Slayer of the Rot
05-26-09, 07:09 PM
((Please kick this in the teeth with the Delete button. Thank you.))
Name: Dan Lagh'ratham, The Red Beast
Age: 32
Sex: Male
Height: 6'4"
Weight: 215 lbs.
Hair Colour: Black
Eye Colour: Gray
Occupation: Slayer
Personality: Greedy and intensely violent, Dan Lagh'ratham is motivated only by power, money, and the search for his daughter (to roast). He is noted infamously for his exceedingly violent responses to even the most minor of annoyances. Cocksure and arrogant to a fault, Dan does not believe that a force exists in the world that can (permanently) kill him; his blind fearlessness makes him extremely lethal when he has set his sights on a single target.
Appearance: Dan Lagh'ratham is a tall, bulky man with hard plates of muscle across his form, and brutal facial features that take well to an expression of absolute fury. The man dresses simply with little regard to modern fashion; usually in war torn clothes or mixes of military uniforms stolen from felled corpses.
Weapons: Primarily, Dan enjoys the use of a large, mythril bladed great axe with a delyn core and haft. The weapon has a thick, cleaver like blade, which is forged of a heavier mythril ore than most weapons made with the metal, and thus has a duller, grayer shine to it.
While less used, the slayer also owns a prevalida kodachi, which is usually bound to his belt in the small of his back, and an iron revolver worn at the right side of his hip with approximately ninety lead bullets.
Armour: He uses nothing but the Shield of Vanguard, a living shield of indeterminate material with the strength of mythril and unknown properties. The soul of a daemon was sealed into it several years ago, and its mouth is centered on the front of the shield. It’s fickle, and picks its owners of its volition, depending on strength. It has the power to chew up weak spells (lvl. 0-1), as well as projectiles such as arrows or bolts, and spit them back at the casters.
Items:
Kikurin
A small jade plaque with three small, white indents carved into its otherwise ornately decorated face, this artifact, upon being invoked, allows Dan to become invisible to the naked eye, for five minutes at a time. Once all three indents return to the color of jade, however, the artifact must be exposed to moonlight for an entire night before recharging. Dan has impanted it into the very center of his chest.
Ether Band
A gold ring inset with three amber stones. Allows short distance teleportation of 8 to 10 feet per use. Inlaid with 3 amber stones which turn to onyx each time it is used to teleport. The stones may be used at once to teleport long distances, such as from The Citadel in Corone to Anebrilith in Raiaera. Requires three hours in direct sunlight to recharge its power after all of the stones turn to onyx. Dan has implanted this into the center of his right hand.
Angelic Emblem
A pair of silver plates, slightly dented, as wide as a man's spread hand. Used together, the plates emit a pair of ethereal wings which change appearances between possessors. The wings allow flight although draining the user's stamina as if actively flapping the wings - Maximum duration depending directly on possessor's stamina. The wings can be damaged as normal bird's wings would and require several hours of rest to repair the damage. Dan has implanted these directly into both his shoulder blades.
((Link (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=16038&page=2) to all three new items))
Strength Leaves
A set of four special leaves, which are taken from ground saturated with magic. Upon chewing these leaves, a person’s strength is doubled for an hour, as well as prevent them from succumbing to poisons. Additionally, after being chewed, if applied to wounds, the leaves help the healing process.
Skills and Abilities:
Biology of a Madman
Dan is able to lift approximately five and a half tons, is twice as fast and agile than the normal human being, and is able to bend/break/rip/destroy materials equal to or beneath delyn, though not without some difficulty. His sight and hearing is on par with an elf's, and his sense of smell is only slightly more superior than the common canine's. Since his body has been strained to the breaking point so many times, it has grown to simply except the enormous amounts of punishment he heaps on it. The slayer is capable of losing twice the blood of a normal man before passing out, and has an incredibly high threshold for pain. In fact, it has adapted to the point that his bones are far harder to break than usual (though when they do break, they tend to be far worse than the common fracture. It has been proven in the past, in Citadel matches, that the only real way to kill the slayer is immolation, decapitation, or crushing his skull. While, say, piercing his heart with an arrow would slow him down and bleed him out, he would only enter a deep coma until the wound is healed. While the unnatural changes the Ritual incurs is commonly only seen in the state that Dan has dubbed the "Blood Frenzy", performing it a second time has altered his own common appearance. Appearing more feral and savage than the common man, his hands and feet are crowned with wicked claws made of a black, porous looking material, much like volcanic rock, each with the tensile strength of delyn; in fact, his entire skeletal system is composed of the stuff. While as difficult as ever to break, when his bones do, the fractures are usually far more severe than common. The canine teeth in his jaws are far longer, sharper, and more pronounced than usual, and his ears are peaked to a sharp tip, in the common shape of a leaf.
Dan is capable of recovering from wounds twice as fast as a human being; as well as wounds that are inarguably fatal to any living being. This has no use during combat (as the only thing that would heal during the short time a fight would take place would be superficial scratches). The slayer must be resting before any serious injuries, such as broken arms or very large gashes, will begin to heal. While incapable, of course, of springing back up immediately from death blows, the Riitual has made him nigh indestructible; if say, he is decapitated, and the severed head is held to to the neck in any fashion, the wound will heal within weeks. If, for further example, he is killed with a mass volley of arrows and left as is, his body will slowly expel the weapons and repair itself over a period of several weeks. After being "killed", though, he is left within a stasis much like death, and is as vulnerable as any other corpse. Additionally, his body produces very little fatigue toxins, which allows the slayer to operate at peak capacity for two days before needing rest, food, or water.
