Race: Human
Age: 28 (Fall 8, 483 AV)
Height: 6'1
Weight: 216 lbs |
| Ulric looms brutal, implacable, leonine. Brawny from grappling, and hauling nets, his tendons are like wedges of granite. Marred by a lattice of scars, including a skewed, partly squashed nose, and missing a lump from his left ear, there’s a grim, yet molten glee limning his visage. Shrewd gimlets that gutter inky as coals pry over tiny details, ruthless and sordid in their skewering. This raking suffuses his face, fringed by a mane of short, spiky hair, like the whiskers that fuzz his cleft chin. Though he trudges with a vague limp, the implied torpor is illusory. There’s a glacial enormity about his presence, as if he’d stay rooted in deluge, unshaken, proud, and defiant. Typically, he resides in layers of dented plate, and pocked ridges of scales scarred black, over a quilted aketon. Draped over this shell is an inky, furred cloak, affixed by a scrimshaw clasp and its unruly inlay of silver, which resides over his gorget. There’s frequently a large, round shield fettered over his spine, while gauntlets scuff the haft of a bearded axe with a jaded, yearning. |
| Ulric was belched from flames as flanged, sorely caved metal, a mongrel refusing to kneel though flaked by rust. Harshly conjured by a deceit, riddled by the bitter contusions of his qualms, he vainly dredges up meaning from brutal, undulating tundra, the sweep of paludal bogs. Scuffs of limpets and lichen shuck before his inexorable gaze, divulging a devil’s ribcage, a veracity limned by neglect. Primordial of soul, he’s a diviner of salt, soil, flint, bone, and brittle iron, jailed by his fleshy fetters. There are scars. Madly jostling, every intonation is barren poetry, deftly spewing acid and kernels of cinder. There’s brooding, suffused by feral joy. The rattling trundle of a cart latched by his fissured acuity, dirged with the jangle of draped mandibles. Boils of choler swell his sketchy-legioned revenants, juxtaposing with intemperately abrogating regret. Hazily tasked with resurrecting a decayed deity, and subsequently having that incarnate of presence ripped from his chest, he’s immolated by that disloyalty. Zealotry infuses him with a flagellant ferocity, though it’s jilted, yawningly trenched, unruly. Japery braids with fervor, conveys brutal discord. Every fiber defies the quotidian, the pucker of lips prevaricating from their liturgy. Utterly pig-headed, delusional under scrutiny, he suffers auguries of the debasing of empires, reduced to desolate wastes circled by polluted gulfs, abraded by caitiffs. These greedy visions and their insomniac liquidity plunge him through canyons of ugly insight, inevitably canting toward the morose, the dilapidated. Dogged by abysmal inadequacy in transcending, he subjugates and defiles, drowning in jars of harsh, cheap wine. The chariot of yearning has ceased in its jangle, traces left slack. Tepidly he ossifies, no longer shirking from his vocation. Now the effigy of a warrior-poet, bleakly gazing over a shell of ruins. |
Squalling, crumpled like a prune, he wriggled from the shaking judder of thighs. Finally liberated from the quiver of their juxtapose, he screwed up knuckles of cartilage, looked with skewed gimlets at his mother. There, draped by a bayou of dingy blankets, she regarded her progeny. Aylis was very quiet, a flush dredged from waxy skin, rumples of her inky tresses over a plain gown. Ulric, she imagined, and ruby lips swelled in a grin. They’d finally bred, the skinny, dismal-eyed girl, and the man she’d joined. Quietly, he surveyed the infant, idly picking at the flaking plaster. Palms caked by scaly residue, blunt nails ripped by the tarry joints of his trawling nets, spine prematurely cambered. Enough brawn, running to fat, gray frosting his temples. Tangles of cable, dented kettles, rude stools arrayed by a trestle. Pegs lonely in the cobwebs. Frayed rugs furled from shutters, shirking their penury.
I’ve a son.
