Azthiar

Information

Player: Zarquon

Character Full Name: Azthiar Flamebinder

Character In-Game Name: Azthiar

Nickname(s): N/A

Association(s): N/A

Race: Orc

Class: Shaman

Skills and Abilities: Azthiar does not believe in serving the spirits, but rather believes in enslaving them and forcing them to do his bidding. He keeps with him a plethora of totemic foci that contains bound elemental spirits, using them to empower his spells and unleash prodigious waste upon his enemies. He cares little for moderation when he decides that moderation is unhelpful, and cares even less about the plights of the spirits save for his utilitarian need for them to be fairly manipulatable.

In light of the nature of his shamanistic powers, his ability to discharge immense amount of firepower is more unrestricted, but his proficiency over healing and restoration is sadly lacking. Whether it be due to the malicious machinations of the imprisoned spirits or merely the very nature of his power is unknown, though truths could be found in both explanations.

Age: 37

Sex: Male

Hair: Red

Eyes: Black

Weight: 186kg

Height: 6'4

Appearance

Usual Garments/Armor: Undetermined. A hunted Orc, Azthiar tends to have a few sets of clothing that he uses and discards with the situation. He has a preference in times of great need or battle, however, to adorn a set of enchanted mail armor that he bound elemental spirits of Fire to.

Other: N/A

Personality

Alignment: Neutral Evil

Azthiar is an Orc of circumspection, prone to deliberating his movements with the careful cunning of one used to being hunted. A utilitarian, he has no moral qualms whatsoever in his words and deeds, his actions driven by a conniving pragmatism of needs and desires. Disillusioned from the spirit's abandonment of him and his race in the days of yore, he firmly stands by the fact that the chaotic and whimsical nature of the elemental spirits are in no way beneficial to his race, and that the only means in which the Orcs can prosper is to control the spirits, and through them, control Azeroth.

For all that he masks his deeds in words laced with beauteous idealism of his goals, he nonetheless bores with him a dark cruelty, avarice and self-centeredness for power.

History

Born in Draenor with his earliest childhood being that of the lush plains of Nagrand, Azthiar's birth was a tragedy in which he only experienced these beauties for but a few short years. A few years after said birth, the Old Horde departed their world of Draenor and descended upon the Kingdom of Stormwind beyond the Dark Portal, and Azthiar's parents were dragged from his idyllic homeland and his side to a dark and alien world. Azthiar himself was left behind in a graveyard of haunted dreams and old memories. A curious young Orc, he tended to try to learn more about the past and his surroundings; it was then that the seed of the idea was first planted in his mind, that the spirits had abandoned the Orcs. The idle musings of a young Orcish boy hardly meant anything, but it was nonetheless the thought, along with many others, that germinated and were tossed around in his mind as he grew.

The fall of the Kingdom of Stormwind and the first destruction of the City resulted in his clan moving to the newly conquered lands. The migration was a harrowing experience for Azthiar, being dragged into a new and alien world, albeit one that he was told wasn't dying as compared to whence they had came from. The seed blossomed, his curiosity driving him on, intrigued by the interconnectedness of the spirits and the worlds, as well as the subsequent questions of why would one be dying and the other not. His innocent questions brought him little in respect to answers, especially from his mother who more often than not remained buried in her own cocoon of concern and anxiety for his father, her husband.

When it came it came in a storm of swords and blood, as the Alliance army swept down from the north when Azthiar was barely in his teens. He had by then received words of his father's death in battle, and it was with a grieving heart that he had to comfort his own mother. Years of being alone had taught him a stoic independence and a peculiar line of thought, one of self-confidence and predication that brought him along. His mother, however, lapsed into a long period of despair upon the news; hence when the Alliance army finally reached his clan's camp at the twilight days of the Second War, she merely huddled in their little hovel with his frustrated cries in her ears. Perhaps, as fate would have had it, that was what allowed them to survive the decimation of their race, as the soldiers who discovered them gave them the grace of life.

