Azaes



Name: Alik Ar'zaes, also known as Azaes, also known as Al

Species: Originally human, transformed himself into the world's first 'vampire'

Age: Approximately 10,000 years old

Sign: N/A

Based out of: Various global locations; currently, Hawai'i

''Ten thousand years ago, Atlantis was an empire, and her king ruled with unquestioned power. His warships sailed the known world and his enemies fell like chaff before him. But even emperor-kings age, and must yield to defeat at last, as death casts its long shadow... Or is there another way? Can a man, even a great man, defeat death itself?''

The Rebel
Alik was born in Atla, the son of a tribal chieftain, with a fraternal twin named Ando. They were members of the "hill people," a folk deemed barbarous by most Atlans, who lived in the Red Hills region of Atla, a dry and rugged coastline known for both its deposits of orichalcum ore and the stubborn individualism of its people, who resisted the rule of the distant king, Nunez, and made life difficult for his tax collectors and assayers. The tribes got along nearly as poorly with each other as with the king, and every few hills, the local control over goat-grazing-ground and springs of fresh water might change.

The twins' father was injured in a skirmish with King Nunez's men when the boys were not yet a year old. Crippled by the encounter, he remained a chief in name but was forced more to indirect guidance of his people, and Alik grew up hearing the tales of his father's one-time prowess as a warrior and struggling to reconcile it with the lame man he saw. Even from early boyhood, Alik's heart surged to tales of war and heroes, battles and bravery.

His brother Ando was different, a gentler sort. Ando loved the goats and the little valleys, and would explore for hours on his own as he herded the goats in search of greenery. Ando knew the names of every herb to grow in the hills, and came back often to the village with flowers woven into his black hair. Despite their differences of temperament, the brothers loved one another dearly, and Alik was often the protector of his less combative brother.

Seasons came and went. The king's men came and went too: sometimes grudgingly acknowledged and deferred to, and returning to their king with sacks of orichalcum ore (the primary tribute of the hillfolk), and sometimes fleeing from the hills with slingstones to help hurry them along. The constant level of tension with the king's soldiers, sometimes boiling over into skirmishes and guerilla warfare, was an ongoing element of young Alik's life, and by his fourteenth year he was joining with his older cousins in the battles.

When he was seventeen, the simmer of violence became an explosion. A rich vein of ore had been discovered and the king was no longer content to simply let the hill folk offer up sacks of raw ore either scavenged from the ground or dug by the hillfolk with simple tools. He wanted large-scale mines-- a permanent presence in the Red Hills-- and the battles between hillfolk and Nunez's troops grew more frequent. Alik's father sought to negotiate concessions, that their tribe might at least profit from the mine's presence-- while other voices argued to kill any king's man that dared enter the hills. Alik was himself disgusted by his father's apparent submission. Still, a true war might have been avoided.... if not for Ando's death.

An unlucky chance encounter between some of the king's soldiers and Ando, contentedly grazing his goats, went poorly. A soldier struck the youth for 'disrespect,' Ando fell, hit his head on a rock, and ultimately perished.

Ando's death destroyed any chance at peaceful negotiations for the mine. Incensed at the death of their chieftain's son, Alik's tribe retaliated blood for blood, falling upon the camp of the king's assayers and murdering them; Alik was first among the blood-hungry. In the wake of the violence, Alik's father faced the unwelcome knowledge that King Nunez would certainly retaliate in kind; he prepared to have his people do what they had always done when the soldiers arrived in force-- to retreat, to pull back into the twisting dry canyons and steep gulches of the hills, the territory they knew better than the enemy, and to wait out the soldiers.

Alik argued a different path. With the brashness of youth, he argued they should not hide in their own land, but take the battle to the enemy instead. He also proposed that they not fight alone, but rather, rally the tribes against their common enemy-- for surely, he pointed out, Nunez would not be content to merely take their orichalcum, but in time, would want to bring all the Red Hills under his heel-- to enslave her proud people as miners, to wrest what profit he could from the rocks and hills, and to break any treaty as soon as it pleased him. Alik argued that the people of the Red Hills had to stand together, or that Ando's story would repeat in every tribe.

