![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hollow_kingUser Name/Nick: Sy
User DW: N/A
AIM/IM: @anstaar
E-mail: Perola1882@gmail.com
Other Characters: Erskine Ravel, Hope Summers, Stan Pines
Character Name: kin Horseriver
Series: World of the Five Gods / Chalion Series
Age: Uncertain but more than four centuries
From When?: At his final death, near the end of The Hallowed Hunt
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Horseriver is an inmate for quite a few reasons but most of them boil down to a betrayal of faith, not in the religious sense but in what he owed to the people who had given their loyalty to him. In simple terms, the old kings – of whom Horseriver was the last - had two tasks: to lead their men to battle and to lead them home again. Leading them home wasn’t about survival, it was freeing their souls so they could be taken up by their god – or chose not to be. He let down that duty, took away their choices in order to try to hurt the gods. In that quest, over the centuries, he’s committed many other crimes but at the base is that betrayal and the taking away of others choices. All the while claiming he’s doing it for them.
He needs to both deal with what he’s done over his multiple lives - and what’s been done to him - and to learn to care about the consequences of his actions.
Arrival: Extremely unwilling
Abilities/Powers: Currently, nothing more than centuries worth of experience in fighting and politics. The magic he had was stripped from him at his death, even before the Barge, but he does have knowledge of certain rituals to gain power that he won’t be able to access.
Personality:
Those who know Earl Wencel kin Horseriver agree that he’s a hard man to describe. A young man, though he gives the impression of being much older, who seems to have grown into his power and responsibilities. He’s very intelligent, to a degree that makes people uncomfortable at times. He’s moody, sometimes going around for days in silence as if caught in his own thoughts. He’s known to occasionally sink into depression (called a darkness of the spirit, in the terms he would use). He can be charming, funny even, but often swings back to a cool detachment from the world. These inconsistencies and weird shifts are easily explained: he is not truly Wencel. He is the last Hallowed king. Long generations before, his people had been fighting against invaders. Losing to them. They decided on a ritual that would make their warriors immortal, un-killable, tied to the king. Unfortunately, the ritual was interrupted and twisted, leaving only him immortal. But he could be killed, at least in body.
Social context is important in understanding anyone’s personality but in Horseriver’s case, a large chunk of what his personality has become by the time of his final death can’t be understood without knowing certain fundamental facts about his world. The most important is that the five gods exist and are known to exist. They can’t move matter or force someone’s will. However, when someone opens up their soul to them they can work through that person. Through these conducts the gods can perform various miracles, from small to large. The most fundamental connection they have with all people, the miracle that is always granted, is at someone’s death. The person’s soul is taken up by one of the gods – which one is demonstrated in various ways – apart from the people who chose to reject them and become ghosts who fade away into nothing.
Among Horseriver’s people, there was a practice of warriors taking in the souls of animals – something that grants various powers but prevents them from being taken up by the gods. So at their deaths the animal spirit is separated from their souls – allowing the person the choice to follow their god or turn away. Because of the ritual, Horseriver’s soul is not released upon death. Instead, his soul traveled into the body of his closest in blood male descendent. And continued to do so, cursing him to a cycle of torment.
The twisting of the ritual and the horror that followed was not Horseriver’s fault, but he bears responsibility for what he did. Two different minds could not co-exist without destruction. He took control of the bodies, suppressing and consuming the souls that were there before. First to continue the fight and later because there was no chance of the other mind standing up against his experience. In this way he traveled through sixteen generations, himself but also with the memories of those he overtook, a vast pool of memory and personality - still there. These remnants of other personalities sometimes float to the surface, sometimes are accessed on purpose, adding to his erratic behavior. But they certainly aren’t the only reason.
Horseriver has lived for centuries. Hard centuries of fighting and death and killing his own children whatever he tried to do to escape. Centuries that allowed him to see what he fought and sacrificed for destroyed. Even when the invaders were kicked out and the kingship restored, it wasn’t the one he’d known. The old traditions were forgotten or misremembered, the new ones brought by the invaders holding sway. And even without this, all those years of seeing people he cared for die probably would’ve added to his layer of detachment. He has grown indifferent to the family (wives, siblings, children) that come and go around; to not take pleasure in things like fine horses or food or comfort because it’s transient and he’s seen countless of such pass before his eyes.
