Sigismund

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Information

Player: Sol

Character Name: Heinrik van Starrow

Character In-Game Name: Sigismund

Nicknames: Multiple aliases, including Markus Torraine, Ernault Luthar, and his more recent adoption of 'Sigismund' without any particular fixed surname. Also dubbed 'Hat', on account of his hat.

Associations: Himself, his whimsy and the highest bidder, in precisely that order.

Race: Human

Class: Death Knight

Age: Forty-nine at death, three years dead.

Sex: Male

Hair: Not a single one on his body.

Eyes: Invisible behind the burning blue light they emit.

Weight: A sturdy 183lbs., in spite of his looking emaciated.

Height: 5'7"

Appearance

By all accounts, Sigismund is dressed like a common labourer. Baggy, stained trousers and a jacket to match with a multitude of pockets, blacksmith's gloves and work boots form his usual outfit. A broad-brimmed leather hat flops wearily over his face, concealing his eyes. His face is a gaunt, pock-marked mess, his skin waxy white. He looks more on death's door than actually dead, appearing incredible ill – and yet he moves with brisk precision. Stowed quietly away in his jacket are a long, curved-bladed knife and a butcher's cleaver.

Beneath his clothes, he looks much less like a common labourer and more like a cross between a mummy and a necromancer's dart board. Much of his body is wrapped in dirty, bloodied strips of paper - and under the dirt and the blood on these papers are commands, aimed at reality, written in arcane inscription. Moreover, he wears three runed manacles of saronite on each arm - one above the elbow, one below and one at the wrist. Six angry spikes of identical black metal have been pounded into his chest, between the bones of his ribcage, and are similarly engraved. There is a gaping wound on his throat from where the hangman's noose took him, festering with rot - well, that explains the high collars and the leather gorget. His habitual twitching and shuddering may be related to neurological damage sustained through his broken neck.

Sigismund appears to have an abundance of papers stuffed crumpled into his pockets. He habitually plays with a pair of old dice when left unattended.

Personality

A scoundrel in life and a scoundrel in death, Sigismund represents the kind of person who is last on your list of people to ever give immortality and magical powers to. A born sociopath to begin with, spending twenty years committed to banditry and then being risen into the service of the Scourge has only worsened him. He is driven only to fulfil a few basic desires: to survive, to sate his Hunger, to accumulate currency and to leave an impact on the world, whatever that may be. Ethics, morality and what people think of him are all meaningless things to Sigismund in his pursuit of his ill-defined goals.

Long ago, he decided to mask his really rather average intelligence and common background through grandiloquence and waxing lyrical about brainy subjects. Old habits die hard, and if his carrying this one into undeath is anything to go by, they die harder than he did. He comes off as a verbose, amiable if slightly scatter-brained chap in conversation, and this is no machiavellian manipulation on his part - he simply realises it's easier to get by in the world when you get along with people.

Sigismund is obsessed with “odds” and “the fates” and is certain that every mortal action is determined by forces beyond ourselves. He believes that the intentions of the powers that be can be divined through his dice. He displays various other neuroses; his preoccupation with 'maintaining his good health', even in undeath, is one. Furthermore, he often seems to forget crucial details about himself and the world around him and demonstrates a warped perception of time and place in relation to memory. How much of all this was present before death, how much was brought about by his service as a Death Knight and how much is simply a masque to confound the living is unclear. Sigismund isn't even sure himself.

History

Born in Strahnbrad under the name of Heinrik van Starrow as the son of a banker and moving to Stratholme at age five, the child who would become Sigismund was raised in relative luxury and comfort, never going hungry or wanting in his youth. What he wanted, it seemed, was intellectual stimulation, for he was insatiably hungry for knowledge and tuition. So much so that he would spurn his father's demands that he follow him into the banking profession to enter the life of a scholar when the time came, studying ancient languages and the purported arcane power they held.

Of course, at the end of the day, Heinrik was still a jumped-up commoner and he didn't get far in academia due to his background, not to mention his decidedly average brainsmarts. Furthermore, he was hindered by frequent misbehaviour, an inability to get along with his colleagues, problems with gambling and drink and the fact his father refused to subsidise his studies due to his perceived betrayal of the family. Indeed, when the call to arms was sounded as Lordaeron entered the Second War, Heinrik, due to his birthing and his father's refusal to pay off the recruiting sergeants, was drafted into the army.

