» Wed Aug 18, 2010 5:01 pm
[takes in a deep breath...]
Ariake is a Breton, born under the Mage in a small backwater mountain village in High Rock. In his child years, he'd cause his next of kin to worry because his prime occupation was to find and get to know every noock and cranny of every hill and mountain around him, sometimes dissapearing for an entire day, which is where he got his drive for exploration and discovery. He never remembered his father as he died shortly after his birth. His world turned upside-down when his mother died as well at the age of ten. The already spartan conditions of living in the mountains meant noone was willing to take in an extra mouth in his home village. Thus he had to move to the outskirts of Evermor to live with a cousin. What followed was the most brutal part of his life. High Rock underwent many violent changes in the centuries since the Oblivion crysis, changes the guard had to focus their full attention to. As a result, even a civilized settlement like Evermor was rithe with crime, especially among the young of the poor who had little other choice to get by. Even though he was living in a city, Ariake learned there the law of the jungle, suffering much at the hands of stronger kids who lived by the notion that anything the weaker had, belonged to them. Overtime, he coped by learning to fight back when he could, or escape when he couldn't. This abysmal lifestyle went on for four years, and by the time it was over, Ariake felt most at home in visceral close-quarter combat, even though he was a Breton.
Though the conditions were rough, Ariake did not abandon the sense of justice and goodwill that his late mother worked so hard to develop. After becoming adept at fending against the Evermor's hazards for himself, he began using his newly honed "talents" to help those less able than himself. By chance, one of those "less able" turned out to be the neese of a minor noble, a certain Gallin Clavian. As gratitude, Clavian took him in under his wing, away from the hell of Evermor's streets. For the next three years Ariake lived in the noble's estate as part guest and part servant, helping with whatever he could. There his spark for learning was noticed and Clavian made possible Ariake's education under the tutelage of a resident scholar. He studied with great enthusiasm, especially for the arcane arts, and was well on his way to becoming a fully fledged mage apprentice.
Unfortunately, his golden years came to an abrupt end. For generations, High Rock's nobility was in constant rivalry with each other that manifested in an unseen war of lies, disinformation, sabotage and, more often than naught, assasinations. Ariake was curious of this unseen struggle that Clavian waged, but whenever he asked, he'd only get the reply: "Don't dive into this pit. It's a jungle even worse than the one you've been in.". Apparently that jungle proved too much for Clavian himself, as one day he simply disappeared without a trace, and his whole household came apart without him. Unwilling to return to the nightmare of the streets, Ariake instead chose to leave Evermor altogether and seek the life of an adventurer. The caution he honed in his ill neighbourhood taught him not to get ahead of himself, and thus he started small, doing simple jobs for whoever needed help: hunting down rabid animals that pestered struggling farms, message deliveries, surveys for sholars, and the like. He also did some work for the Mage's guild, though he never got beyond the rank of Associate simply because of his questionable origin. In High Rock's Mage's Guild, how high you could climb is completely dependant on how high you are on the social ladder. High positions are instantly given to sons and daughters of nobles who fund most of the guild's activities, and the rest have to content themselves with positions below them. In time, as Ariake honed his skills, the caliber of his work increased with them: from odd jobs to hunting bandits and smugglers, all the way to treasure hunting in locations to dangerous for anyone else. People also started hiring him as a mercenary for difficult tasks, where he shaped a good reputation for his reliability and sense of honor. Those same merc jobs, however, spelled his undoing.
After a while, Ariake noticed a disturbing trend. Most of the outlaws that he was hired to exterminate had with them evidence of correspondence with anonymous nobles, who paid them exorbitant sums to do their dirty work. Though he saw evidence, he had no real proof, and could only content himself to simply dealing with the consequences and leaving the source alone. The "source", on the other hand, thought otherwise. Apparently, at the height of Ariake's career he became too ubiquitous of an obstacle for the High Rock brass that relied much on circumventing the rules to ignore. One day, upon returning from exterminating a goblin infestation for a village, Ariake was beset by guards. His charge - murder of a noble, his punishment - prison for 30 years. The whole farm knew that he wasn't anywhere close to the site of the murder when it happened. Also, not longer than a few days after his arrest, his sentence was changed from 30 years in a High Rock prison to life in a Skyrim prison (it wasn't uncommon to transfer prisoners to Skyrim's "Freezing Hells" for a fee; some of the Nordic prisons even turned it into a business of sorts), and even that was quickly corrected to execution. It didn't take much wit to understand that someone was "waxing the system", the same someone who framed Ariake in the first place.
***
In the events that take place in TES V, Ariake is at first conflicted between seeking revenge for his unjust conviction and fighting the immediate threat of the Dragon invasion. Later, though, he comprehends that Alduin is a far greater priority than a petty noble pulling strings with his coin, and focuses his attention appropriately. In combat, he employs a combination of swords and the magic he used the most during the years preceding his downfall: Destruction and Alteration. He wears light armor, as the thought of wearing something that would prevent him from escaping if necessary, an instinct he developed in Evermor, is quite literally alien. Since he never had any formal training as any particular class of combatant, he has no concept of "purism" and switches between sword and spell, dual swords and all magic without much thought, whatever the situation favors. The brutal rules of life in the streets of his childhood have resulted in him being inately cautious, prefering to anolyze what he's up against from the shadows before the opposition is even aware of his presence, and not needlessly rushing into the fray. Apart from his favourite two magic schools he also uses what little he managed to learn about the other ones from the scholar as side-skills. At a certain point he also grasped that he would spend too much of his hard-earned coin on relying on others to maintain his equipment, and as such began practicing the arts of smithing and enchantment to rid himself of that dependency in time.
Ariake is mostly altruistic, readily helping the needy and defensless for no reinbursemant. However, his history with the cruel mechanics employed by the nobles and the maleability of the law has left him with a deep resentment for politics and law enforcers. Thus he prefers to distance himself from them as far as possible.
He is a twenty-something, and thus has the appearance of a youth, though slightly better built, but not burly. He has an intricate, proportional face, with neither the nose nor lips nor cheeks being large, with dark-brown medium-length hair weaving evenly down in all directions, and dark-brown eyes adorned by equally dark eyebrows. He tends to have a serious, emotionless expression, often described as "a wolf's stare", looking at people from under his forehead and rarely smiling.