Due to his simplistic nature, however, it is an easy matter to mentally manipulate the slayer. Unlike physical attacks, mental offenses always take their full toll on Dan if not more so, and he tends to fall for illusions more often than not.
Curiously, those select, mad few who perform the Ritual for themselves seem to gain an aversion to copper. The red metal, considered alchemically to be the closest in element to fire, causes the flesh of the inhuman it touches to blister and sizzle upon contact. To Dan, the touch of copper is really the only pain that he considers more than simply annoying, and if exposed to it for even a short time (one post), he will instantly burst into a Blood Frenzy. If the copper maintains contact throughout the Frenzy, by the time he reverts, his skin will actually burst into flame. Thrusting a blade of copper into his heart and not removing it is the only known way to completely halt his mutated regenerative abilities, and will put him into one of his comas in short order.
Slayer's Bond
Dan has acquired a strong connection with all of his weapons, even the most recent. He can summon them from thin air, and have it vanish in the same manner. Also, he can summon it to his hand if it is at most, thirty feet away. This skill has a chance to fail if Dan is attempting to summon the weapon(s) under situations of extreme duress or intense pain.
Blood Frenzy
Most likely a side affect of consuming the flesh of blessed animals, or Thayne favored beings, once Dan has smelled and eaten a fair amount of meat and blood from another living being, he will convert into a mental and physical state that he refers to as a "blood frenzy". The true form of the berserker; Dan's body floods with toxic levels of adrenaline which cause a very unpleasant burning sensation - which lessens with the more meat he eats. of being lit on fire, the shock on the body shuts his eyes down, inducing blindness. In this state, Dan feels no pain whatsoever, and his skin turns a dull red from the flow of hyper-oxygenated blood pouring into his muscles. His strength is tripled its base amount. Not only does the conversion drive him temporarily insane, and strikes him blind, but it also mutates him. Since performing the Ritual a second time, the form which he takes has become all the more frightening; a chimeric blend of a bull, tiger, and bat, the slayer stands at a height of fifteen feet even when changed, covered from head to hoof with blood red fur. Wide, leathery black wings extend fom his back, thick, dark, curved horns rise from the tiger like head, while the lower body is like that of a bull, the feet terminating in thick cloven hooves. The body manages to retain a humanoid shape, though it would take an idiot to mistake it for man. The fur of the body is thick and matted, allowing it to act something like iron chain mail.
This state lasts for five posts, though if he consumes at least five hundred pounds of gore, he will instantly revert. Otherwise, he is exhausted once returning to his normal form.
War Machine
Dan has spent almost more than half his life in combat, his experiences intensifying in more recent years. It has shaped him to fit into a dangerous mold; he no longer flinches, or hesitates to spill blood, and revels in it; to the point of zealousness. Dan has become an expert with a heavy blades, such as claymores, axes, and other cleaving-type weapons. He's very well versed in the use of a knife, as well. While he has no discernable, specific discipline, Dan's mixture of savagery and massive brute strength makes him deadly in both unarmed and close combat.
History
Dan Lagh'ratham was the son of a low rent mercenary and a rogue Wilmhearst slayer, who left two days after his birth (in a strange contrast to the father typically abandoning the child). His father, Garen, who had been picked up years before by the Wolf Pack, a fairly successful mercenary group, was a bumbling, forgetful man, was almost always found in the lowest ranks, and was often the butt of jokes. Garen was almost always the one to clean up after the horses, and polish the weapons at the end of the day, and never really seemed to live up to his profession. Dan found his father to be a never ending source of embarassment, and as he grew older, he shunned Garen. Instead, he turned his attention and affections towards the leader of the group, a broad shouldered man named Aeric with a long, pale scar on his eye, who seemed to be amused that Garen's own flesh and blood saw him as a failure. The boy's father, as well natured as he was, never spoke up when Aeric began to train Dan for a mercenary's life.
The boy inherited many of his mother's traits; stubborness, spiteful humor, and arrogance among them. When Aeric thrust a short sword in his hand and joked that it fit him well, he nastily refused it and took up a broadsword taller than he was. When someone in the company tried to pry it out of his grip, he bit them viciously, and it was decided that if he wanted to be as much of a fool as his father was, he was welcome to it. Despite Garen's protests, his son was thrown into his first battle at the age of twelve, and returned from it further changed, with a man's blood on his sword. He'd discovered that training to kill another living being, and doing so was two very different things...he also had found that he liked it. Unlike his weak, mewling father, Dan had exercised real power in the first time in his life. He'd enjoyed feeling his enemy bleed under his weapon - but worried over what would be said of that, he kept it to himself.