He presents the world with a smooth ironic mask. Those who get to know him see a little more: a brittle humor; an apparent indifference to all things lying just below the surface; an occasional burst of temper. But below that, there’s an aspect of his personality that has sharpened and twisted over the years: his dedication. This was always part of who he was. At the beginning, it was something truer. It helped bring together his people to fight and why he continued fighting. It wasn’t mindless or unbending, as circumstances changed he went from war to politics to reclaim his people’s home. He had been elected king and he worked to fulfill the responsibility put upon him by that role.
However, that dedication has turned to obsession; to hurt the gods he feels responsible for his fate because they didn’t listen to his people’s calls. This obsession doesn’t allow responsibility for anyone else, respect for their choices, about how many will be hurt by his actions. He has built himself around a core of bitterness, the only thing that lasts. He’s tired and vengeful and willing to do anything. He has developed a certain type of patience combined with a constant shifting from plan to plan to try to avoid any traps of the gods. The only thing he truly wants is something impossible – his world back; his first wife and his sons and the time they’d lived in. Cut off, he’s willing to cut off many others.
Yet, it’s also not just spite. Horseriver is aware of his bitterness – knows how much it keeps him going – but he doesn’t realize to what lengths his obsession has destroyed what he once believed in, who he once was. He wants to hurt the gods, and he thinks that his people must want the same thing. He thinks of himself as still their king – leading the way down a path they want to follow. He claims not to care much about the people around him, who will die so soon, and even though that’s not completely true he is better at disconnecting from them. At using them to do what he thinks has to be done. But he still allows himself to care about his dead. Believes that he’s doing right by them. As tired as he is, as much as he wants to rest, taking them with him is an act he considers good not just another attack against his enemies. Finding out they don’t, as he does right before his final death, is something he hasn’t yet had to confront.
He also does care about the world around him. Despite what he says, despite the truth to his claims of apathy, it’s not as complete as he makes it out to be. Partly, he’s too curious. Stuff that catches his interest is rare but when he finds it he has a hard time letting go. This includes an interest in people that turns obsessive when they really catch his attention. But even with his wife, someone he mostly disregards, he can’t look at her straight on when he uses her for his plan. The ability and desire to make connections is twisted but it’s still there.
Barge Reactions:
Horseriver will have an easier time dealing with the extremes of the Barge than it’s ‘normal’. When it comes to Breaches, he has long experience with suppressing other personalities and will do his best to do so with whatever is left from the Breach. As for floods, he’s used to alterations of body and shifts in his mind. Ports, well, they might be interesting. Dying? He’s done that plenty of times and far more painfully. His only complaint is that yet again he is brought back instead of released.
The harder part will be dealing with the day to day. The ship and its technology are completely alien to him. He comes from an almost medieval like world with strict distinctions of rank. He also comes from a world where the gods are very much real. Dealing with people who come from modern times will be strange and also those from worlds without magic. Aliens, while also unfamiliar, are barely less strange. On the one hand, it’s some of the first truly new and interesting things he’s seen for a long time but he also doesn’t have much interest in adapting to other people’s standards of behavior. On the very surface, at first meeting, he acts with courtly politeness. Which is to say, with a degree of formality and certain expectations foreign to people from cultures such as 20th/21st century Earth. He might say that rank doesn’t mean much to him after all the years, but he understands the world in terms of such. It adds a touch of unthinkingly arrogance. Part of that is the result of all his years but quite a bit is because of who he is. A lord, a king, an earl – important men of all stripes. It’s not that he consciously expects respect, he is simply used to a certain position in society.
Path to Redemption:
For Horseriver, redemption is in letting go yet it’s also about connections. In multiple senses. Not letting go of his anger, necessarily, but of revenge. To let go of enough indifference to care about things other than anger. To take people as equals, not as subjects, and to accept his responsibility when it comes to his subjects. To let go of the cannibalized souls and try to find something for himself. He won’t be interested in redemption, especially not at first, seeing it as basically the same promise the gods offered which he rejected. There’s nothing that he thinks he wants. He accepts that he’s a monster, he sees no reason to go beyond that.
A more indirect approach is needed. The strangeness of the Barge will be a starting point to get through the layers of indifference. His interest pulls him out of himself a little, enough to start seeing who he is beneath the surface apathy and so allowing attempts to deal with that. Talking about his past and making peace with what parts he can living with the horrors he can’t make peace with. To let go of the habits of control.