Alik's words found eager ears. His father's decision to allow the mine had been unpopular with many of the younger men-- and even some of the older. The pride of the hillfolk rose in response to his fierce, unpolished speech, as contrasted with the measured caution of his father's. Loyalties were divided between father and son... and while debates raged, Alik chose to act. He gathered like-minded men of his tribe, and even reached out to other neighboring tribes, to their young, hot-tempered warriors as well-- other youth he had met during the yearly gatherings of tribes-- and spoke of his brother's death, of vengeance, of honor.

In the dead of a moonless night, Alik led a hundred warriors down from the hills and struck at one of the nearer villages of the low-lands. Raiding the settlements of the plans had happened before-- but such raids has been to steal supplies or livestock-- to make off with a dozen fat goats, or bolts of good cloth, or sacks of grain. But Alik and his warriors came to destroy.

The village, called Twisted Oak, had a small garrison of soldiers; Alik's superior numbers overwhelmed them. The simmering anger of the hill people, each of whom could call to mind harsh treatment by the king's troops over the years, or could name kin lost to the skirmishes, boiled over that night and led to the razing of Twisted Oak, with farms and homes torched by the attackers, and dozens dead by morning.

Alik knew his father's warning of the king's retribution was true. He sought to use his raid to force the tribes to unify, to make the case that several of them had taken part in it, and that retribution would come not just to one tribe but to all of them-- that the king's soldiers would hardly carefully weigh the bloody hands of each of the local competing tribes when they punished the raiders of Twisted Oak. Survival, Alik argued, lay in banding together; to do otherwise was suicide.

The tribes did not rally overnight, but they did rally. Many young men rushed to Alik's banner before their villages had agreed to do so, and thus dragged their own more reluctant elders with them. A year later Alik had a thousand warriors under his command, though little in the way of a true plan. He was a skilled combatant, despite his youth, but the ability to swing a blade is not the ability to wage war. He was content to be a thorn in the empire's side-- to attack trade caravans and poorly defended villages, and to pull back to the shelter of rugged terrain as needed to avoid the lumbering masses of the empire's troops. His hatred for Nunez was unabated, and he privately dreamt of grander revenge, but Alik would never have become anything beyond a bandit of the hills if not for further chance encounters.

In his eighteenth year Alik met a siv named Ko. The siv was approaching a village Alik and his ragged 'army' had just overrun; a battle of wills ensued between the siv's insistence on tending to the dying and the young warrior's attitude. The encounter ultimately ended with the siv as a quasi-hostage; Alik feared to let the siv go, to potentially inform the king's soldiers of his company's movements, and also wished to have the services of a siv for his own people. So, Ko began to travel with Alik and his people.

Ko's influence slowly tempered the brutality of Alik's attacks. Ko's careful questioning led Alik into considerations of long-term strategy, as well as towards greater clemency towards the villages he attacked. Though Ko's primary goal was to minimize bloodshed, the inadvertent result was that Alik began to act less as a raider, and more as a conqueror, 'freeing' villages from the king's rule.

Some time after Ko joined Alik's 'army,' they reached the town of Three Rivers. By this point, word of Alik's rampage across the north had spread, and a delegation of town elders met the attackers. They offered a proposition: one of their own would champion the town, against Alik himself, and if the town's victor was successful, the town would be spared; if Alik prevailed, the town would offer him no resistance. Alik of course agreed to such a challenge, thinking it all the easier when the 'champion' was one of the elderly delegation-- a stooped, silver-haired old man.