After a time, he began to experiment with other weapons. He found that axes, maces, and war hammers had a much more satisfying effect than a simple sword could; there was something he enjoyed about the way bones sounded when they were crushed. The mercenary leader took on more of a father figure image to the boy. It was Aeric that brought him his first beer, had taken him to his first whore, had given him his first side arm; a knife from his own childhood. Dan became so alienated from his father that when he was finally killed in combat after the boy's fifteenth birthday, he joked about it with the others around the campfire.
Months after Garen was put six feet beneath the dirt, a brunette woman with scarred hands and arms came to the mercenary pack. She arrived during a castle seige, and thinking she was one of the enemy, the Wolf Pack attacked her. She effortlessly defeated them without a casualty, and introduced herself to Dan as Sophia Wilmhearst, his mother. She told him that it was best that he went with her, and he firmly disagreed. Aeric laughed the boy off when he realized Dan looked at him as a father figure, and disillusioned by the mercenary captain's rejection, he agreed to leave with his mother.
The two of them travelled to Raiaera, and Dan soon learned that the woman was a far cry from his late father. When an early argument boiled down to a fist fight, it ended with the boy knocked out cold. Instead of being bitter about it, Dan accepted the woman. Having grown up respecting strength, and power, he couldn't help but see it in any other light.
During their travels, Sophia told her son about her side of the family, the Wilmhearst. Known publically only as the Wilmhearst Slayers, they were notoriously disliked, as they operated as a form of secret police, serving their own strange, unspoken laws. If it wasn't for the fact that they were often responsible for the destruction of monstrosities such as giants, vampires, wraiths and the like, they would have all been blacklisted centuries ago. However, in the past few decades, after the Seven Slayers - the governing council of Wilmhearst - went through a regime change, the family began to go through disturbing changes that Sophia slowly began to notice. Instead of protecting the people, they suddenly sought to right some unseen and unknown balance - even if this meant killing innocents and destroying priceless, ancient artifacts, especially those which dealt with the Thayne.
Sophia had split from her family to carry on what she considered their true purpose; the destruction of unnatural monsters, and she wanted her son to carry on this legacy. Unfortunately, he proved to be largely incompetent, struggling for months with even the simplest Slayer magic. Even worse, he made secret of his admiration of the powers and strengths of the abominable monsters they sought. It came to a head in Raiaera, when Dan baldly refused to help eliminate a vampire that had butchered three towns and an entire contingent of Bladesingers. Frustrated, Sophia abandoned him in Concordia after tricking him into a hunt for the N'jailan Spider Magi. Wandering into Radasanth, Dan joined the military, where his violent tendencies seemed to be accepted almost immediately.
Four years passed, and despite small skirmishes, Dan found himself bored with the military. One evening, while stationed at an outpost on the border of the country in the dead of winter, a woman in a red hooded cloak wandered upon the soldier camp, seeking refuge for the night. Dan fell madly in love with the woman, but she laughed him off when he proposed marriage. Alone in his tent, the woman brushed her ruby colored hair out of her face, and promised that if he could manage to pin her until the sun came up, she would wordlessly accept his proposal. Easily the largest of the soldiers, Dan accepted the challenge. Despite his most powerful attempts, the woman managed to break each and everyone of his holds, managing to thoroughly exhaust him further with her insatiable appetite.
Dawn broke, and the woman gathered her clothes, despite Dan's attempts to make her stay. "Tell you what," she finally relented, giving the broad shouldered soldier a smirk. "If you ever find me again, we can repeat this night all over again. And your reward will always be standing..." When he protested that she'd been cheating with a strength spell of some sort, she shushed him, and immediately told him a tale of an old ritual*, a Beast God, and the blood thirsty men who had went through the unforgivable act. Dan listened with rapt attention as the woman spoke of each gruesome detail. The Ritual was as old as the Tap, as the Thayne, and had many names.
And it would give him power. Enormous power. The power that he had admired and sought all his life.
She left him when the tale was done, and he watched her walk across the border, and out of his life. He returned to his friends, his fellow Coronian soldiers...but around the camp fire that evening, there was something missing in the camradery. It felt hollow...and the woman's words rang in his ears. Dan turned in early, entering his tent to sit and think. When the last lantern had gone out, he had made his decision.
Dan found a meat cleaver that had been used to prepare a sheep for dinner earlier. And with it in hand, he performed the unspeakable ritual that the woman had told him of, moving through the thick curtain of the winterstorm, killing every soldier in the outpost, and eating their flesh and blood. He was discovered the next morning amidst the slaughter by a Coronian Ranger, and was taken to the city and jailed for his monstrous crime. Word of the atrocity spread quickly among the people. Before his trial, dozens of soldiers and civilians asked why he'd done it. He laughed in the face of each one from his cell, and spat at their feet.
The night before he was to stand before a judge, Dan Lagh'ratham used his newfound strength, granted by the monstrous ritual, to snap his iron shackles. Moving through the prison, he killed every guard that so much as stood in his line of sight, and tore the door from every cell. Dozens of thieves, murderers, and rapists flooded into the city, and amidst the carnage, the killer vanished into the night.
Almost immediately, Dan began to cultivate a brutal, loud spoken reputation. Taking up the old stand by of mercenary work, the slayer began to carve a tale of gory carnage across the six famed nations. Soldiers and other mercenaries told frightened, awed tales of the man they called The Red Beast; an inhuman monster who cut down fully armored men like cornstalks with a each stroke of his weapons. A demon who had been stabbed through the heart and still lived to kill the remaining enemy. It seemed that each time the beast was to have been killed in battle, he arrived months later in a new one, covered in his coat of scars and stolen armor.