To get through to him, a warden also has to at least try to understand his world. They don’t have to agree but if they don’t understand why being a king is important, the double ties of duty, they won’t be able to reach a large part of him. Those who are fundamentally against the magic he’s used to, which includes blood and human and animal sacrifice, will be dismissed by him.
Another part that will hold him back is habit. He's very used to dismissing whatever qualms he might have about his actions. At looking away. At holding people at a distance so he doesn’t have to care, especially as he has a greater mission. With that mission both finished and not received as he thought it will, he’ll try even harder not to care. But making connections with people and then accepting the consequences of his actions in relation to them is another important step.
History:
Centuries before his death, he was born the heir to his high house of kin Horseriver. His country, the Weald, was under invasion by the Darthacans. As he puts it “[they] pressed my kin tribe, squatted on our lands, cut down our forests, sent missionaries to defile our shrines, then soldiers to drag the missionaries’ bodies home. My people fought and fell. I saw my father die, and my hallow king.”
At the election for the next king, he was chosen. By that time his people were grim and needed someone like him to lead them into battle. And he did, spending years fighting and sacrificing to try to get help from the gods. They grew more desperate as the Darthacans grew more vicious. Eventually, they decided to perform a holy rite to grant immortality to the soldiers. However, the ritual was interrupted by the Darthacans who reached the field of battle far quicker than expected. The Darthacan leader at that time turned the fight into a slaughter. He killed everyone there – at a place that became known as Bloodfield. He didn’t just kill the warriors but also the camp followers and any other innocent that might get caught up in the fight. Than he cursed the field, blocked it from the gods.
Horseriver traveled from one horrible death to another. He spent the next hundred and fifty years working to win back the Weald through the bodies of various descendants. First fighting and then turning to politics. Finally, they succeeded. Only for him to realize that the Weald hadn’t be restored. That the magic that had once been in it was gone. His war was over but not one.
So he turned to a different sort of war, against the gods he felt had brought him to this position. He amassed money and power and eventually found himself in position to retake the hallow kingship. With that power, he returned to Bloodfield and the ghosts that had been trapped there for so long – not to free them but to take them with him in dissolution.
However, he was stopped by those he had manipulated and the power taken from him. He died, final plan failed and with no hope of anything else.
Sample Journal Entry: Link
Sample RP: Link
User DW: N/A
AIM/IM: @anstaar
E-mail: Perola1882@gmail.com
Other Characters: Erskine Ravel, Hope Summers, Stan Pines
Character Name: kin Horseriver
Series: World of the Five Gods / Chalion Series
Age: Uncertain but more than four centuries
From When?: At his final death, near the end of The Hallowed Hunt
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Horseriver is an inmate for quite a few reasons but most of them boil down to a betrayal of faith, not in the religious sense but in what he owed to the people who had given their loyalty to him. In simple terms, the old kings – of whom Horseriver was the last - had two tasks: to lead their men to battle and to lead them home again. Leading them home wasn’t about survival, it was freeing their souls so they could be taken up by their god – or chose not to be. He let down that duty, took away their choices in order to try to hurt the gods. In that quest, over the centuries, he’s committed many other crimes but at the base is that betrayal and the taking away of others choices. All the while claiming he’s doing it for them.
He needs to both deal with what he’s done over his multiple lives - and what’s been done to him - and to learn to care about the consequences of his actions.
Arrival: Extremely unwilling
Abilities/Powers: Currently, nothing more than centuries worth of experience in fighting and politics. The magic he had was stripped from him at his death, even before the Barge, but he does have knowledge of certain rituals to gain power that he won’t be able to access.
Personality:
Those who know Earl Wencel kin Horseriver agree that he’s a hard man to describe. A young man, though he gives the impression of being much older, who seems to have grown into his power and responsibilities. He’s very intelligent, to a degree that makes people uncomfortable at times. He’s moody, sometimes going around for days in silence as if caught in his own thoughts. He’s known to occasionally sink into depression (called a darkness of the spirit, in the terms he would use). He can be charming, funny even, but often swings back to a cool detachment from the world. These inconsistencies and weird shifts are easily explained: he is not truly Wencel. He is the last Hallowed king. Long generations before, his people had been fighting against invaders. Losing to them. They decided on a ritual that would make their warriors immortal, un-killable, tied to the king. Unfortunately, the ritual was interrupted and twisted, leaving only him immortal. But he could be killed, at least in body.
