Varak

((Hey, I've been playing for about a week now getting the hang of things. I haven't done *as much* RPing as I'd like yet, mostly because I always get pretty uneasy RPing with a character who I haven't come up with a backstory or specific identity for yet, so I decided to sit down and write something which'd give a sort of insight into Varak - both to me and other people. Any feedback would be welcome - I already posted this on the main Cimmeria forums a couple of days ago, but got the tip to leave it here too))

It was a contemplative mood Varak found himself in, walking back and forth with the sound of fresh snow and twigs crunching underfoot. Over the next hill, modest plumes of smoke could be seen rising from Conarch village where the troubled Cimmerian had been spending the past several restless nights – but the settlement didn’t interest him. In fact he almost resented it as a kind of scar across the open landscape. The village was unattractive… no, ugly, and there was no getting around that fact, but the Cimmerian tribes wouldn’t have had it any other way. Like most everything manmade in the frozen landscape it was built with the soul aim in mind of keeping its inhabitants alive and sheltered. Aesthetics – Varak mused, seemed to be reserved for the other inhabitants of Hyboria. Those who had a mind to carve out imposing artifacts of art and symbolism, and warriors long since deceased.

But Cimmeria was an artless place. Or is there was an art to be found there, it would be found etched into the very features of its people. A single face or body could tell of years of untold conflict, grief, sorrow, but most of all determination. The Cimmerian spirit was something of a work of art in its own right -a canvas which life and fate painted and etched their fickle marks onto, before death swept in and hammered down the final stroke.

No, the village was nothing but a means to an end, and Varak sought no comfort there. Alone in the wilderness, some distance away from the bustling preparations of war, at least he could gain some semblance of a peaceful moment to gather his thoughts. Most of his life to that point had been something of a whirlwind, with each event coming so close on the heels of the last one that there was only barely time to react, and none at all to philosophize. The Ranger paused for a moment, stooped down and reached for a curiously shaped pebble. It vaguely called out to some distant memory, long consigned to the back of his subconscious. It was possible that it related to something from his childhood, although it lay down some closed off avenue of the mind.

Varak remembered little of his childhood. He knew he was born in Cimmeria, in a backwater village – if that term can be fairly applied to one village in the region and not all the others along with it. He remembered his father vaguely and his mother not at all. Whether she was swept away by some illness, or some horde of battle-crazed marauders, her absence was the only thing which even alerted him to her one-time existence. His father had been some type of sellsword – and his clan (Varak included, although only in the most superficial sense) had stayed on the move almost constantly. That was one thing at least that the young Cimmerian had inherited, a strange sort of wanderlust. And while he had no interest in charting undiscovered territory in far-off isles, remaining in any one place for a minute longer than necessary stirred up a deep sense of unease in the pit of his stomach.

The Ranger stopped. Every sinew in his body tightening at the sound of boot meeting ground several feet from his location. He dropped into the ritual of a paranoid man, slowly and as silently as possible flattening his back against a frostbitten tree and moving his calloused hand towards the crude stone hilt of the dagger he kept unceremoniously tucked into his belt. A small dark-haired child with the markings of a fresh beating crudely etched all over his face ran past, oblivious to his presence, and off in the direction of the nearby river. Varak relaxed once more.

Being off guard was a luxury which the gods were ill at ease to smile upon. A lesson which is best learnt young lest too late altogether. Since returning to his sun-forsaken birth-land, Varak had been ambushed by highwaymen, charged at by wailing maniacs, and stalked by world-weary refugees, who would sell their own grandmothers for a scrap of rancid meat.

He was something of a pragmatist, Varak, and found it convenient to do away with many of the more romantic ideas of polite – and even Cimmerian, society. He would be one of the last to martyr themselves in service of any village, and wouldn’t be averse to killing or selling out one of his “country-men”. In fact, for his own part Varak was a murderer and a thief, with no particular sense of overwhelming kinship to his fellow barbarians - but deep at his core, anchored to his very soul were certain ideals and prejudices which no man’s will or blade could drive away. There were two groups of people Varak hated with a passion, and he hated them both for different reasons.

The Stygians, he hated for his own sake – the Vanir, he hated for the sake of others.