Naturally, this drew the attention of the Wilmhearst.
During one of the many skirmishes between Alerar and Raiaera, where Dan found himself in the employ of the dark elves, the slayers struck. Surging through the battlefield and killing anything that got in their way, the Wilmhearst pounced upon The Red Beast. Irritated that he was being attacked by soldiers he hadn't been hired to kill, Dan viciously struck back, surprised to see that his own family posed as a greater challenge to him than he had ever found before. Nevertheless, he slaughtered them after a Blood Frenzy was triggered. Insane with rage as the power made him, Dan was unsatisfied as the last slayer fell,and eagerly turned on the elves.
Upon recuperating from the fatigue the Frenzy had put him in, Dan began to delve into the criminal underground of Radasanth and Haidia, looking for the Wilmhearst. After some time, he was pointed in the direction of Dheathain. In the land of the Fae and the Draconians, he came across an old castle that had been sunk into the soil decades ago, wrapped in the forest, which crept closer and closer beyond an embrace and into enstranglement with each year. Taking up axe, Dan descended into the sunken castle and once more performed the ritual (which, by this point, he had come to call The Ritual of Blood and Thunder), with unexpected results. There had never been another who had went through the ritual who had been psychotic enough to attempt it again. As he murdered the Wilmhearst, spilling the blood of his family in the gallons, the ritual began to draw from the Tap itself. Mere seconds after cutting down the last, a massive swell of power rippled through the countryside as a column of light struck the charnel house. It could be seen for miles, as the stories go, and those who followed it found only a crater and smoldering, splintered trees, dressed in ash.
Wilmhearst scouts, away from the castle on patrol, had discovered the bare, burnt form of The Red Beast in the very crater, and had taken him to Alerar, to another place of the slayer's occupation. Astounded that the man was still alive, the family made their decision; he would be harnessed as a living weapon, one to hunt down his own kind. For several years, the magi layered false memory after false memory into him as they struggled to keep him sedate, eventually resorting to lobotomies in an attempt to calm him. Several times though, Dan woould manage to break free and escape, appearing in the world of Althanas in a confused delirium.
It was during one of these occassions that a woman prizefighter named Claire from Radasanth, and impregnated her. She fled from him months later when she discovered his identity,and had the child in secret - only to die during childbirth. The offspring of a man who had undergone the ritual was rumored to be inhuman, and the raw strength of the infant was enough to cause Claire to hemmorhage and exhaust herself. With her last breath, she named the child Meredith.
Dan soon fought through many of the false memories, regenerating his damaged brain tissue as the Wilmhearst hunted him. He began to think in his own ways again,and when he discovered that he had a child, he began to seek her out. Not for a patriarchal reunion, but to consume her. The slayer believed that eating the flesh and blood of others had given him his monstrous strength - so devouring his offspring, the child of an inhuman, would give him even greater power.
Hunting her proved to be difficult, however. Meredith matured physically and mentally very fast, a product of her strange genetics. While her father often found her before he could be stopped,the girl would escape each time; though she'd taken his temper and pigheadedness, she'd been blessed with her mother's intelligence and cleverness, something that the Beast could not manage to compete with. When he was captured once more, the Wilmhearst decided that they would tamper with his memories again, specifically including his daughter, deluding him into believing her a gentle, smaller, and more innocent child,something he should find and protect with his own life.
It would be years before he escaped again.
It was one evening that the Wilmhearst magi were startled by a sudden, violent spike of activity from the slayer's mind. Their overseer confidently assured them that all would be fine. The promise was broken almost immediately as Dan tore free from his bonds and murdered everyone in the room, sprinting through the castle in a mindless rampage, slowly discovering the truth through hallucinations and brutal interrogations. Enraged at the very notion that anyone could believe they could enslave him, Dan fought one of the family's generals, Matthew Wilmhearst, seemingly killing him. Free finally, he turned his murderous gaze towards thbe rest of the slayer family - and nearly all of Althanas stood between him and his bloody trophies.
Additional Notes
*The Ritual
The Ritual that the Crimson Woman told Dan Lagh'ratham of is a guarded secret of the Thayne religion, and is said to predate even the War of the Tap. It has dozens of names, in dozens of languages, but Dan simply refers to it as The Ritual of Blood and Thunder. The details of the Ritual are entirely shrouded in mystery, as many are thankful for, though it is known that it includes cannibalism, murder, arson, self mutilation, and a few other unspeakable acts. It takes a special mindset to perform it, as well; the mortality rate in rumor alone is startlingly high, for the practitioners themselves. Those that emerge on the other end are irrevocably, forever changed, and are prone to berserk episodes which transform them into gruesome, inhuman beasts of slaughter. The inhumans, as they are popularly referred to, are occasionally mistaken for lycanthropes and demons, causing mortalities for those who attempt to battle them with silver or religious magics.
Some have even mistaken the Ritual as an invention of N'Jal, but, it is, inarguably, one of Hromagh himself; a celebration of the power and dominion one wields above others, baptized in flame and blood.