Haren D’yar blinked profanely, then cuffed back a joyful tear. I’ve a son. The salty pearl dried in his beard. Through rudely indigent, he’d an inheritor. Tiny fingers lured him, and he jostled at their sticky casing, grunting as they knotted his thumb. I’ve a son, he rejoiced, looking to his prize. Deftly, he stroked the ridge of her jaw, just as it turned away. Aylis didn’t cry, though, barely twitched in the yanking suck of raggedy inhalations. Veined by basalt, she just slitted her weary lids, grateful for the wailing.  This was a blessing, for the others had only writhed, and shrunk, and dripped to her ankles in thick, ruddy trickles.
I’d do anything for you, she vowed.
Suffused by the inky lake, Ravok squatted, and bided in graceful seclusion under Rhysol’s influence. Marble plinths cracked, and over their cupolas folded a mossy detritus. Rusty flanges crept over brackets, pocking bas-reliefs, dogging the lofty gargoyles. Petals deluged the canals. Zeal flared, so incandescently that pilgrims, mendicants, and soothsayers jumbled, yokes discarded in sordid neglect, only to burble again from chapped lips. Trenchant, red-ravosalas plied oily swells by a bundling of fruit stalls, lurching drunkenly under knolls of glazed jars, baskets, damask, and liturgy. Blocks skewed, rigged like barnacled jetsam, their scuppers hardly listing. Siftings of gravel from the masons’ chisels like antediluvian murmurs, glorying their bristling tranquility.
Ulric skulked in gutters, scrawny in a grubby jerkin. Boyish visage marred by lurid contusions, gleaned from the unreserved cruelty of juvenile squabbles. There’d be salvage jostling the culvert gates, heavy trellises of rust. Buoyancy defiled by a greasy slurry, so he’d brought cables, and ersatz tongs. Though filthy in dross, atypical morsels conjured a few copper larks. That was enough. Reaching through a mooring ring, he lunged for the refuse, beaking like a choleric gannet. Fringe lifting on his jerkin, receding over the jut of a knife’s casing. Though biding only seven winters, he’d used it before, on tubby boys and cretin boys, and even a waif who’d tried muddling with the disciples of his hooliganry. Trenchantly varnished, it was his pride. In truth, he was fascinated by ruddy beads welling over flesh. Maybe he wasn’t the kingpin of the brash boy-mafiosi, but bullying terror was sufficient.
Discarding, and dowsing in projected felony, Ulric found himself ducking under the manifold strakes of saloons, darkly cognizant of their legion of ossified denizens. The panes smashed, glued, then ruptured. Straying, he snooped on the yarns of djinns, the rattling of immaterial caravanserai. They subjugated him with yearning, and he waxed restively under dogmatic fetters. Nuggets of comprehension disgorged, reforming like flakes of gypsum. Then, slipping by the surly shamble of a clerk, Ulric gazed over a slanted frock. Aylis giggled, and teasingly plucked at the twining of brawny arms, licked the dregs from a mug. Presaging infidelity, a functionary of the gendarmerie scuffed his mailed tract against her, molten filigree in his surcoat’s badge. Ruby cloak, musket-ball gimlets, onyx in the lashing of his blade. Ulric squatted under a trestle, eddying from aloofness, to dulled curiosity. Pursued them, through slantways hung by lines of washing, a usury of cloisters leading to gaunt cantons and their alcoves, wired by haughty banners. They rambled to a hiatus, palled by inscrutable awnings. Grunting, the gendarme straddled her, mauling skirts.
Aylis strayed, and Ulric braised over that final, indifferent perversity when he’d trudged from her keening, losing himself in the buzzing scuttlebutt of quadrangles and plunging obelisks, the statuary of coppery verdigris gracing pilasters. There’d be no disclosure of that horrid sunset. There’d be no mourning, either. Haren devotedly cuddled flasks of liquor, guzzling fondly until he realized she’d gone, and while scabs faded from his knuckles, he grieved. Ulric chided him, and though the bony ridges flushed, scabs returning, Haren kept mussing his untidy mane. Try looking in the coals, he’d murmur after lengthy, grueling jaunts in his pot-bellied vessel. Try, and tell me, what d’you find? Ulric just knitted in perplexity, retracting into a shell. Hurriedly, his dented shank winched and pried the exoskeletons of mussels, cockles, and tiny, steel-blue crabs, absconding from ruffian spankings. Presently, kernels of disbelief boiled in his being, intruding on the ruddy, shuffling eels. Visages sprang from in their fiery nebula, ballasts of kreshy fiber, the husking of grist. What d’you see? Haren frequently ventured, twisting a probe of a forefinger. Ulric inexorably clamped his chapped lips, and lied, for his paterfamilias’ skull was suffused by scurrying lobsters, limned by fever, loony in entirety.