Social context is important in understanding anyone’s personality but in Horseriver’s case, a large chunk of what his personality has become by the time of his final death can’t be understood without knowing certain fundamental facts about his world. The most important is that the five gods exist and are known to exist. They can’t move matter or force someone’s will. However, when someone opens up their soul to them they can work through that person. Through these conducts the gods can perform various miracles, from small to large. The most fundamental connection they have with all people, the miracle that is always granted, is at someone’s death. The person’s soul is taken up by one of the gods – which one is demonstrated in various ways – apart from the people who chose to reject them and become ghosts who fade away into nothing.
Among Horseriver’s people, there was a practice of warriors taking in the souls of animals – something that grants various powers but prevents them from being taken up by the gods. So at their deaths the animal spirit is separated from their souls – allowing the person the choice to follow their god or turn away. Because of the ritual, Horseriver’s soul is not released upon death. Instead, his soul traveled into the body of his closest in blood male descendent. And continued to do so, cursing him to a cycle of torment.
The twisting of the ritual and the horror that followed was not Horseriver’s fault, but he bears responsibility for what he did. Two different minds could not co-exist without destruction. He took control of the bodies, suppressing and consuming the souls that were there before. First to continue the fight and later because there was no chance of the other mind standing up against his experience. In this way he traveled through sixteen generations, himself but also with the memories of those he overtook, a vast pool of memory and personality - still there. These remnants of other personalities sometimes float to the surface, sometimes are accessed on purpose, adding to his erratic behavior. But they certainly aren’t the only reason.
Horseriver has lived for centuries. Hard centuries of fighting and death and killing his own children whatever he tried to do to escape. Centuries that allowed him to see what he fought and sacrificed for destroyed. Even when the invaders were kicked out and the kingship restored, it wasn’t the one he’d known. The old traditions were forgotten or misremembered, the new ones brought by the invaders holding sway. And even without this, all those years of seeing people he cared for die probably would’ve added to his layer of detachment. He has grown indifferent to the family (wives, siblings, children) that come and go around; to not take pleasure in things like fine horses or food or comfort because it’s transient and he’s seen countless of such pass before his eyes.
He presents the world with a smooth ironic mask. Those who get to know him see a little more: a brittle humor; an apparent indifference to all things lying just below the surface; an occasional burst of temper. But below that, there’s an aspect of his personality that has sharpened and twisted over the years: his dedication. This was always part of who he was. At the beginning, it was something truer. It helped bring together his people to fight and why he continued fighting. It wasn’t mindless or unbending, as circumstances changed he went from war to politics to reclaim his people’s home. He had been elected king and he worked to fulfill the responsibility put upon him by that role.
However, that dedication has turned to obsession; to hurt the gods he feels responsible for his fate because they didn’t listen to his people’s calls. This obsession doesn’t allow responsibility for anyone else, respect for their choices, about how many will be hurt by his actions. He has built himself around a core of bitterness, the only thing that lasts. He’s tired and vengeful and willing to do anything. He has developed a certain type of patience combined with a constant shifting from plan to plan to try to avoid any traps of the gods. The only thing he truly wants is something impossible – his world back; his first wife and his sons and the time they’d lived in. Cut off, he’s willing to cut off many others.
Yet, it’s also not just spite. Horseriver is aware of his bitterness – knows how much it keeps him going – but he doesn’t realize to what lengths his obsession has destroyed what he once believed in, who he once was. He wants to hurt the gods, and he thinks that his people must want the same thing. He thinks of himself as still their king – leading the way down a path they want to follow. He claims not to care much about the people around him, who will die so soon, and even though that’s not completely true he is better at disconnecting from them. At using them to do what he thinks has to be done. But he still allows himself to care about his dead. Believes that he’s doing right by them. As tired as he is, as much as he wants to rest, taking them with him is an act he considers good not just another attack against his enemies. Finding out they don’t, as he does right before his final death, is something he hasn’t yet had to confront.
He also does care about the world around him. Despite what he says, despite the truth to his claims of apathy, it’s not as complete as he makes it out to be. Partly, he’s too curious. Stuff that catches his interest is rare but when he finds it he has a hard time letting go. This includes an interest in people that turns obsessive when they really catch his attention. But even with his wife, someone he mostly disregards, he can’t look at her straight on when he uses her for his plan. The ability and desire to make connections is twisted but it’s still there.
