Zilrud
Details
Full Name: Zilrud of Clan Saraghen (Zilrud Saraghen)
Race: Orkhai
Sex: Male
Age: 43
Height: 6’10”
Weight: 296 lbs
Birthdate: 34th of Glade, Year 4579
Birthplace: Clan Saraghen Holdings in Rokhan
Profession: Gladiator
Housing: N/A
Partners: N/A
Titles: N/A
Factions: N/A
Fluencies: Common, Mor’Drub
Conversationals: None
Ineptitudes: None
Appearance
Zil stands just a little over 6’10” tall and weighs over 295 lbs. At first glance, he is a large, lumbering hulk designed for one thing and one thing only, death. At first glance, both of his ears are pierced with large studs, and his tusks were filed down to smaller ones and capped with dangerously sharp metal tips. His skin is greenish-grey-brown and leathery to the touch. His hair grows in a slight mohawk shape from the center of his skull. With pointed ears, the only other obvious thing about the Orkhai are his glowing reddish orange eyes.
Zilrud’s flesh can sometimes be seen stained with painted colors of red and green, a mixture of an homage to his homeland in Rokhan and to the colors worn during his time fighting in Lorien. He is large with muscle and can withstand hefty blows and the harsher weathers that Atharen offers. As imposing as he is, many people steer clear of his lumbering size, especially with the glare that would rightfully place anyone into the death ideation quickly following.
Personality
In his younger years and prime, Zil was considered the epitome of what an Ork should have been. Zil was dominant even among his clan, fearless, murderous, primal, and without peers. He had respect and had earned his right as one of the apex predators of Rokhan. However, as he had become comfortable in his Orkish ways since his ambush, dosing, and capture, Zil had since spent years under the effects of manufactured drugs to keep him compliant and just on the edge of sanity and being able to control his own body. Indentures as a Nameless, he lost his individuality, respect, pride, and honor and became a mindless slave to gladiatorial fights and forced selling of his body to the highest bidder after each fight.
He is a broken Ork on the road to recovering himself and proving to Jaxkael that he will always remain his disciple and will never forget the kindness Jaxkael had shown him in his youth and seeks to regain the favor. In the process, the effigies of Jaxkael would once again become known.
History
…Bloodshed…
A comingling of feral cries could be heard. A bestial, deep-throated roar was accompanied by that of a child no older than nine to ten years of age, then a deafening silence. Drip. Drip. Drip. Slowly, sounds began to paint a picture, drawing together the cries of two to the scene surrounding them. A twitching body lie on the ground, covered in lacerations as its nerves were frayed, and the body was dying. The sound of metal pulling could be heard, with a squelching sound of flesh suctioning from the normally cold mineral of the weapon. With a sickening thud, the body fell from the axe, and the victor? A ten-year-old Orkling, his shoulder armor missing, blood dripping from his young but already developed torso. His hand was drenched in his adversary's blood, a fully grown Orkhai. Slowly, the sounds of a skirmish could be heard, metals and minerals clanging together, bestial roars, and the smell of musk and death permeated the fields… It was a battle between Orkhai groups, splinter cells of their parent clans. There had been no attempt at an armistice. Instead, bloodshed and death were the only possible answers. Thus entered Zilrud of Clan Saraghen into the never-ending fields of history.
Born to his parent, Tolgok, Zilrud had been trained to be a weapon, a tool of war from the moment he could stand after being birthed. It had been an immediate transition for the young Ork from an innocent infant to being needed to fight and defend his Clan from the fellow Orkhai Clans within Rokhan. It was not a magnificent life, but it was the life expected of all young Orks raised within their clans. To learn to fight and offer sacrifice to their patron deity, Jaxkael. Zilrud had brought his axes and maces for many years to cleave and bash enemies abroad. Whether it was to fight off incursions of other Orkhai, outsider races trying to encroach in Rokhan, where they had no claim to anything, or just for sport, Zilrud always won. Always made sure to be the best. In his generation, he was the Orkhai to want to live up to the name.