Dusk fell, and cowls furled. Below the patina of visors, glazed and stylized, veering like animals, the inquisitors hurled at their shanty of a squalid tenement, all gauntlets, ringmail, and grins, while barbed cudgels swung from harnesses. Through shaking hinges, knobby knees leaking yellowy fright, Haren yelled for Ulric to flee the looming peril. Unthinking, the boy plunged betwixt the twisty gratings, scrambled up a skeleton of vined shutters and crumbly bricks, until he gained purchase on the grimy flotsam of shingles. The city spilled under him, and he ducked, raggedly huffing with shock and a bowel-quaking dread, through the funnel of chimney pots and dormers until glazed tiles scraped, and a hidden inquisitor bashed his knee with a maul. Ulric yelped, the knit of cartilage rupturing. Slumping insensate, he roused in an untidy factory of the macabre, all gnawed flesh and shiny implements. Meaty joints swayed from hooks and trusses, dankly decaying, perspiring walls garnished by the paraphernalia of slaughter. Agony suffused him, coruscating and sundering remnants of innocence. Haren gruesomely dangled by clamps affixed in the flesh of his shoulders, tethered and gagged. Their staples made the skin elongate luridly, his visage a bluish stain dappled by congealed burgundy. Looking from their knolls of sundry implements, the inquisitors parted, yielding ingress to a masque-cupping woman. “Finally, it’s your turn to suffer,” she chided, reaching for shears. Snick, snick, and skin peeled, leaving only a syrupy welling. Haren’s shrieks perforated the gag, and dourly the woman whirled, gesticulating for her underlings to converge. They flayed, snarls of flesh piling up like a carpet of soaked leaves, swapping tongs, pincers, and razors. The interims found them loafing, some puffing a water pipe, listening to a colleague plucking at his sitar. Ulric lapsed into a stupor. Internally fractured, he reflexively reverted to a tabula rasa, shackling any subsequent recollection. |
Ulric departed the cellar lugged by the scruff, drooling and mutedly shaking. Conveyed by an untidy vessel, left numbed and dragged comatosely from wrinkles of burlap, his gaze finally screwed over a faded wall-hanging, subjugated by water-stained plaster. Eventually a kerchief wrung over a basin, and he regarded the milliner who’d rescued him from a prompt drowning. “Don’t try to stand,” Elia shushed, forcing him back on the mattress. Ulric’s face was gray, incisors grinding with the pulsing jolts of his suffering. Elia just clucked, spooned him broth, and eventually, conjured a sawbones for his injury.
Slowly, they grew fonder of each other. Ulric displayed a knack for salvaging discounted materials from the bazaars, mazing the canals while Elia toiled in the bowels of their bricked tenement. They walked by the statuary gardens, gobbled pottage together, prayed at her insistence. 
Ulric hadn’t been very ardent in his previous invocations to Rhysol, but he adjusted to these to daily devotions and homilies, skewing his perception over handbills, raggedy leaflets dispensed by the propagandists. Elia kept hankering for his induction to the temple, her fervor bubbling under a disgruntled shell. Ulric had always implored Rhysol for guidance and sanctuary, but he shrewdly recognized that he’d have to mollify her yearnings. Elia wasn’t utterly hoodwinked, but then, at the junction of their struggle, the portal quaked under a grizzled fist.
