GW2: Klejskizae

Name: Klejskizae

Basic Description: A MOST EXCELLENT AND ELEGANT HERO WHO WRITES LEGENDS IN BLOOD AND SONG AND SOMETIMES FINE ALES AND MEADS

Nicknames/Aliases/Titles: Lightbringer

Gender/Pronouns: Cis Male, he/him

Orientation: Pansexual

Age:

Species: Norn (Wolf)

Occupation: Revenant (Herald)

Alignment: Neutral Good

Physical Description: He wears his blindfold thingy in combat and whenever he needs to see into the Mists for one thing or another. He takes it off for social things. His eyes and his senses tell him different things.

Faceclaim: Jason Momoa

Personality: Klejskizae is LOUD. Even fellow members of the Order of Whispers who’ve been debriefed about him have a hard time believing that he’s a member of anything “whisper” related. You sure he’s not a member of the Order of Shouts? Once you realize this, you’ll realize why he’s such a good agent. He’s bombastic and emotional. It’s easy to think that you can read him like an open book, because he’s just your typical Norn. No one suspects a thing.

Being a Skaald, Klejskizae has a story for every occasion. If he has something important to tell you, he’ll tell it in a story, because to him, that’s the straightest you can get. He usually makes up stories on the spot and a good number of them are completely false, but that’s not the point. The point isn’t in what happened, the point is in what you can learn from it. And sometimes the point is just the story and the telling of it. His stories and poems are usually improvised from half-formed memories. (As in, I improvise them from what I vaguely remember of Norn lore.) Take them with a grain of salt. Elaboration and fabrication are vital tools in a storyteller’s set.

He cares about people a lot. He’ll give whatever comfort and aid he can to anyone in his “pack” that he can. His childhood trauma has made him want to cling to as many people as he can as tightly as he can, so that he’ll never be alone ever again.

When he’s leading people, as he does into battle, he expects absolute loyalty, but only because he gives his subordinates absolute loyalty of his own. If his people wouldn’t follow him into the Underworld without hesitation and without coercion, then he doesn’t deserve to be their leader. He tries very hard to keep people together and can be kind of meddling when it comes to making sure that his people are safe and happy.

But yeah, mostly loud and bombastic.

Likes:

Dislikes:

Skills and Abilities:

Affiliations:The Order of Whispers (Lightbringer)

Family:

Associates:

Enemies:Klejskizae hates the Sons of Svanir. The things they have done are beyond forgiveness, especially the things they’ve done to his family. His beef with them is widely known among his fellow Norn, especially given the dramatic events of his childhood. If anything, people who heard his story tend to overestimate how much he hates them because the truth is that he doesn’t hate them so much as pity them. Any one of them could’ve been his father. Could’ve been him. They need to be brought home before it’s too late.

If you listen to how he talks about the dragons closely, you can almost spot that the way he talks about Jormag, about all of the Elder Dragons is a bit more similar to the way the Sons do than most mainstream Norns do. He agrees with them that Dragon is a Spirit of the Wild, as much as Bear or Wolf. He’s a part of nature same as anyone or anything else. The problem is that Dragon’s greed has spiraled way out of control and his reign of terror needs to be stopped the way a serial killer needs to be stopped. They’re killing everyone and won’t stop themselves, but they were once people too. They just got way out of hand.

Their past:If you’ve ever been to a moot in the Shiverpeaks, you’ve probably heard one of Klesjkizae’s songs, if not from himself, then repeated by one of his fans, or a fan of his fan. You'll recognize his work by the overwrought metaphors and the pseudo-archaic wording. They’re not that great, but he has the charisma -or the lung capacity- to make it work, and even if you don't like his songs or poems, you have to admit that he still has this goofy charm, and that he is nothing if not friendly.

For someone as cheerful as he is, he’s had a pretty damn traumatic childhood. When he was about 6, his mother went missing while out on a hunting trip. Around this time, his father was seduced by the promises of power from Jormag and had joined the Sons of Svanir. He wasn’t old enough to completely understand what that involved, and when his father invited him to join the Sons to go hunting for his mother, he was thrilled to come along. Get to go on a hunt with all these cool adults and most of all, finding his mother? How could he possibly not want to join them?