Name: Dan Lagh'ratham, The Red Beast
Age: 32
Sex: Male
Height: 6'4"
Weight: 215 lbs.
Hair Colour: Black
Eye Colour: Gray
Occupation: Slayer
Personality: Greedy and intensely violent, Dan Lagh'ratham is motivated only by power, money, and the search for his daughter (to roast). He is noted infamously for his exceedingly violent responses to even the most minor of annoyances. Cocksure and arrogant to a fault, Dan does not believe that a force exists in the world that can (permanently) kill him; his blind fearlessness makes him extremely lethal when he has set his sights on a single target.
Appearance: Dan Lagh'ratham is a tall, bulky man with hard plates of muscle across his form, and brutal facial features that take well to an expression of absolute fury. The man dresses simply with little regard to modern fashion; usually in war torn clothes or mixes of military uniforms stolen from felled corpses.
Weapons: Primarily, Dan enjoys the use of a large, mythril bladed great axe with a delyn core and haft. The weapon has a thick, cleaver like blade, which is forged of a heavier mythril ore than most weapons made with the metal, and thus has a duller, grayer shine to it.
While less used, the slayer also owns a prevalida kodachi, which is usually bound to his belt in the small of his back, and an iron revolver worn at the right side of his hip with approximately ninety lead bullets.
Armour: He uses nothing but the Shield of Vanguard, a living shield of indeterminate material with the strength of mythril and unknown properties. The soul of a daemon was sealed into it several years ago, and its mouth is centered on the front of the shield. It’s fickle, and picks its owners of its volition, depending on strength. It has the power to chew up weak spells (lvl. 0-1), as well as projectiles such as arrows or bolts, and spit them back at the casters.
Items:
Kikurin
A small jade plaque with three small, white indents carved into its otherwise ornately decorated face, this artifact, upon being invoked, allows Dan to become invisible to the naked eye, for five minutes at a time. Once all three indents return to the color of jade, however, the artifact must be exposed to moonlight for an entire night before recharging. Dan has impanted it into the very center of his chest.
Ether Band
A gold ring inset with three amber stones. Allows short distance teleportation of 8 to 10 feet per use. Inlaid with 3 amber stones which turn to onyx each time it is used to teleport. The stones may be used at once to teleport long distances, such as from The Citadel in Corone to Anebrilith in Raiaera. Requires three hours in direct sunlight to recharge its power after all of the stones turn to onyx. Dan has implanted this into the center of his right hand.
Angelic Emblem
A pair of silver plates, slightly dented, as wide as a man's spread hand. Used together, the plates emit a pair of ethereal wings which change appearances between possessors. The wings allow flight although draining the user's stamina as if actively flapping the wings - Maximum duration depending directly on possessor's stamina. The wings can be damaged as normal bird's wings would and require several hours of rest to repair the damage. Dan has implanted these directly into both his shoulder blades.
((Link (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=16038&page=2) to all three new items))
Strength Leaves
A set of four special leaves, which are taken from ground saturated with magic. Upon chewing these leaves, a person’s strength is doubled for an hour, as well as prevent them from succumbing to poisons. Additionally, after being chewed, if applied to wounds, the leaves help the healing process.
Skills and Abilities:
Biology of a Madman
Dan is able to lift approximately five and a half tons, is twice as fast and agile than the normal human being, and is able to bend/break/rip/destroy materials equal to or beneath delyn, though not without some difficulty. His sight and hearing is on par with an elf's, and his sense of smell is only slightly more superior than the common canine's. Since his body has been strained to the breaking point so many times, it has grown to simply except the enormous amounts of punishment he heaps on it. The slayer is capable of losing twice the blood of a normal man before passing out, and has an incredibly high threshold for pain. In fact, it has adapted to the point that his bones are far harder to break than usual (though when they do break, they tend to be far worse than the common fracture. It has been proven in the past, in Citadel matches, that the only real way to kill the slayer is immolation, decapitation, or crushing his skull. While, say, piercing his heart with an arrow would slow him down and bleed him out, he would only enter a deep coma until the wound is healed. While the unnatural changes the Ritual incurs is commonly only seen in the state that Dan has dubbed the "Blood Frenzy", performing it a second time has altered his own common appearance. Appearing more feral and savage than the common man, his hands and feet are crowned with wicked claws made of a black, porous looking material, much like volcanic rock, each with the tensile strength of delyn; in fact, his entire skeletal system is composed of the stuff. While as difficult as ever to break, when his bones do, the fractures are usually far more severe than common. The canine teeth in his jaws are far longer, sharper, and more pronounced than usual, and his ears are peaked to a sharp tip, in the common shape of a leaf.
Dan is capable of recovering from wounds twice as fast as a human being; as well as wounds that are inarguably fatal to any living being. This has no use during combat (as the only thing that would heal during the short time a fight would take place would be superficial scratches). The slayer must be resting before any serious injuries, such as broken arms or very large gashes, will begin to heal. While incapable, of course, of springing back up immediately from death blows, the Riitual has made him nigh indestructible; if say, he is decapitated, and the severed head is held to to the neck in any fashion, the wound will heal within weeks. If, for further example, he is killed with a mass volley of arrows and left as is, his body will slowly expel the weapons and repair itself over a period of several weeks. After being "killed", though, he is left within a stasis much like death, and is as vulnerable as any other corpse. Additionally, his body produces very little fatigue toxins, which allows the slayer to operate at peak capacity for two days before needing rest, food, or water.