Kelhus’ palm was scarified by the sigil of a soldier, disgraced by ineptitude or just recalcitrance. Ruptured from his squad, he’d resorted to selling his sword to the highest bidder. Trudging by cavalcades of wagons, converging to petty banditry and occasionally slaving, he was difficult figure to impress, and he instantly took a disliking to Ulric. Kelhus and Elia squabbled, their bickering an adjunct to the crack of busted crockery. Disinclination ultimately capitulated, qualms trumped by quarreling expostulation. Kelhus suffered Ulric, though he rarely shirked from meting savage whippings when he felt insulted, fissuring ribs at several junctures. Ulric deeply resented him, railing and cajoling for justice while kneeling in sundry chapels, his entreaties fell upon deaf ears. Gradually, he rankled under this spurning, arrived at thuggish revolt. Shedding any boyish illusions, he drifted after dusk, revisiting a mafiosi that’d been yoked by drugs, tossing the knuckles. Elia fumed at his mulish insolence, but with Kelhus gone on a piecemeal foray, she’d no means of culling Ulric’s straying. Nastier, fixated on his faults, the substance of her acerbity plunged directly upon him, and he retaliated in kind. Kelhus’ return left Ulric with fresh bruises, but the damage was already incurred. Elia, already unhinged, swilled over a virulent ballast. Regrettably barren, continually denied progeny, she cosseted the soothsayers, implored leagues of inchoate mystics and knavish apothecaries, until one offered her a panacea. The beaker only left her violet, distended flesh stained like wine, while lifelessly she gawked at flaking plaster. |
Kelhus, gutted, veered toward boozy inundation, though contrarily, he didn’t resort to his preferred crutch of violence. Ulric baffled at his unlikely guidance, galled by the reshuffling of their affiliation. Kelhus jostled him toward a sellsword’s dismal, muddy existence. Any fleshy bits cleaving away, leaving only sinewy brawn, an insistent craving to discover a kernel of understanding. Ulric looked into ruddy, glowing embers, and inquired, what do I see? Inevitably, he scuffed his gaze over ashes, and reached for skins of harsh, vinegary wine. This tendency also dulled the twinges of his frequent abrasions, lumps, and contusions. Kelhus, whose prowess dwarfed any Ulric subsequently witnessed, pressed him ruthlessly. Eternally despising, wholly subjugated by the drubbings, he invariably tried brokering tiny nuggets of triumph, if not conquest, from jaunts of ignominy.
Glacially, stubble fringed his jowls. Ulric filled out, girded by fur-braided leather, segments of ringmail, and bleak resignation. Vicious like a kicked dog, he found himself gifted with uncanny brutality. Through juts of boulders, inexorable jigsaws rifted by patches of frosty heather and bracken, tangled tufts of timber, he eked out moldy bread and rancid, putrefying skilly with fungi, counting himself lucky. Deluges left him shaking, trudging through reeking, stilt-speared marshes, over muddy carpets. Frosty veils savaged him, canyons and utter gulches nearly swallowed his bundled inadequacy in the duplicity of their rocky defiles. Ulric rejected the trawling of gates and winding lanes, drinking and capering with floozies, brawling if he found the excuse. The kernels of amorality, nurtured by this grim milieu, thrived. Their abyssal refraction only crowded him, left him under the smoky rafters of pubs. Though bereft, he gulped the ballads, dirges, and unruly, bawdy jigs of a litany of bards with an inveterate greed. Hollow pipes skirled to his soul, hide-stretched drums imploring him to wriggle from the shackles of typical.
