Relenor

Relenor Umbri… where to start with him…

Relenor was my second online RP character, and was a good deal more complex than Jezrin, my character from OSD. He started as a dark presence in the back of the tavern the FFRPG started in, and I designed his character throughout the first chapter. I was a rather prominent architect of the original adventure, and Rel’s story plays into that quite a bit.

Let’s start explaining his background:

There are Gods and Goddesses in this world – and their servants, the angels. Have you ever wondered why the gods almost never intervene directly? Why they use champions or hurl bolts from afar? …Or use angels? It is because the gods are too pure for this world. Even just to interact with mortals at all, they must assume identities and create personalities to wear – this is how they exist at all: a divinity is formless until an identity is assumed. There is much speculation on why gods and goddesses have the identities they do, and it is widely accepted that it is the belief of mortals that shapes divinity into gods and goddesses. Further speculation exists on what happens if those who believe in a god have their views start to vary… it could cause the god to become formless again, or to some degree of such, furthering it from interaction in the world. So what of the angels? Angels are the servants of the gods on and off this world – they exist to a much more direct extent than the Gods, yet can interact directly with them.

Angels are divine. To create an angel, a god or goddess pulls from the formless energy of divinity some power and shapes it into a being. But it is well known that angels have little or no personality: how then do they stay in existence, much less in the material world? It is because angels have flaws. Every angel has a flaw that keeps it from slipping off the world – the gods use this instead of personality to avoid the dangers of egotism. Thus are angels made, lesser divine beings under the will of the gods.

Relenor was created an angel, eons before this story began. He was created of the Umbris line of angels, designed for a particular purpose – combat. It is the Umbris that protect the gods from those who would rival their power. It is the Umbris that combat the enemies of the gods. And Umbris are angels. In addition to the powers that stem from their divinity, Umbris have the power to drain foes of energy and strength – they are natural conduits for power, magical or otherwise. But unlike most angels, the slight flaws that most angels have are not enough for the Umbris. Umbris have major flaws, or numerous ones: this gives them a firm anchoring in reality. Rel’s flaw was an abhorrence, verging on complete antipathy, to the act and practice of reading minds. Down to his core, the mind is sacrosanct to him and he will not touch it.

Relenor is the fourth angel of the Umbris line, created when the powers of the mortals first began to threaten the gods. Mighty were his powers, and all foes fell before him for hundreds of thousands of years. Then he was sent against a wizard that held power over time itself. The wizard was not the most powerful foe that Relenor had faced, but the man evaded Rel time and time again – despite the face that Rel traveled through time to combat this foe, he never knew when his foe had disappeared to. He could have read the wizard’s mind to know the destination, but that was against his very nature.

Rel slunk home in defeat. He was faced with a task that was beyond his ability, and for the first time had to question why he had failed. Those were the first conscious thoughts of Relenor. He realized that the only way to defeat the wizard was to read the wizard’s mind – and that was unacceptable. The solution to his inability was to have another Umbris take his place, but Rel had already thought once… so he thought again, and found that the only way that the other angel could win was by reading the wizard’s mind – and that was unacceptable. He searched and searched for a solution, but everything came back to the wizard’s mind being violated.

Rel asked of the gods what he should do, and they had no answer. Instead, the cast him down upon the world and sent another angel to defeat the wizard. Cast down on to the world, Relenor tasted the bitterness of mortality, and the betrayal of the gods having stripped him of his powers. Why, he wondered, and he found the god’s motive. Rel knew in his heart that casting him down had been the right action, for he would have revolted against the gods if another angel was sent to read the wizard’s mind and to thereby defeat him.

But Rel turned from the light, and banished his heart. He forgot who he was then, and wandered into the nearest town starving and cold – unused to the sting of mortality, he almost died. When he awoke the next day, Relenor the man was born.

Rel was now a mortal, but the imprint of his former powers still lay upon him. He was a natural conduit for energy, magical or otherwise, though he could not cast magic himself. He was more innocent that those naturally of the world, though that trait soon vanished. His body did not age, though over the years he became wiser in the ways of the world.

And he had known power, and he craved for it again.

After setting himself up, he became a student at a school of warriors. More motivated then the rest, he rose to the top of his class - eventually becoming greater than the teacher himself. Rel’s body rose to the challenge, and a preternatural strength and speed soon became apparent.

Soon he left, seeking more power than the school had managed to provide. As he explored the world for whatever would give him power, he began to remember his past. His self-induced amnesia started to fade, and he began to wonder what his past was. What had he been? The answers were not clear.