Due to his simplistic nature, however, it is an easy matter to mentally manipulate the slayer. Unlike physical attacks, mental offenses always take their full toll on Dan if not more so, and he tends to fall for illusions more often than not.
Curiously, those select, mad few who perform the Ritual for themselves seem to gain an aversion to copper. The red metal, considered alchemically to be the closest in element to fire, causes the flesh of the inhuman it touches to blister and sizzle upon contact. To Dan, the touch of copper is really the only pain that he considers more than simply annoying, and if exposed to it for even a short time (one post), he will instantly burst into a Blood Frenzy. If the copper maintains contact throughout the Frenzy, by the time he reverts, his skin will actually burst into flame. Thrusting a blade of copper into his heart and not removing it is the only known way to completely halt his mutated regenerative abilities, and will put him into one of his comas in short order.
Slayer's Bond
Dan has acquired a strong connection with all of his weapons, even the most recent. He can summon them from thin air, and have it vanish in the same manner. Also, he can summon it to his hand if it is at most, thirty feet away. This skill has a chance to fail if Dan is attempting to summon the weapon(s) under situations of extreme duress or intense pain.
Blood Frenzy
Most likely a side affect of consuming the flesh of blessed animals, or Thayne favored beings, once Dan has smelled and eaten a fair amount of meat and blood from another living being, he will convert into a mental and physical state that he refers to as a "blood frenzy". The true form of the berserker; Dan's body floods with toxic levels of adrenaline which cause a very unpleasant burning sensation - which lessens with the more meat he eats. of being lit on fire, the shock on the body shuts his eyes down, inducing blindness. In this state, Dan feels no pain whatsoever, and his skin turns a dull red from the flow of hyper-oxygenated blood pouring into his muscles. His strength is tripled its base amount. Not only does the conversion drive him temporarily insane, and strikes him blind, but it also mutates him. Since performing the Ritual a second time, the form which he takes has become all the more frightening; a chimeric blend of a bull, tiger, and bat, the slayer stands at a height of fifteen feet even when changed, covered from head to hoof with blood red fur. Wide, leathery black wings extend fom his back, thick, dark, curved horns rise from the tiger like head, while the lower body is like that of a bull, the feet terminating in thick cloven hooves. The body manages to retain a humanoid shape, though it would take an idiot to mistake it for man. The fur of the body is thick and matted, allowing it to act something like iron chain mail.
This state lasts for five posts, though if he consumes at least five hundred pounds of gore, he will instantly revert. Otherwise, he is exhausted once returning to his normal form.
War Machine
Dan has spent almost more than half his life in combat, his experiences intensifying in more recent years. It has shaped him to fit into a dangerous mold; he no longer flinches, or hesitates to spill blood, and revels in it; to the point of zealousness. Dan has become an expert with a heavy blades, such as claymores, axes, and other cleaving-type weapons. He's very well versed in the use of a knife, as well. While he has no discernable, specific discipline, Dan's mixture of savagery and massive brute strength makes him deadly in both unarmed and close combat.
History
Dan Lagh'ratham was the son of a low rent mercenary and a rogue Wilmhearst slayer, who left two days after his birth (in a strange contrast to the father typically abandoning the child). His father, Garen, who had been picked up years before by the Wolf Pack, a fairly successful mercenary group, was a bumbling, forgetful man, was almost always found in the lowest ranks, and was often the butt of jokes. Garen was almost always the one to clean up after the horses, and polish the weapons at the end of the day, and never really seemed to live up to his profession. Dan found his father to be a never ending source of embarassment, and as he grew older, he shunned Garen. Instead, he turned his attention and affections towards the leader of the group, a broad shouldered man named Aeric with a long, pale scar on his eye, who seemed to be amused that Garen's own flesh and blood saw him as a failure. The boy's father, as well natured as he was, never spoke up when Aeric began to train Dan for a mercenary's life.
The boy inherited many of his mother's traits; stubborness, spiteful humor, and arrogance among them. When Aeric thrust a short sword in his hand and joked that it fit him well, he nastily refused it and took up a broadsword taller than he was. When someone in the company tried to pry it out of his grip, he bit them viciously, and it was decided that if he wanted to be as much of a fool as his father was, he was welcome to it. Despite Garen's protests, his son was thrown into his first battle at the age of twelve, and returned from it further changed, with a man's blood on his sword. He'd discovered that training to kill another living being, and doing so was two very different things...he also had found that he liked it. Unlike his weak, mewling father, Dan had exercised real power in the first time in his life. He'd enjoyed feeling his enemy bleed under his weapon - but worried over what would be said of that, he kept it to himself.
After a time, he began to experiment with other weapons. He found that axes, maces, and war hammers had a much more satisfying effect than a simple sword could; there was something he enjoyed about the way bones sounded when they were crushed. The mercenary leader took on more of a father figure image to the boy. It was Aeric that brought him his first beer, had taken him to his first whore, had given him his first side arm; a knife from his own childhood. Dan became so alienated from his father that when he was finally killed in combat after the boy's fifteenth birthday, he joked about it with the others around the campfire.