What he didn’t understand at the time was that by “hunting for his mother”, his father meant “literally hunting her down as a sacrifice to Dragon.” He was sent to go and call out for her, hoping that she’d come back for him. What he didn’t know was that he was the bait and that when he did find her as she rushed out of the cave in which she had been hiding from her husband to reunite with her beloved son, the Sons hadn’t brought him with them for a happy family reunion. He ran ahead to tell his father that she was coming and his father told him that he had done well, and was well on his way to becoming a man that Dragon could be proud of. When she arrived, his father and his fellow Sons opened fire. Klejskizae’s father tossed him a sword and asked him if he had the strength to finish the hunt. For a moment, Klejskizae stood in horror, trying to comprehend how this was happening. When the moment passed, he fled.

He ran into the forest for what felt to him like an eternity, and once he was sure that he outran them, he collapsed into heaving sobs of exhaustion and grief. He didn’t know where he was, but even worse, he even if he knew where he was, he didn’t have anywhere to return to.

That’s when out of the mists, or the Mists, Wolf came to him. He found the young boy, scared, hurting, alone and curled up next to him to keep him warm while he slept, and protected him throughout the night from danger. When he awoke the next morning, he saw paw prints leading him to his aunt’s house, where he told her everything that had happened. His aunt and uncle knew that this had been a sign from Wolf, who was both of their totems, and took him in as their own son. Because of his miraculous experience, they showed favoritism towards him over their own son, Kaaj, who didn’t really buy into the whole unity and friendship and happiness thing, and who ended up either cursed or blessed by Raven with impossibly bad luck, so that everything he would do would be that much harder and through it, he’d learn to be that much more clever to outwit constant doom. Raven’s got a tendency to bestow those kinds of “gifts.”

As he grew older, he began to think more about his encounter with Wolf, it's meaning and the blessing bestowed upon him, the full implications of which hadn’t been completely revealed to him at the time. He saw the Spirits where only the shamans did, and when at the graves of the dead, he could hear their whispers and see their outlines. At times he could see the boundary between this world and the next for the fragile veil it is, and could cut through it, moving through a fog from one place and ending up far away from where he started in only a single step. He studied with the shamans of Hoelbrak to try to figure out his gift for moving and seeing through the Mists.

At first he hated that they never told him anything straight. How was he supposed to become a great legend if all they’d do is tell him about the legends of the past? Who cared? They were dead, he wasn’t. He just wanted to learn some neat tricks that he could use to beat his rivals up. But as he started to really listen, he began to love the legends more than the spells and weapons. He would spend hours listening to the skaalds tell stories, and he didn’t even care what they were about. He had always felt odd as a shaman, but as a skaald, he found that suited him. Wolf had shown him the tear in reality to hear the legends in the Mists. The least he could do was relay them in the material world.

He and his cousin, Kaadja joined the Order of Whispers jointly in a grand adventure that I’ll figure out some other time. It probably involved fucking up some Sons of Svanir and also definitely Kaadja doing something super awesome with his super boring job as the boringest Norn in Hoelbrak. What you need to know is the end, namely, that Klejskizae ended up doing spy work and Kaadja quickly rose as an analyst and strategist, her blessing finally kind of sort of paying off by making her the one they could always go to to get a comprehensive list of everything that could possibly go wrong on any given operation and the things she’s tried to mitigate the ever present disaster.

At the formation of the Pact, Klejskizae volunteered to join the assault on Zhaitan. Why wouldn’t he? He’s always wanted to visit the land of the dead, and he DEFINITELY always wanted to give Dragon a black eye and a bloody nose. He had recently been promoted to Lightbringer for his meritorious leadership in the time he worked for them and they gave him a squadron of “mercenaries” to lead into the heart of Orr.

It went about as well as anyone can expect. He lived, many in his squad didn’t and it was a low point for him and his life. He’s proud of what he did, and would do it again and again a thousand times, but he prays that he’ll never have to go through anything like that again. The smell alone…

After Zhaitan’s defeat, he remained in the Order of Whispers but asked to be transferred to something a little less full of corpses and a little closer to home. He was placed back in Hoelbrak because his reputation and prestige had made him trusted by the people who were the closest things the Norn had to leaders, giving the Order an in to manipulate them into doing the right thing for Tyria.

Current situation:

Their future?:

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