Of course, the old man turned out to be able to handle himself. Thus Alik made the acquaintance of Baez, a one-time general for Nunez, disgraced and exiled to his country holdings. Baez defeated Alik in battle, and Ko reminded the furious, humiliated Alik that he had given his oath to leave the town be. But Baez saw potential in Alik, and had his own reasons to resent the king; thus, another unlikely partnership was born, as Baez began to instruct Alik in the ways of tactics, strategy, and command. Under his leadership, Alik's followers became a true military body, but even more importantly, it marked the beginning of warriors other than the hillfolk coming to "serve" in Alik's army. Nunez's despotic rule had left many people, not only hillfolk, ready to take up arms against him, if only they had a leader to rally behind. Baez saw that Alik's charisma and drive could make him into that leader.

The next year saw Alik's army grow and the formation of tenous alliances. While Nunez had many enemies willing to rebel against his rule, uniting them into one force, under one leader, was no easy task. Ko was invaluable in this task, using their skills of diplomacy and negotiation to bring the disparate would-be rebels to a common table. Alliances were formed with the island-dwellers to the west, with their fast ships, and with the horse-riders of the eastern plains. The orichalcum ore of the hills became a powerful resource-- when partnered with the smithing capacity of some of the towns they had overtaken, the ore became ingots of orichalcum: immensely valuable when trying to outfit an army and fund a rebellion, and even more valuable when turned into weapons. Ironically, the very mines that the hill people had resisted for generations were finally established-- to outfit and supply Alik and his warriors.

More than swords and spears, or even alliances, would be needed to challenge the tyrant Nunez. The king had the favor of the gods, manifested in a supernatural guardian-- a terrifying divine bull the size of a house. The king also had magicians at his command. Alik would need the patronage of a god of his own, and magic to fight magic.

He did all these things. Alik completed numerous trials and braved impossible dangers, undertaking quests as an epic hero, and ultimately proved himself so that the gods decided they would abstain from favoring one side or the other: Alik and Nunez would decide their conflict man to man, with no divine thumb on the scale on either side.

And thus, ultimately, Alik and his coalition marched on the great city of Atla, the capital. Through guile and trickery, he laid low the divine bull; through his alliances and military strategy he blockaded Atla's docks and stopped the roads that brought grain and meat into the great city. Alik laid siege to Atla.

As the pressures of hunger mounted inside the city, Alik offered challenge to Nunez: single combat, to decide the throne. Alik had become known to his army as Ar'zaes, a name that meant 'the young bull', and he played on the notion that Nunez was old and failing, and that his time had come. With pressure to prove himself, Nunez came forth from Atla and accepted Alik's challenge.

At twenty years of age, Alik defeated Nunez, and claimed vengeance for his brother, and became king of all of Atla, changing his formal name to 'Azaes' (the reigning bull, the eternal bull) on doing so.

The King
Azaes' army had been a coalition united to wage war against a tyrant. Preserving that same coalition in peacetime would be a harder task. The first hurdle was what should become of Nunez's queen, Basyit, and her surviving children by Nunez. Several of the older children had perished in the war itself, but there remained two children under ten. Some of Azaes' allies argued that all the possible heirs should be executed, so that none might emerge in a few years time to challenge Azaes' rule. Others pointed out that harming either the children or Basyit herself might create more warfare, for Basyit hailed from the southern region of Essen, and her kin there might retaliate. Ko suggested that Azaes marry Basyit himself, to avoid war with Essen, and that a deal be struck for the safety of her children. Though both Azaes and Basyit were not initially enthused about this plan, Ko was able to bring them both around.

Azaes's early years as king were marked by similar situations. Ko was his guide in navigating treacherous political situations and in surviving the various political coup attempts (and sometimes literal coup attempts) that marked the first few years of Azaes' rule. The Atlan nobility assumed he was gullible, savage, and easily provoked into missteps; if not for Ko's savvy guidance, those things might have all been true. Without Ko as a backroom dealmaker and smiling ambassador, Azaes' reign might have been a mere footnote before some treachery or intrigue overcame him.