Months after Garen was put six feet beneath the dirt, a brunette woman with scarred hands and arms came to the mercenary pack. She arrived during a castle seige, and thinking she was one of the enemy, the Wolf Pack attacked her. She effortlessly defeated them without a casualty, and introduced herself to Dan as Sophia Wilmhearst, his mother. She told him that it was best that he went with her, and he firmly disagreed. Aeric laughed the boy off when he realized Dan looked at him as a father figure, and disillusioned by the mercenary captain's rejection, he agreed to leave with his mother.
The two of them travelled to Raiaera, and Dan soon learned that the woman was a far cry from his late father. When an early argument boiled down to a fist fight, it ended with the boy knocked out cold. Instead of being bitter about it, Dan accepted the woman. Having grown up respecting strength, and power, he couldn't help but see it in any other light.
During their travels, Sophia told her son about her side of the family, the Wilmhearst. Known publically only as the Wilmhearst Slayers, they were notoriously disliked, as they operated as a form of secret police, serving their own strange, unspoken laws. If it wasn't for the fact that they were often responsible for the destruction of monstrosities such as giants, vampires, wraiths and the like, they would have all been blacklisted centuries ago. However, in the past few decades, after the Seven Slayers - the governing council of Wilmhearst - went through a regime change, the family began to go through disturbing changes that Sophia slowly began to notice. Instead of protecting the people, they suddenly sought to right some unseen and unknown balance - even if this meant killing innocents and destroying priceless, ancient artifacts, especially those which dealt with the Thayne.
Sophia had split from her family to carry on what she considered their true purpose; the destruction of unnatural monsters, and she wanted her son to carry on this legacy. Unfortunately, he proved to be largely incompetent, struggling for months with even the simplest Slayer magic. Even worse, he made secret of his admiration of the powers and strengths of the abominable monsters they sought. It came to a head in Raiaera, when Dan baldly refused to help eliminate a vampire that had butchered three towns and an entire contingent of Bladesingers. Frustrated, Sophia abandoned him in Concordia after tricking him into a hunt for the N'jailan Spider Magi. Wandering into Radasanth, Dan joined the military, where his violent tendencies seemed to be accepted almost immediately.
Four years passed, and despite small skirmishes, Dan found himself bored with the military. One evening, while stationed at an outpost on the border of the country in the dead of winter, a woman in a red hooded cloak wandered upon the soldier camp, seeking refuge for the night. Dan fell madly in love with the woman, but she laughed him off when he proposed marriage. Alone in his tent, the woman brushed her ruby colored hair out of her face, and promised that if he could manage to pin her until the sun came up, she would wordlessly accept his proposal. Easily the largest of the soldiers, Dan accepted the challenge. Despite his most powerful attempts, the woman managed to break each and everyone of his holds, managing to thoroughly exhaust him further with her insatiable appetite.
Dawn broke, and the woman gathered her clothes, despite Dan's attempts to make her stay. "Tell you what," she finally relented, giving the broad shouldered soldier a smirk. "If you ever find me again, we can repeat this night all over again. And your reward will always be standing..." When he protested that she'd been cheating with a strength spell of some sort, she shushed him, and immediately told him a tale of an old ritual*, a Beast God, and the blood thirsty men who had went through the unforgivable act. Dan listened with rapt attention as the woman spoke of each gruesome detail. The Ritual was as old as the Tap, as the Thayne, and had many names.
And it would give him power. Enormous power. The power that he had admired and sought all his life.
She left him when the tale was done, and he watched her walk across the border, and out of his life. He returned to his friends, his fellow Coronian soldiers...but around the camp fire that evening, there was something missing in the camradery. It felt hollow...and the woman's words rang in his ears. Dan turned in early, entering his tent to sit and think. When the last lantern had gone out, he had made his decision.
Dan found a meat cleaver that had been used to prepare a sheep for dinner earlier. And with it in hand, he performed the unspeakable ritual that the woman had told him of, moving through the thick curtain of the winterstorm, killing every soldier in the outpost, and eating their flesh and blood. He was discovered the next morning amidst the slaughter by a Coronian Ranger, and was taken to the city and jailed for his monstrous crime. Word of the atrocity spread quickly among the people. Before his trial, dozens of soldiers and civilians asked why he'd done it. He laughed in the face of each one from his cell, and spat at their feet.
The night before he was to stand before a judge, Dan Lagh'ratham used his newfound strength, granted by the monstrous ritual, to snap his iron shackles. Moving through the prison, he killed every guard that so much as stood in his line of sight, and tore the door from every cell. Dozens of thieves, murderers, and rapists flooded into the city, and amidst the carnage, the killer vanished into the night.
Almost immediately, Dan began to cultivate a brutal, loud spoken reputation. Taking up the old stand by of mercenary work, the slayer began to carve a tale of gory carnage across the six famed nations. Soldiers and other mercenaries told frightened, awed tales of the man they called The Red Beast; an inhuman monster who cut down fully armored men like cornstalks with a each stroke of his weapons. A demon who had been stabbed through the heart and still lived to kill the remaining enemy. It seemed that each time the beast was to have been killed in battle, he arrived months later in a new one, covered in his coat of scars and stolen armor.
