Tellurian Tales: Luceo Tenebrae

Game Details

STR   7
DEX  14
CON   8
INT  16
WIS  14
CHA  10

Description

Luceo is a slight young man of 5' 7", with pale skin, black hair, and dark blue-grey eyes. He has long eyelashes, making his eyes rather arresting. He wears very dark grey robes. He has a small raven familiar named Rasputin, who often perches on his shoulder or on the top of his pack. From his belt hangs the red copper symbol of Wee Jas--called The Ruby Sorceress and The Witch Goddess.

When he was first found by Rorik and Invellios, he was bald, and his face was marked with the magically shifting and shadowy Mark of the Outcast. This has since been removed. His hair has grown out , though he still shaves his face whenever facilities are available.

Luceo is rather shy when treated with affection. He is quiet, and not terribly well-spoken in social situations. However, when faced with trouble or hostility, he tends to be decisive and determined, even to point of being ruthless or cruel to his enemies.

Early History

Luceo was born to a poor family on the Outskirts. His father was rugged and handsome as a young man, but had lately started going to seed, becoming increasingly drunk and abusive. His mother was small and beautiful, and filled with nonsensical stories about fairies and woodland creatures. When Luceo was 9, his father, in a rage, strangled his mother nearly to death. Luceo distracted his father by attacking him with a piece of firewood, but was then knocked unconscious himself by a single backhand blow to the head. Thinking his wife dead, Luceo's father stole a horse and fled; he was later hung for the horse theft. Luceo's mother lingered in a coma for a week before regaining consciousness. She had become a smiling, silent, simple creature; her stories were gone. Luceo cared for her during his teenage years; she loved him back in lost, child-like way.

Luceo, being frail, day-dreamy, and from a poor family, was constantly abused by other boys. This torment tore at him, slowly filling him with frustration and then anger. He longed for power, for the strength to hurt those who would hurt him.

Aside from memories of his mother before her coma, Luceo's one untarnished memory of joy is sitting under the rowan tree with the girl Michelle. In the memory, they are both about 6 years old, and she kisses him briefly. He remembers the warm softness of her lips. He can remember nothing else about the girl--either before or since this memory. He does not know what happened to her, or even if the memory is real. He can't even remember precisely what she looked like, only the glow of her blond-white hair in the sun.

Luceo excelled at school work, and often carried books with him wherever he went. One day when he was 14, picking up his books after another tormenting by passing farmers' sons, he was approached by a dark traveler in robes. After two nights of long discussions, Luceo found himself signing up for a dark mage school, part of the secretive Bleak Academy. Securing a loan from the Academy, he arranged care for his ailing mother.

The Academy was located in the remote hills, in an old tower with a modified cavern system beneath. The life was grueling and harsh--poor food, bare sleeping pallets, and hours of study and prayer. Yet Luceo took to it well. And, though there was much hazing by the superiors--starting with the rough shaving of his head and the magical marking of his face with the Mark of the Outcast--for the first time, he was not abused by his peers. And the promise of power never to be hurt again and the ease with which he took to that power filled him with a savage joy.

This cell of the Bleak Academy focused mostly on the arcane arts of necromancy, supported by clerics of both Wee Jas and Nerull. Luceo took well to the teachings of discipline and retributive justice preached by Wee Jas's clerics.

After 7 years of study, as he neared the trials that would end his neophyte status, his mother tracked him down. This is the greatest mystery in Luceo's life--he will never know how she managed it. But he only saw her body, struck down by the Bleak Academy to protect their secret location.

Seeing his mother again, and the fate meted out to her, drove Luceo to flee the Academy, despite his debts to them. He also stole a number of tomes from the library before he left. He realized that he desires power, not to control others as the Academy does, but only to stop others from hurting him. Yet as he fled, he also felt a great rage building in him, calling him to destroy and consume everything before him before it hurt him again. He felt the rage strangling him, closing him off from any future chance of human love and connection. And yet he remembered the kiss under the rowan tree.

Luceo prayed to Wee Jas for guidance on how to control his rage. Over a period of days, he wrote out his own rules of conduct in an attempt to keep his years of training in the dark arts from fanning the flames of his rage and desire for power.

Luceo still desires power, however. And he still thrills at the ease with which both the divine and arcane magic of the dark arts come to him. Following up on hints of lore from his learning and from the stolen library tomes, he seeks now the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, said to be the first step in unlocking powers older than either the arcane grammar or the gods themselves.