Post by Deleted on Jul 26, 2013 8:28:35 GMT
"Misfortune" was the word that plagued him as far back as he could remember. It was also the name he was given by the warchief of the hobgoblin tribe into which he was born. A particularly ugly word in his native tongue, one cannot properly pronounce it without sneering. It was not expected of him to question why he was called this, or why his parents abandoned him to the care (or lack thereof) of the warchief at such an early age, but this did not stop his inquiring mind. It was only through hardship and cruelty that he discovered that his inquiring mind itself was the reason for his condemnation. A hobgoblin is born to pick up his weapons and take commands, and if luck or raw talent favors him, he will one day outlive his former commanders and assume their role. All else is trivial and must be purged. But this Misfortune would not be purged so easily. The warchief claimed that this Misfortune's rite of passage was handed down from the unnamed gods, and the tribe rose in unison too see it through. His body was bound by chain and thorn while each member of the tribe took to him with burning blades stoked in a blacksmith's pit, in ritualistic precision timed to the oppressive rythmn of crude skin drums. His flesh distorted and hardened with each cauterized wound, his blood turning black and skin peeling until he burst out of his chains bellowing like a demon. His rite of passage had been completed.
His skill and savagery in combat did nothing to dissuade everyone from calling him Misfortune, even when he rose in rank enough to accompany the warchief on a fateful raid of a remote farm. By now he had proven himself a quiet subservient warrior who spoke with a morningstar and only when ordered to do so, but all the while he was watching, waiting and planning. So it came to be that he turned on his peers as the raid came to a close, isolating and picking off his fellow bandits one by one, until only he and the warchief remained. The Misfortune fell prostrate before him and begged forgiveness, requesting a clean, quick death in penance. The warchief, struck by a strange pang of pathos, turned to gather his thought, which is when the Misfortune took a farming scythe and plunged the blade into the warchief's spine.
"Neither you, your people or your gods may claim ownership of me. A god, through endurance and pain, gives birth to himself."
As the night crept forward, the flames which overcame the farmhouses leapt onto to the fields and found their way to the paralyzed warchief. All the while, the Misfortune, self-christened Telleroth, rode away on a horse stolen from the conflagrated farm, swinging his scythe wildly, envisioning the bloody path he will carve though this world before him.
His skill and savagery in combat did nothing to dissuade everyone from calling him Misfortune, even when he rose in rank enough to accompany the warchief on a fateful raid of a remote farm. By now he had proven himself a quiet subservient warrior who spoke with a morningstar and only when ordered to do so, but all the while he was watching, waiting and planning. So it came to be that he turned on his peers as the raid came to a close, isolating and picking off his fellow bandits one by one, until only he and the warchief remained. The Misfortune fell prostrate before him and begged forgiveness, requesting a clean, quick death in penance. The warchief, struck by a strange pang of pathos, turned to gather his thought, which is when the Misfortune took a farming scythe and plunged the blade into the warchief's spine.
"Neither you, your people or your gods may claim ownership of me. A god, through endurance and pain, gives birth to himself."
As the night crept forward, the flames which overcame the farmhouses leapt onto to the fields and found their way to the paralyzed warchief. All the while, the Misfortune, self-christened Telleroth, rode away on a horse stolen from the conflagrated farm, swinging his scythe wildly, envisioning the bloody path he will carve though this world before him.