Mother and child spent unkind years in the internment camps of their human captors. His mother languished in captivity, paling into nothing more than a husk, a shadow of her former life and passion; eventually, she died years later. Those who knew her merely commented that she had lost the will to live, in which the Orcish lethargy had drawn her too strongly in its grasp. Azthiar himself was a lost sheep in a strange and hostile world, spending most of his time imagining the outside world, thinking, deliberating. . .blaming, infesting himself with the first faint touch of cold hatreds, fed and watered by tears of grief and the drive to seek reason in a world bereft of it. He did what he could to learn, to survive, and to grow.

Thrall's liberation of the enslaved Orcs in their internment camp and the formation of the New Horde proved to be the break that Azthiar needed. It lent enemies to his rage and he served as a young warrior in Thrall's army, his axe earning notches and his strength of will honed in strife. His childhood fascination drove him, however, and he soon began to learn beneath the shamans of the New Horde, seeking knowledge of the elemental spirits and of the world. He learned from them the lore of the world, the harmonious interplay of nature and men, and the shaman's role as mortal guardians of the balance of the world. He was disappointed. He found the whimsical and chaotic nature of the spirits to be exasperating and frustrating, especially when he felt that the need of his race is so great. Their inexplicable reasons and their timeless nature was, to him, nothing but an excuse for their malicious personalities and their unwillingness to aid his and his kind. He demanded more from the spirits, he blamed every failure upon them, and his power waned and waxed with time. He found the idea of being beholden to the spirits, to having to beg them for anything, to be absolutely abhorrent to his independent nature. He found the fact that the spirits would not grant him the strength he needs to save those he cared for to be nothing abominable.

But there was little he could do about it.

He followed his Warchief and his people, lending whatever strength and shamanistic might to the Horde. The Orcs were a race of tragedy, and Azthiar found himself witnessing scenes that he would very much had rather not; the trek across Kalimdor, the Battle for Felfire Hill, the draining war with the Burning Legion that finally culminated in the Battle for Mount Hyjal that ended the Third War. He watched as comrades fell in battle, as fellow brothers that he sought to heal from the grasp of death nonetheless breath out strained gasp and die. He watched, and he seethed internally. He began to lose the favor of the elemental spirits as time went by, and gradually, began to lose his shamanistic powers.

Reviled. Outcast. He became something in his eyes as monstrous, for the social stigmatization to one who could ever lose the powers of the Elemental Spirit is sharp to a shaman. He began to explore alternate pathways, means in which he could further his power and obtain the strength he needs- Nay, the strength he demanded, the power that he feels the world owes him. He studied Kobold Geomancers, other shamans, transcendents, even the one or two queer Pandaren Brewmasters. He watched, he boiled, his hands trembling with rage; scorned, was he? Scorned by the spirits, and so he simmered.

It was a curious meeting of fates as the stars aligned, born aloft the raven's back, an evil news that brought sweet relief. Arthas's invasion and the subsequent response by the Horde and the Alliance at first proved to be quite a chore for Azthiar, who had nonetheless still pledged his axe to the Warchief. He had been absorbed in his own smoldering rage, clinging desperately to the last few iotas of power, the last few scraps that he could somehow slither out from the spirit's grasp. What he had expected to be nothing more than another chance for him to die in an ignominious death in the fields of battle, however, turned out to be an opportunity of a lifetime.

He met the Taunka. The Taunka were a sub-race of the Taurens that had learned to enslave the elemental spirits, forcing the lands and the elementals to yield to their will. It was from the Taunka that Azthiar first learned and grasped the possibility of such a deed, and it was from them that he watched and trained. He offered his own mastery of the Shamanistic Arts, arts that he had learned from the Orcs, and he offered his aid in subduing the elements. In exchange, he garnered from the Taunkas the knowledge that he sought, the knowledge that he believed and still do believe liberates him from dependency and grant him what he desired. If only he would reach out to grab it.

For years he dwelt in the northern reaches of the world amongst his new-found friends. He found himself driven by a few principle beliefs; firstly, that the power to do so would grant him and his people the power over the Spirits, and from there, power over Azeroth to prosper and become dominant in the world; secondly, that he and he alone could usher this new age of prosperity, developing methodologies in which to drain the elemental spirits and force from them the power he desires; and finally, a nagging feeling in his core, life, immortality, and survival from those who would seek to hunt him down.