While he saw little action, Heinrik had some revelations in the field. Firstly, he realised as his company pillaged the ruins of a burnt-out monastic library that there was nothing good in having knowledge for its own sake – it needed a purpose. Moreover, he realised that there was more to life than struggling day and night with a pen to make sense of the world. There were things to be enjoyed out there, as he learnt when he and his scavenging comrades lined their pockets with plundered wealth, filled their bellies with moonshine and developed a habit of welcoming desperate war widows into their camp.

So he and his comrades devised a plan. When he returned to Stratholme after the war, he stuck a knife in his wife's back, set his room at the university ablaze and fled those to whom he owed money with a fair few gold pieces taken from his father's pocket. Heinrik van Starrow died and an innocent scholar who had once dismissed his findings was implicated in double murder, arson and robbery. Meanwhile, a new man called Markus Torraine rode a stolen horse to an agreed spot of countryside where Heinrik's unit reunited under assumed names, fashioning themselves as a mercenary company and making good money clearing up the lingering orcish strongholds after the Horde's military backbone had been broken. However, as the years went on, there was less and less work for them, and they soon sank into ruthless banditry.

Come the Third War, there was suddenly a lot more defenceless people for bandits to rob and unprotected houses for them to loot. By and large, barring accidents, Sigismund's crew managed to stay one step ahead of the Scourge for several years, picking the carcass of fallen Lordaeron until the military consolidation of the Forsaken led them to flee – into the waiting arms of the Scarlet Crusade, who, after verifying that they were not Scourge agents or plagued, pressed them into service.

Years later, after making unsavoury advances on a priestess, the man who would become Sigismund was hanged by the neck over the gates of Tyr's Hand. However, although it broke his neck, it didn't kill him, and snapped before it could strangle him. The last thing he remembers as a living man was a feeling of euphoria, the notion that direct intervention by some divine force had saved him from death playing across his mind, as he fell from the gates of Tyr's Hand to his death.

While the Scarlets were floundering over their botched execution, a Scourge attack lying in wait was launched. Assuming the massive ceremony at the gates of the fortress indicated hat Sigismund was awfully important to the Crusade (and not simply someone who'd committed an awful crime), the necromancers leading the attack spirited him away back to Acherus. It really was a matter of being executed in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had him raised, imbued with deathly power, armed, armoured and set to work.

And what work it was. You see, there isn't really any logical gap in Sigismund's memory of his death and rebirth - struggling to comprehend what had happened, he merely convinced himself that he'd survived his fall, and thus, here he was. Sigismund really didn't have any qualms with systematically murdering the people who had attempted to murder him, let alone the acts themselves, so he went along with the imperative urgings of the Lich King within his mind without the slightest resistance. In fact, he came to relish his newfound power. When the Lich King's hold was broken on the third generation of death knights, he simply became acutely aware that the Scourge had been controlling him and set to working vengeance against them eagerly, following the Ebon Blade to Northrend under the assumed name of Ernault Luthar, fallen hero of the Scarlet Crusade.

Of course, the Lich King's abrupt demise several months ago has left him with a lot of time on his hands, so Ernault Luthar is missing in action and a man called Sigismund has arrived in Stormwind. He fashions himself as a "professional solution to the problems of the rich and needy" - an elaborate turn of phrase he uses to say 'assassin' in polite company.

Skills and abilities

Sigismund has forgone specialising in any particular school of the dark runic magic his kind takes for granted. Rather, he's honed his application of a mixed bag of techniques. He focuses on spells which directly affect his fighting: hardening his body and bolstering his strikes complete with a strong dash of antimagic and shadow manipulation to back it all up. His muscles swell with unholy strength while his flesh hardens, pulling itself back together.

He fights poorly armoured and seemingly unarmed, light on his feet and heavy with his fists. It's naïve to assume this puts him at any significant disadvantage, for although he lacks a runeblade, manacles of engraved Saronite are clamped on his arms, while spikes of it are buried in his chest. Hidden under his clothes, they allow him to wield dark runic magics bare-handed.

Sigismund's knowledge of runic magic extends further than the typical death knight's, and he's a capable scribe to boot. Glyphs and sigils adorn his bracers just as his regular runes do, and an abundance of scrolls and vellums are stashed around his person for opportune bursts of power in a pinch.