Approved CoL Bio for Eoghann - CC by BT

[claireducky]

Your Handle at DM: WildTaltos
Character Name: Eoghann
Division: Hand of the Light
Character’s Age: Looks in his 30s
Place of Birth or Raising: Arafel
Physical Description: 150 cm tall (4' 11"), ~63 kg (138lb), red hair with two braids on either side of face and an additional smaller one pinned to top of his head. Pallid skin with abundance of freckles all over his body. Green eyes, one congenitally blind. Cleft lip and palate. Blunt nose, dimples, dimpled chin.
 
Other Description: Dislikes talking, sometimes engages people with intense stare but other times, stares beyond them, particularly when disinterested. Has seizure disorder that he keeps hidden to avoid potential persecution. Often spends free time in religious contemplation and a form of prayer peculiar to his home community. He despises Aes Sedai based entirely on their arrogance, corruption, and deceit, and therefore concedes that much, if not all associated with the White Tower are in league with the forces of darkness. He is a lover of green things and deeply mistrustful and skeptical of mankind because of their capacity to do unspeakable evil to each other and to the world.
 
History:  Eoghann was born in a small, isolated farming community in the southern reaches of Arafel. They shared enough cultural diffusion with the rest of the land that they shared the aesthetic of braiding and belling their hair, as well as ornamenting their clothing in bells, and of course they carried blades against the grim threat of the north, but little else was there in common, for rarely had a traveler or merchant passed that way in long years.

 

It is a community very strong in superstition and wonder at the mysteries of divinity. There were no surnames, for there were no outsiders, no need to distinguish themselves from others, but to state that an individual’s lineage by means of “son of” or “daughter of.” Born into such a community, he was bound to become deeply religious, but religion and absolution was branded deeper into him by his father, a drunkard and an intensely abusive parent who verbally and physically abused and occasionally starved him as a child because of his facial deformity. Malnutrition resulted in his slight height as an adult.

 

Envisioning a world order of great magnitude and beauty, as only his religion could offer, helped him escape from the ugliness of his immediate world, but paradoxically, he was taught to deeply mistrust the world outside and its people, the outsiders, for they were frail in spirit, seduced by the Shadow with ease, dishonourable and full of deceit.

 

He learned how to farm and hunt and trap and fish and build shelter-- short-term dug-outs to long-term cozy dwellings – all the practical skills for survival, and yet another one in the Borderlands: how to fight, with both blade and club.

 
At 17, for daring to strike back at his father as he was being beaten viciously, he was kicked out of his home, but despite how much he loved his siblings, he did not start his own farmstead as was expected, but set out to see the world, despite warnings against it. He would see for himself the infamous outsiders, and witness with his own eye their evil, for he could not truly understand evil unless he witnessed it himself, after which he would return home.

 

Some incomprehensible wanderlust was branded in him from the moment he was rejected from the house of his father, such that he remained away from his village for several years on end, learning the ways of outsiders, studying them, working at their various diverse crafts – at times he found a farm that would take him on as a hand for a season or two, other times when he found a fishing vessel in a great river he might serve as a deckhand for months or a year. He went to cities and there he saw human vice in its finest displays, and it worsened the further south he dared to venture, into fat lands with little troubles or need for stringent systems and honour. He was violently repelled by it – murder, robbery, rape, violence, filth, dishonesty, and a peculiar hostility towards him for his ugliness...but for all its grotesqueness, he was continually drawn back out to it, to see, to witness, as if he had become addicted to the cringing nausea, or perhaps it was for the sheer knowledge of what he learned of the various regions he entered, how different they were from his own world.
 
But then he found the recruiters for the Children as the trading vessel he was working on at the time was stopped in an Andoran river port. In the world of outsiders, where he had seen little else but a dismal and corrupt form of humanity, here were ones who preached against the darkness, and vowed to fight against it – and to him, make the world like unto the isolated nook he came from, pure, primitive in its devotion to divinity and honour. What it would be like to be a part of it, to help turn darkness into Light? He had to at the very least discover, and though they had hesitated initially because of his ugliness, they had seen the zeal and fire in his eyes, and heard it in his words fervently uttering the truths he held nearest his heart, and they knew for certain he was a Child.
 