Kelhus’ presence was inexorable, limned by bickering, gibes, and doting fisticuffs. Ulric trifled with feelings, but he’d growl only rejection. There wasn’t much left in the soldier, just booze. The craving left reducing him to knolls of sponged funds, piling to insouciant arrears. Ingots of tumors swelled in knotted guts, and ultimately he reduced to a cheap cadaver under leeching fevers. Spewing gobs of ruddy phlegm, they culminated in his demise. |
Ulric hadn’t realized he’d be overly affected, but he felt the fickle stirring inside him shatter. That wasn’t the only thing, though. Huddles of peril intruded from all quarters, gabling the ducted canals and byways. Muffling machetes, a pair of bashers snuck into his billet, squashing his nose. Don’t matter whose they are, they hissed. Don’t matter, unless you won’t shell out. Ulric only gritted, and culled the dregs of his pockets. Nestled silvers weren’t nearly sufficient, so impulsively he fled for the coast. Bristles of firs, pines, and birch crowded him, but fright only whipped up the bluffs that looked over a briny gulf. Prying asylum from reprisal, he shuffled upon a marooned girl.  Elena, formerly of a cluster of whalers, discerned the lusty glint in his gimlets, and subsequently drugged, afflicted, and defiled him, displaying her own faculty for violence. Ulric forgave her, and they became lovers. Neglecting his maul, he wrung out jumbled fishing nets and corralled his thoughts to her, and his ululating heart. Elena became his zenith, but she’d already augured his departure. Unlike him, she staunchly refused to ascribe any deeper import to their proximity, separate from copulating. Ulric barely quelled his animosity, biding sullenly under her rejection.
And then, congealing from lapping mists, an assembly of bounty hunters spoiled everything. Their mail, scrawny pelts, and pikes didn’t avail the cause, for they perished. Ulric flayed the culprit’s moniker from his victims, and stripping their bloated corpses promptly left for Ravok. The salvage resolved his lesser debts, but refused to pay the largest. Finally, the loan shark, Beran, allegedly a butcher, lured Ulric to his stall, where Beran offered to swap a pardon for a pledge of fealty. Ulric rebuffed the offer, parlaying inadequately with Beran. Accordingly, the juncture forked in his being sliced to shreds by lackeys and trimmed to pickled liver, or brawling from the stall, which’d also settle the debt. Ulric chose the latter, crawling away drenched by ruddy flecks.
Hardly consoled, he trudged over flinty agglomerations, splicing for the rambling conurbation of anarchists and their mineral detritus. The slag heaps quirked his fancy, lozenges of metal bubbling with potential. This was a queer period for him, veering temporal through his incessant mulling. Eddying shoals signaled, and he rejoiced in their thunder, roaming and scraping over brackets of mussels. Ruffians lazed, and trundled with equanimity. Ulric resented their swagger, irritated by the sweltering blister, and he blitzed through an enclave, leaving a gory trail in reckoning for a mislaid jape. Ruthlessly unaffected by the vindictive streak, he digressed from racket and squalor. |
Ravok bided, indubitable in inky beauty. Though returning to its rearing cantons, he wasn’t placated by the legions of balusters and leaden effigies. They were unremittingly hollow, just deep-pocked boulders, alabaster marred by manifold veins. The urns, satins, and sandal rosaries jaded him, the swollen blood oranges deficient in tangy savor. Gnostics failed in their meddling, rambling over parched frauds. Mammoth specters bunched around him, and he began to question, where do I fit? Fittingly, a liquored miasma guided his rejoinder. Ivar One-Eye, a dreaded conjurer and myth for his retrieval of artifacts, brashly offered the prospect of pillaging reliquaries, finding buried casks. Bogged down by silver, he pledged his skin, along with a parcel of sundry warriors, to delving a warlord’s ossified charnel from a northerly bedlam.
Dogged by peril, they died. Dwarfed by milky peaks, frosted under shaggy, reeking pelts, gnawed by wolves as they starved. They turned ankles on broken rocks, trudged by murmuring boles that wept a thick, ruddy sap. The horses perished, turgid rivers claimed their provisions. Rag-wrapped heels scuffed over snowy crusts, exposing carpets of decaying leaves. Knolls defiladed, forcing them to toil up ridges and traverse slippery, thundering gorges bearded by mist. Mossy rocks jutted from deepling pools meshed by frail shards of frost, nestled by menhirs. Flaky birches plunged gray, bushy firs, spruces, and somber pines looking somberly. Squalls draped, dismally leeching spirit from gaunt chests. Red-Eye, though consumed by madness, was painfully cognizant of their deficiency. Seeing that he’d only eight men remaining, he declared they’d bide through the worst. Together they felled, hauled, and lashed until they’d lofted a ramshackle kind of citadel, squatting like a gargoyle over a flinty gorge. Inlay of runes graced a boulder, a tribute of its denizens; Agnar, Grim, Tyrfing, Ulric, Einar, Ingvar, Knute, Thord, Ivar.