In time, Azaes grew wise to the ways of 'civilized' men. Though he and the nobility of Atla always maintained a cautious détente at best, Azaes pursued publics works projects that made him popular with the common man-- he built canals, roads, bridges, schools, and granaries; he also reformed many laws that benefited the upper class at the expense of the lower. He maintained a strong military and navy, which sailed to distant lands, won wars, and brought back plunder and tribute that made Atla the richest and most glorious kingdom in the world. Azaes's reviving of lost forms of magic also made Atla powerful, and regular Atlans more prosperous.

Azaes' rule stretched for decades. One of the few things to mar it was that he had fathered no male heir, and only one daughter, Nene. Some said this was due to a curse by the gods; others suspected Basyit of a subtle revenge or machinations of her own to try and get one of her surviving sons on the throne. Whatever the cause, Alik grew older and still had no son. This caused some contention between Azaes and Basyit, and Azaes took various mistresses in an attempt to father a son, but it seemed to be the one thing the universe would deny a king who otherwise had everything. Azaes passed from his youth to his prime to early middle age without the heir he desired.

Time ultimately overpowers each of us...

Queen Basyit was fifteen years the king's elder, and succumbed to old age when Azaes was fifty-five. Though their relationship had often been rocky, she had been an inarguable presence in Alik's life for over three decades, and he took her loss poorly. Personal grief played a part, but on a more existential level, Azaes truly began to think about his own death. For all his victories, for all his power and crown, death had come for his queen, and it would come for him...

Or was there a way to defeat even this foe? The question seized Azaes with a grip of steel, and he bent both the fantastic wealth of his kingdom, the knowledge of his most skilled advisers, and his own considerable drive and will to this problem. Over several years, Azaes's determination became obsession. His kingdom languished, matters of state left to whoever would manage them, while Azaes's attention was ever more devoted to anyone who could promise him eternal life. He demanded that his alchemists, soothsayers, doctors, and priests find a way to let him live forever. He drank elixirs that cost a fortune and commissioned costly expeditions to find fabled herbs or fountains. The kingdom suffered, but Azaes would not be dissuaded from his goal, not even by his old adviser, Ko.

Inevitably, some who were close to the king decided he needed to be removed lest all of Atla suffer under his increasingly pathological rule. Thus an era of attempted coups and assassinations began, in Atla. Rather than seeing these as warning signs of how his nation was losing faith in them, Azaes saw the attacks on his life as all the more reason he needed to become immortal-- to survive such cowardly betrayals, to fear no poison or blade in the night. When strange, shrouded people from unknown lands showed up and promised the king that yes, they truly could make him immortal, he listened, and withdrew even further from those who had previously been in his confidence.

Finally, the ranks of the conspirators grew to include even his own daughter-- who had married one of Basyit's surviving sons, her half-brother. Together the two, with the backing of the surviving upper class of Atla, made one last stab to take down the mad king.

But blades did nothing. All of Azaes's experiments and dark bargains let him survive the attempt, but his retribution was terrible. He ordered the conspirators executed immediately, except for his daughter... for he had a terrible use for her.

The shrouded figures that whispered to him said that true immortality came only if you sacrificed a life close to your own... and so it was that Azaes killed his daughter Nene with his own hands, and performed a ritual as directed by his shadowy advisers, and drank Nene's blood. He earned for himself immortality, as promised; but the gods answered his blasphemy harshly.

They laid curses on him to taint each of the powers he had bargained for. His curses may be seen as the dark side of vampirism-- the dangers of sun exposure, the lust for blood, the inability to eat or drink-- and so forth. But the gods didn't stop there. They determined to take everything from him, including his kingdom; and thus, Atla was claimed by the sea and by earthquakes, crumbling all around the damned king.

With the blood of his daughter and grandson alike on his hands, Azaes's world collapsed, and he too was claimed by the sea. Unable to perish, he was tossed by the waves for a long time, before he eventually washed up on the northwestern coast of what would later be called Africa. A king with no kingdom, adrift in the wake of his own hubris; a man who had bought forever but whose life had been ruined.

The Immortal
Azaes swore to revenge himself upon the gods and their judgment.