Since Joining: Since joining the Children of the Light, Eoghann had delved eagerly into the institution. There was no training too harsh for him after the grueling physical ordeal of his early childhood, and though small of stature, he was stout and deft of limb. He learned more techniques to add to his existing arsenal of sword and club styles, he learned to tune his bow and spearcraft, previously used to fetch himself food in the wild, to the killing of men and shadowspawn – it was but a little he learned in the training to make him into an effective weapon of the Light.

 

During this time as a Recruit, he was observed for any nuance that might reveal him as a Darkfriend, but whatever questions were put to him, he answered them truthfully, and it was a truth the Children found in line with their own doctrines, which were taught to him as well. He remained relatively aloof from others in what little leisure time he had, not only because of his impaired speech and mistrust of words, but he much preferred his private rituals and prayer to the complexities of socialisation, and it was also to minimize the chance that his seizures might not be discovered by others. He also was busy studying the history of the Children and their place in a world of darkness. He was not so infatuated that he could not see flaws with individual Children themselves, whether for their lack of zeal and occasional breaches in piousness, but compared to the world of outsiders he knew, the Children as a whole was a bastion of virtue and hope for a better world such as he could find nowhere else.
 
He was ecstatic then when he was at last called to the Dome of Truth at the end of his training, to take his oaths, to be anointed in the Light, to be made one of the Children. He had decided long before on his path within the Children – what he perceived to be the brain of the Children, the steady discerner of good and evil, the Hand of the Light, and it made him proud to have the white cloak with the golden sunburst and the blood red crook on top of it laid over his shoulders.
 
Eoghann begin to know evil like never before when he became a Seeker, and to loathe it more intensely. Often, Darkfriends were brought to the Fortress, and for his training he many times took part in the questioning of the Darkfriends. Before, he had been unable to recognise them, for most outsiders had seemed equally vile to him, but when he saw his first Darkfriend, someone who was truly devoted to evil in its entirety instead of simply an indirect accomplice, he was fascinated, and the questioning of the Darkfriend was a profound learning experience – on how to use the hot irons and the needles and the vices and the fine blades and the various racks, on how Darkfriends might be different physically or mentally from any other outsider.

 

Physically, they were not much different, he learned – they were flesh and blood and fully capable of feeling pain, and at first it had bothered him-- the screams, the intense smells, so reminiscent of his own childhood – but then came the moment of revelation, oft times very fast, of their evil deeds, of their intimate collusion with the Shadow and their efforts to pervert Light and innocence, and the revolting confession made their torment vindicated.

 

At times, he was dispatched with a unit of the Children to go to other lands, to recruit for the Children or seek out Darkfriends at a rumour, and through these experiences, and his time spent at the Fortress, he learned to get into other people’s mind, for that was the only way to truly know real evil; with every questioning he assisted in, with every judgement he observed, with every flogging for unpious behaviour within the ranks of the Children he witnessed, he grew more attuned to detecting a guilty conscience or, the worst, unashamed wickedness, in a person. He studied the writings of Lothair, and he hung eagerly on the words and advice of the higher ranking members of the Hand, contemplating them and reconciling them with his own experiences with the Shadow and evil, and it only sharpened his perceptions.

 

He learned the less fine aspects too, the mundane but necessary skills of military life in his time in the field – how to make rounds about the camp, how to dig latrines to maintain sanitation, how to make horselines, and everyday he made sure to sharpen his combat skill a little more, practicing forms with the blade and the unlovely but brutally-powerfully club, sometimes alone, sometimes with a comrade. His size at least was an advantage at times, in so far as he was a smaller and nimbler target.
 
When he was at last called to the Dome of Truth for his vigil to become an Arbiter, he was sure that his time of seeking had prepared him to directly combat evil, and when the sun rose, and he was given his tunic with the red bands on the arms, he felt as if he was awakening as a new person.

Edited January 31, 2013 by Arath Faringal

[claireducky]

Anybody want to CC this, please?

[Arath Faringal]

*BT Stamp*