The Bone Hunters.
Grimly, they carved a meager existence from the forest, gleaning what sustenance they might before the waxing of a fresh peril. Ulric flogged himself with despair, resigned to their imminent demise. Though part of him rebelled, he desperately, frenziedly lanced at a greater meaning. The gist defied him, but he refused to kneel, clutching at bleak reflections and visions, looking for veracity. Unwittingly, they’d strayed in the nether territory of itinerant hunters. Tensions boiled, and both sides schemed the other’s demise. Veya, a girl wishing to skirt the dispute, guided him to Kyal, a bewitching mystic who implored him to forestall the inevitable. Ulric refused, stating that it was impossible, and presently many of The Bone Hunters perished during the eradication of their foes. Red-Eye led their bloody remnant to his reliquary, a grotto garnished by calcified stalagmites. But abruptly, the warriors turned on him and their comrades, bitterly settling scores. Ulric, having stayed consistently faithful to Red-Eye, plunged a knife into the conjurer’s spine rather than letting him profane the bones, which’d become his creed. Shambling from the gory spectacle, the only man who’d endured, Ulric reunited with Veya and Kyal, then trekked to Ravok. |
Verdigris had already crept over the metal busts and mighty, marble plinths of his innocence. Irrevocably changed, Ulric poured stiff layers of ringmail into a basket, laid aside his maul. Infused with a yearning to return to the days of yore, he acquired a vessel, joined the ranks of fishermen. Trawling for silvery, wriggling provender, he existed meagerly. Guzzled and whored, trudged through the edifices of roses and cherry trees, paddling like a wraith defying his labyrinth.  And then, drifting on a bayou of vacantly horrid visions and blasphemy, he was beguiled by Mhera, a fiery-haired girl who’d already steeped him in deceit. Ulric pursued her affections, only to find her rutting with a rival. Though wrathful conflagration yielded to a profundity of grief, as he turned, he was stricken by an infernal rapture. Tinges of a myriad chaos buzzed through his veins, seducing him with an insanity. The liminal fury of his father’s flaying, though forbidden, made flumes in his head, and he promptly executed, mutilated, and hurled the mangled bits of flesh and gristle into the canals. Krysus’ curiosity piqued, and having bestowed him a token of her favor, she winked out of regard. Ulric hurtled from his transgression, dreading the reprisals of justice. |
Ulric trudged over blue ridges, crested by ruddy hues as he grieved a flagellant’s undertaking of salvation. Ravok had belched him in distain, and now he trekked for Syliras. The sprawl of purple, of topaz plunged sheerly, plumbed by a jumble of canyons. Their cliffs were direly vertiginous, scattered of boulders. Fissures of ravines trenched before him, blotched by the molten intensity of ascendant birches. And then, the squat gates plunged before his vision, swathed by an immensity of buttresses, crenels, and towers. However, he wouldn’t remain for very long. Krysus’ taint was upon him, and prevaricated against the deity, preaching defiance. Glav Navik, the temple’s prelate, offered him a voyage to the far corners of the world, along with Leo Varniak, Torc Ironwood, and Sharn. Glav’s only caveat was Ulric’s unsullied fidelity, though the prelate’s exact purpose, the sundering Ivak’s fetters and Glav’s own, subsequent ascension, slouched under layers of pretense. Embarking on a vast cromster, sails unfurled over their trip to Karjin.
Invariably unable to slumber, Ulric found refuge by the canting jib, looking over the string of pearls broaching inky velvet. Isolation defied him, and a tiny creature kenneled him by the railing. Faintly shifting, bluish with tusks, he instinctively knew it for a Gasvik. It evoked a vestigial yearning in him, and he submitted to its sway.  Tanroa interceded, deluging them thousands of years through time, to the mislaid temple where he confronted his precursor. Xhyvas, the God of Possibility and Transcendence, was slain, though he explained that a sliver of his essence was inchoate, at the very least, in Ulric. Xhyvas rebuked him for not circumventing injury, lifting the stain of Krysus’ influence, and Ulric wholly pledged himself to the deity’s resurrection. Xhyvas spoke of the inevitability of demise, but also leeway, for a parcel of viziers bided though the ingress of time, risking everything for his return.