Not so long ago there had been a small rag-adorned family in one of the myriad scattered villages along the blood-stained corpse-laden frontline of the ongoing battle with the Vanir. They had been traditional, but modest, patient and forthcoming with the young barbarian when he found himself – along with his father and the warband that accompanied them, under their hospitality. The patriarch of the family was blind, and suffered the ignominity of old age. He had been a veteran in near-countless wars from all the accounts that Varak could remember, and had lived as honest a life as any man in the lands. Speaking his mind and standing up for his beliefs, even as death was preparing to lunge at him from behind every shaded rock.

Varak’s father and his clan had been appointed by this aged warrior to guard the village against the encroaching threat from the north, and often the young barbarian would find himself occupied with mock sword-play against the offspring of the old man and his fragile but spirited wife. There are few parts of Varak’s life which are not shrouded in uncertainty, and the memories of the events that occurred when he was living in this modest village are perhaps the strangest of all, being at once the most chaotic and fragmented, and also the most certain he possesses – a certainty etched into his mind and soul as if carved there by a fire-brand.

Amid the flames, smoke, disarray, and carnage, certain moments stand out. The sight of his father’s head being hacked from his body, the hideous gargling sound coming from his open throat – untidy tendrils of meat and muscle left behind. The children with whom Varak played and boasted being dashed into the stony ground until with terrible finality the crack of their skulls reverberated in the night air, signaling the end of their time - pink froth pouring from gaping cavities. The systematic rounding up of the few women in the village, the hurried and vindictive rape which can only be bourne out darkest malice, and not any form of lust, and finally the hacking apart. His own terror, while hiding in the darkest corner he could find, under a pile of waste and dung. And finally the laughter of the Vanir dogs as they left not an hour later – cautiously pre-empting the arrival of any aid which might have come to the ruined settlement and the stricken child.

But fate has a dark sense of humor and a cruel wit, and the next people who arrived in the settlement were scavengers. Scavengers who had seen the direction which the Vanir warband had headed in, and schemed with perverse delight at the possibilities this offered. Scavengers who made play with the corpses of the fallen, and who saw Varak half dead in the snow, after crawling out of the pile of human shit he had been hiding in the night before. Stygian scavengers.

The Ranger snorted to himself, clenched and unclenched his grazed, near-frostbitten fists – out of habit rather than any sort of rage. His emotions were more focused these days, and even his anger tended to have a sense of direction behind it. Something which he partly resented in himself, but which, perhaps, he bitterly mused, was an understandable side-effect of the repressive nature of Stygian slavery.

Nearly given as an offering to the dread-serpent god of the Setittes on a terrifyingly regular basis, barely avoiding the brutal sodomy which befell many of the other young slaves on the galleys, and being whipped and beaten to the point where the blows seemed to stop landing on the flesh and start landing on the soul, Varak’s life was defined by a growing sense of despair and malice. Action against any of the oppressors would have led to instant death.

Stopping dead in his tracks the Ranger half chuckled to himself at the absurdity of his thought

“No, not an instant death at all. A slow and perverse one.”

Tossed high upon the murky seas like some ill fated plaything, a pestilential wind always seemed to be behind the Stygian vessel, yet did nothing to make the work of rowing with the splintered and tortuous oars any easier. Its cargo and crew not even granted the hollow sight of foreign kingdoms. Aquilonia, nor Stygia, nor anything inbetween.

The sun had begun to die over the horizon; a flame-wreathed orb, casting an ominous and foreshadowing shade of crimson across the land. Varak tilted his head idly upwards, long tendrils of unkempt hair half plastered to his face by the wet and cold. He stood in contemplation for a moment, and at the baying of the wolves decided to head back to Conarch for one more restless night in the exposed inn room he was renting with the few items of worth and meager amount of coin he had scavenged

While some of those aboard the slave galleys and transport vessels, he knew, had been afflicted with various ill magics and works of sorcery, Varak’s own absent-mindedness about his past was born from something altogether less reversible than magic. It was born out of disbelief. Disbelief that a past so contrasted with the life he spent aboard the Stygian slave vessel could have possibly existed in any but the most abstract sense. Out of the hundreds or thousands of those unwary souls who had been spirited away into a half life in the Stygian slave trade, how many were still aboard those ships, languishing in Stygian brothels, or long since dead with their bleached bones picked clean and left in the desert to themselves turn to dust?

The village gate grew closer. With his freshly broken nose, swollen jaw, and cut forehead stinging more than usual, Varak made a final mental note: “Kill Vanir… Elkhorn Clan”