Soon he chanced upon a rumor that would change his life. A sickly dragon was said to live in a mountain nearby, and Rel jumped at the chance of what the horde must contain. He searched out the entrance of the dragon’s lair, and entered it.

The dragon was waiting.

It turned out that the rumors had been false – the dragon was not weak in the least, and rather was more powerful than the greatest of its kind. Rel knew he was unable to win, but charged anyway, hoping his legacy would be to scratch one iridescent crimson scale.

The dragon off-handedly swatted him into a wall before he could sprint far enough to reach the dragon’s body. Surprised that he had survived the impact, the dragon waited for Rel to awaken… perhaps there was a use for him…

The pain of defeat brought back more memories, and Rel realized that he had once been an angel, leveler of the mighty.

“Thou art a mighty man,” the Dragon spoke “I deem you worthy of some lesser duties.”

“I am no man,” spoke Relenor “I am a fallen angel.”

“My pardon, former guardian of the light.” The Dragon spoke again, “Perhaps a high station and bestowed power should be yours…”

Rel, hungry for the power that the mighty Wrym could bestow, pledged his loyalty to the Dragon. They mixed blood, and the Dragon proclaimed Rel its champion, gifting him with extreme amounts of power. The dragon knew of the Umbris, and rightly assumed she would be a target if she used her power directly. There was also a prophecy that proclaimed that an elven champion would slay her – she suspected that Rel, not being born of this world—and not being accounted for in the act of prophecy—was a factor of randomness that could disrupt the prophecy. Rel, in return for the power she gave him, used his knowledge to hide the Dragon from the angels’ watchful eyes, and created a plan to make her a goddess. Unfortunately, this involved having people openly worship her to give her divinity. Throughout, there was a growing sense that he had drifted farther and farther from his origins, betraying his former masters by plotting for the dragon to succeed in what he had been created to stop. He also because disillusioned with what the dragon asked him to do.

A mere 63 years after making the blood pact with the Dragon, Relenor betrayed her. He never returned from a mission. Instead, he wandered the lands far from the dragon’s lair. A few days after he was supposed to return, he decided to see what he still retained from the infused power of the dragon. Finding a boulder in a forest, he punched it with all his strength, testing how much he had. His punch shattered the boulder into a thousand pieces and sent the shards ripping through the forest, devastating a hillside.

Rel was amazed – he had assumed that the Dragon wouldn’t leave him such power. Then the dragon’s intent became apparent.

Rel watched in horror and pain as the Dragon withdrew her support. The flesh of his arm turned to a bloody pulp and the bones underneath shattered – the muscles that had powered the mighty punch ripped and tore. Rel screamed then, for though he had suffered worse as an angel, this pain was beyond his bounds as a mortal.

Rel hobbled back to the town he was staying at, and found a healer for his mutilated arm. Despite their magics, and his natural sensitivity to such forces, his arm still took a week to become usable again. Rel swore never to do something as foolish again.

Once his body had healed, he continued practicing his art as a swordman. He adopted a runaway orphan as an apprentice, and trained her in swordplay. But it was increasingly obvious that the Dragon was sapping his body of strength, empowering him when he exercised, so he could not built natural muscle, but sapping him the rest of the time. He continued teaching his apprentice, showing how to weave blades and magic like he had once done, and imparting wisdom upon her. But he found that she was impossible to guide, for she believed in vengeance. He told her that it was not right, and later that she should go and find wisdom before he would train her more. Neither worked, for she did not believe him, nor wished to leave.

So Relenor left.

He decided that it was time to free himself from the dragon’s curse. He left the girl, and traveled to an old friend - the guild master of the thieves’ guild. There he conversed over how to kill the Dragon.

A plan was made.

Relenor would return to the Dragon and work in its service, procuring a weapon from the dragon’s hoard that could kill the Dragon. Relenor remembered stealing several weapons for the Dragon – She could not wield them, and they were not given Relenor to use; between that and their highly magical nature, Rel guessed that the dragon viewed them as a risk. But Rel couldn’t fight the Dragon directly, weakened as he was. Neither could any of the guild master’s underlings, for the Dragon was ever aware of anything of magical nature nearby. It would have to be an attack that the dragon saw coming.

The guild master recommended an elven mercenary who was greatly skilled in the blade. Yet Rel doubted in her, for he was once skilled as well, and had never managed to touch the beast – what good was a weapon if you died before using it? And so he plotted a deeper plot…

That takes you up to the beginning of the FFRPG. I might write up some of Relenor’s schemes later.