And yet, there’d be no escaping harm over the voyage. Vayt infringed on Glav’s hegemony, dispatching an insidious plague, incarnate in an affiliate of the Shroud. Finn Hanli, the skipper, Glav Navik, and Leo Varniak defused the hazard, but Krysus seized the instant to entice Ulric. Ulric and Sharn climbed to the bilge, where caged by the thwarts, she materialized, forcefully imposing her seduction. Ulric refused vehemently, but during his struggle for dominion, juvenile shackles burst in his mind, plunging his cognizance to inexorable wreckage. Finally, he repatriated the shink, shink of flaying, but he’d already slumped. Krysus decided him weak, but Ulric, convening what remained of his resolve, bullied her with invective and ridicule, the tendrils of Xhyvas’ braising his visage such that, horrified of the discord, Krysus fled from Ulric. |
Ulric’s disavowal inflated in cost, dispersing his sanity over the gulfs and knolls. Distortions in his persona surfaced, fractured and dissonant with any kind of conviviality. Violent paroxysms chirped through flanges of marrow, gripped by a muddling insomnia. Drowning under this pressure, he was belatedly cognizant of another presence, a usurper corroding his faculties. Worse, the presence wasn’t alien. Blankly, he reflected upon the child who’d wobbled, dizzy and barfing at the immolating repulsion of his skewed knee. Though he’d escaped, this child had bided, shrieking, in seedy confines of gore for nearly twenty years, fueled by a flagrant fury, yet incidentally, a curdling grief. Polyps took root, subjugating his ascendancy with an ardently homicidal mania. The gypsum of his mind keened, and fissured, every whisper the gong of a mallet.
Ultimately, Ulric arrived at the volcanic metropolis of warrens dubbed Wind Reach, badly sluicing, leaking with decay. Murmurs dogged him, but mulishly he persisted in his insubordination. Dismay left him vulnerable, though. Eerily voracious, the usurper took over. Lurking in the tunnels, he nursed an antipathy for the caste system that squashed him under disdainful heel. Before long, his woeful cuffing of paranoia arrived at fruition. Though flying from peril, the murmurs reversed in skeptical affront, and during a penultimate jihad for dominance, the usurper dissolved. |
Ulric cozened to chimera, residing in the seaport of Alvadas while he fancied himself the incarnate of Xhyvas, preaching, drinking, and despairing at his ineptitude. Trawling from untidy coracles, or the tufted strand, he miserably pursued his vocation in gladiatorial games. And then, irrevocably, everything changed. A dispatch from his mother shattered him, sealed by the sigil of the Black Sun. Aylis D’yar was merely a ruse. Ynara Dagor-Fyr divulged the sordid truths of his parentage, the rapine she’d subjected herself to by edict of Myleena Sul. Kelhus Taredan was, quite rightly, disgraced, he’d also been an eminent paladin, and her brother. Elia was his wife, Liana Desorn. Ynara implored Ulric to return to her side.
Vowing retribution, Ulric decided to remain still for the moment, rankling under the yoke of Xhyvas. Diverted by turbulent copulation with Naama, a savage he’d picked up from the lanes, he refurbished a ruined chapel, sanctifying it as the Temple of Xhyvas. Ynara, fearing that he’d become too fixated on his life, subsequently dispatched her caitiff, Arshaz, to edify Ulric. Arshaz nearly killed Naama, plowing a blade into her womb so the quickening child spilled from the juncture of her thighs. Ulric reduced him to gristle, and schemed Ynara’s demise. Eventually, when Xhyvas returned to his throne, Ulric seized the opening for his vengeance. Fobbing the Temple of Xhyvas off on Lynnea Timandre, his only initiate, he departed for Syliras on a casinor guided by Sable Baggywrinkle. Returning, leery of Glav Navik’s duplicity, Ulric trudged for Ravok. |
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by Ulric on May 20th, 2010, 6:15 pm 