Naturally, this drew the attention of the Wilmhearst.
During one of the many skirmishes between Alerar and Raiaera, where Dan found himself in the employ of the dark elves, the slayers struck. Surging through the battlefield and killing anything that got in their way, the Wilmhearst pounced upon The Red Beast. Irritated that he was being attacked by soldiers he hadn't been hired to kill, Dan viciously struck back, surprised to see that his own family posed as a greater challenge to him than he had ever found before. Nevertheless, he slaughtered them after a Blood Frenzy was triggered. Insane with rage as the power made him, Dan was unsatisfied as the last slayer fell,and eagerly turned on the elves.
Upon recuperating from the fatigue the Frenzy had put him in, Dan began to delve into the criminal underground of Radasanth and Haidia, looking for the Wilmhearst. After some time, he was pointed in the direction of Dheathain. In the land of the Fae and the Draconians, he came across an old castle that had been sunk into the soil decades ago, wrapped in the forest, which crept closer and closer beyond an embrace and into enstranglement with each year. Taking up axe, Dan descended into the sunken castle and once more performed the ritual (which, by this point, he had come to call The Ritual of Blood and Thunder), with unexpected results. There had never been another who had went through the ritual who had been psychotic enough to attempt it again. As he murdered the Wilmhearst, spilling the blood of his family in the gallons, the ritual began to draw from the Tap itself. Mere seconds after cutting down the last, a massive swell of power rippled through the countryside as a column of light struck the charnel house. It could be seen for miles, as the stories go, and those who followed it found only a crater and smoldering, splintered trees, dressed in ash.
Wilmhearst scouts, away from the castle on patrol, had discovered the bare, burnt form of The Red Beast in the very crater, and had taken him to Alerar, to another place of the slayer's occupation. Astounded that the man was still alive, the family made their decision; he would be harnessed as a living weapon, one to hunt down his own kind. For several years, the magi layered false memory after false memory into him as they struggled to keep him sedate, eventually resorting to lobotomies in an attempt to calm him. Several times though, Dan woould manage to break free and escape, appearing in the world of Althanas in a confused delirium.
It was during one of these occassions that a woman prizefighter named Claire from Radasanth, and impregnated her. She fled from him months later when she discovered his identity,and had the child in secret - only to die during childbirth. The offspring of a man who had undergone the ritual was rumored to be inhuman, and the raw strength of the infant was enough to cause Claire to hemmorhage and exhaust herself. With her last breath, she named the child Meredith.
Dan soon fought through many of the false memories, regenerating his damaged brain tissue as the Wilmhearst hunted him. He began to think in his own ways again,and when he discovered that he had a child, he began to seek her out. Not for a patriarchal reunion, but to consume her. The slayer believed that eating the flesh and blood of others had given him his monstrous strength - so devouring his offspring, the child of an inhuman, would give him even greater power.
Hunting her proved to be difficult, however. Meredith matured physically and mentally very fast, a product of her strange genetics. While her father often found her before he could be stopped,the girl would escape each time; though she'd taken his temper and pigheadedness, she'd been blessed with her mother's intelligence and cleverness, something that the Beast could not manage to compete with. When he was captured once more, the Wilmhearst decided that they would tamper with his memories again, specifically including his daughter, deluding him into believing her a gentle, smaller, and more innocent child,something he should find and protect with his own life.
It would be years before he escaped again.
It was one evening that the Wilmhearst magi were startled by a sudden, violent spike of activity from the slayer's mind. Their overseer confidently assured them that all would be fine. The promise was broken almost immediately as Dan tore free from his bonds and murdered everyone in the room, sprinting through the castle in a mindless rampage, slowly discovering the truth through hallucinations and brutal interrogations. Enraged at the very notion that anyone could believe they could enslave him, Dan fought one of the family's generals, Matthew Wilmhearst, seemingly killing him. Free finally, he turned his murderous gaze towards thbe rest of the slayer family - and nearly all of Althanas stood between him and his bloody trophies.
Additional Notes
*The Ritual
The Ritual that the Crimson Woman told Dan Lagh'ratham of is a guarded secret of the Thayne religion, and is said to predate even the War of the Tap. It has dozens of names, in dozens of languages, but Dan simply refers to it as The Ritual of Blood and Thunder. The details of the Ritual are entirely shrouded in mystery, as many are thankful for, though it is known that it includes cannibalism, murder, arson, self mutilation, and a few other unspeakable acts. It takes a special mindset to perform it, as well; the mortality rate in rumor alone is startlingly high, for the practitioners themselves. Those that emerge on the other end are irrevocably, forever changed, and are prone to berserk episodes which transform them into gruesome, inhuman beasts of slaughter. The inhumans, as they are popularly referred to, are occasionally mistaken for lycanthropes and demons, causing mortalities for those who attempt to battle them with silver or religious magics.
Some have even mistaken the Ritual as an invention of N'Jal, but, it is, inarguably, one of Hromagh himself; a celebration of the power and dominion one wields above others, baptized in flame and blood.