Barge Reactions:
Horseriver will have an easier time dealing with the extremes of the Barge than it’s ‘normal’. When it comes to Breaches, he has long experience with suppressing other personalities and will do his best to do so with whatever is left from the Breach. As for floods, he’s used to alterations of body and shifts in his mind. Ports, well, they might be interesting. Dying? He’s done that plenty of times and far more painfully. His only complaint is that yet again he is brought back instead of released.
The harder part will be dealing with the day to day. The ship and its technology are completely alien to him. He comes from an almost medieval like world with strict distinctions of rank. He also comes from a world where the gods are very much real. Dealing with people who come from modern times will be strange and also those from worlds without magic. Aliens, while also unfamiliar, are barely less strange. On the one hand, it’s some of the first truly new and interesting things he’s seen for a long time but he also doesn’t have much interest in adapting to other people’s standards of behavior. On the very surface, at first meeting, he acts with courtly politeness. Which is to say, with a degree of formality and certain expectations foreign to people from cultures such as 20th/21st century Earth. He might say that rank doesn’t mean much to him after all the years, but he understands the world in terms of such. It adds a touch of unthinkingly arrogance. Part of that is the result of all his years but quite a bit is because of who he is. A lord, a king, an earl – important men of all stripes. It’s not that he consciously expects respect, he is simply used to a certain position in society.
Path to Redemption:
For Horseriver, redemption is in letting go yet it’s also about connections. In multiple senses. Not letting go of his anger, necessarily, but of revenge. To let go of enough indifference to care about things other than anger. To take people as equals, not as subjects, and to accept his responsibility when it comes to his subjects. To let go of the cannibalized souls and try to find something for himself. He won’t be interested in redemption, especially not at first, seeing it as basically the same promise the gods offered which he rejected. There’s nothing that he thinks he wants. He accepts that he’s a monster, he sees no reason to go beyond that.
A more indirect approach is needed. The strangeness of the Barge will be a starting point to get through the layers of indifference. His interest pulls him out of himself a little, enough to start seeing who he is beneath the surface apathy and so allowing attempts to deal with that. Talking about his past and making peace with what parts he can living with the horrors he can’t make peace with. To let go of the habits of control.
To get through to him, a warden also has to at least try to understand his world. They don’t have to agree but if they don’t understand why being a king is important, the double ties of duty, they won’t be able to reach a large part of him. Those who are fundamentally against the magic he’s used to, which includes blood and human and animal sacrifice, will be dismissed by him.
Another part that will hold him back is habit. He's very used to dismissing whatever qualms he might have about his actions. At looking away. At holding people at a distance so he doesn’t have to care, especially as he has a greater mission. With that mission both finished and not received as he thought it will, he’ll try even harder not to care. But making connections with people and then accepting the consequences of his actions in relation to them is another important step.
History:
Centuries before his death, he was born the heir to his high house of kin Horseriver. His country, the Weald, was under invasion by the Darthacans. As he puts it “[they] pressed my kin tribe, squatted on our lands, cut down our forests, sent missionaries to defile our shrines, then soldiers to drag the missionaries’ bodies home. My people fought and fell. I saw my father die, and my hallow king.”
At the election for the next king, he was chosen. By that time his people were grim and needed someone like him to lead them into battle. And he did, spending years fighting and sacrificing to try to get help from the gods. They grew more desperate as the Darthacans grew more vicious. Eventually, they decided to perform a holy rite to grant immortality to the soldiers. However, the ritual was interrupted by the Darthacans who reached the field of battle far quicker than expected. The Darthacan leader at that time turned the fight into a slaughter. He killed everyone there – at a place that became known as Bloodfield. He didn’t just kill the warriors but also the camp followers and any other innocent that might get caught up in the fight. Than he cursed the field, blocked it from the gods.
Horseriver traveled from one horrible death to another. He spent the next hundred and fifty years working to win back the Weald through the bodies of various descendants. First fighting and then turning to politics. Finally, they succeeded. Only for him to realize that the Weald hadn’t be restored. That the magic that had once been in it was gone. His war was over but not one.
So he turned to a different sort of war, against the gods he felt had brought him to this position. He amassed money and power and eventually found himself in position to retake the hallow kingship. With that power, he returned to Bloodfield and the ghosts that had been trapped there for so long – not to free them but to take them with him in dissolution.
However, he was stopped by those he had manipulated and the power taken from him. He died, final plan failed and with no hope of anything else.
Sample Journal Entry: Link
Sample RP: Link
