . . then what did that say about everyone else?

When he was well again, there was only one path to take. He undertook the first steps of training towards becoming one of the rare Argent Templars. Simultaneously, he dug deep into ancient theological studies, delving into the radical teachings of days past in order to help him make sense of his maimed, altered worldview. At the same time, though, he struggled with guilt and a pervasive feeling of weakness. When it transpired the secrets he'd told the Scarlet Inquisitors under torture cost some of his fellow Dawnsmen their lives, Orthander resolved that he need never speak again, incorporating a vow of silence into the many he took during his training as a Templar.

The next time he rode out against the Scourge and the Scarlets, he did so with strengthened resolve and renewed vigour. He fought bravely at the Battle of Light's Hope and would fight in Highlord Fordring's Crusade in Northrend, assigned to a Crusade emissary party to the Alliance forces, but he only saw more weakness and death in the frozen north. He saw soldiers turning on one another when the rations ran short, leaving their wounded to die to save their own skins, fragging their superiors when they disagreed with their leadership.

Returning to the Eastern Kingdoms two years later with a dead King behind him, Orthander left the Crusade and resolved to wander the land as a mendicant, fighting evil wherever he would find it, be it in places of darkness or in the hearts of men.

Skills and abilities

• Fear No Evil: His strength, mental and physical fortitude and resistance to Fel, Shadow and Fire are all a cut above the norm. The Light empowers him where his mistreated body and feverish mind would otherwise fail. He is incapable of projecting auras, however; most of his abilities to support others are utterly stunted. Clearly, he is an instrument of retribution and not much else. Moreover, these boons will only persist so long as his oaths are abided by and his faith is intact.

• Silence is Golden: A paladin under a vow of silence? You might think that not being able to recite chants, hymns or litanies aloud has left him unable to cast. You'd be wrong. The sheer number and quantity of sacred symbols, markings and prayers cut, burnt and inked into Orthander's skin, as well as the blessed or anointed equipment that went into creating most of them, afford him holy power in themselves. Using them as conduits for his faith, he can call upon the Light's power without speaking aloud like some kind of Holy Runemaster. This means he cannot be physically silenced from spellcasting, but it also limits his spells to the ones he has the appropriate symbols for.

• Searing Verdict: In terms of his magical capabilities, Orthander has an affinity for manifesting the Light's power offensively as Holy Fire. Be it projecting it all around him, hurling it in focused bolts or wreathing his blade in it, he has a particular magical dexterity when it comes to manipulating sacred flame in combat. An unfortunate downside to this affinity, however, is that his healing lacks finesse and causes burning pain in the recipient as he mends them.

• No Such Thing as Innocence: Through the Light's power, Orthander is an expert in wielding the guilt of sinners against them, stirring memories of crimes past in their hearts to bring pause to them at crucial moments. With focus and concentration, he can lock someone down with an incapacitating hallucination of crimes past returned to haunt them, and can incur temporary repentance in even the coldest of hearts.