…Jaxkael’s Gift…
As a reward and for showing sheer strength and dedication to their way, Zil had been granted the rite of passage to learning one of the magics within his clan. Even though it was not passed down by Jaxkael himself, strong magic had been withheld from many Orkhai due to its inevitably brutal nature. Offered the ability to accept the trial, Zil had accepted the proposition of being inducted into one of the few Orkhai who could manipulate the very earth, Divide. The private ceremony was held with a shaman and practitioner of magics that was well respected and feared, even among the mightiest of the Orkish warriors. His gift was given, and the material flowed into Zil and the Master Orkhai. Zil’s sample of stone flowed into his bloodstream, while soon, the Master’s sample found his lungs. It took longer than usual for Zil to succumb to the hypoxia, inevitably fighting against the shortage of oxygen in his blood until he lost consciousness. It was quite some time; the idea that Zilrud was not strong enough had begun to rise in question before he regained consciousness; the minerals flowing through his system left their mark across his green flesh in angular patterns in a near tribal marking. From that point forward, Zil had not only become a powerful warrior but also began to hone his abilities as a Mage, a Dividim.
…Depravity’s Hostage…
As an adolescent, honed blade of his clan, Zilrud had been given numerous responsibilities for maintaining the culture around their clan. One of those responsibilities revolved around patrolling and ensuring there were no wandering Orkhai from other clans or strangers seeking to cause trouble for the Orks. During one of these ventures, Zilrud found a band of strange… They were not all men. He had known what a human had looked like, but some had pointier ears than he had, and some looked like a mix of many things. They numbered seven in total. As Zilrud gave them a single warning to leave, they attacked. One was quickly dispatched, but as he had been focused on the next target, he had not expected nor imagined what happened next. Something hit his face that exploded in a blue powder. At first, he had merely thought it a distraction, but quickly as he breathed in the powder, he felt off. His vision became blurry, and his brain became fuzzy. Zilrud’s senses dulled, so he attempted to overcompensate by hacking and slashing with his axe, but something had also happened with his nerved. They were not responding as well as they should have been. His prowess as a fighter had been reduced, and his weapon was flung due to weakness in the strength of his limbs. The one thing the Ork had never intended was to be attacked by something that did not need to pierce or burn his skin, he had been attacked with some form of the weaponized herb, and Zilrud faded out of consciousness to a nightmare he would not wake up from for some time.
It was days, weeks before he became lucid enough to realize he could not feel the plains of Rokhan beneath his feet. What he felt was cold and hard. He could not smell the scent of his fellow Orks nor the livestock and animals they would raise. Instead, he found scents of dampness, filth, and decay. Eventually, his vision returned to him, and he found himself stripped of all his weapons and what bits of gear he’d had. In those moments of lucidity, he found himself chained to… Something. He could not tell what it was, but he heard men yelling. His captors had been ambushed themselves. In those moments of clarity, he broke free of his bonds and fought his way out of the altercation in his partial haze. Little had he known, in his drugged state, he had eliminated the enemy, or at least enough of them to allow time for another of those powdered weapons to find his face. Before he could finish making it far enough away from the captors, he had felt nothing but coldness on his bare body and then nothing.
Once more, he awoke, only this time, he was in a cell. The bars were thick, and the accommodations were less than what many prisoners would have gotten. Bare, with no water, and chained, he glanced around but could only make out this faintly glowing blue… The shape floating beside him had a line that went down into his arm. Consciousness had left him again.
…The Abrogation of Honor…
Zilrud’s body had eventually become used to the blue liquid to the point that he could function with it pumping through his veins. There was a constant dripping of the drug into the thick veins of his forearm by an IV that he was hooked up to in his cell. As a result of the drug taking hold within his body, he had become complacent and malleable to those, not of his clan or even his people. Instead, he was pushed into fighting rings as a nameless. His captors’ original plan of using him as a prize to a duke for money had been abandoned, and they sought to make money for themselves. Zilrud, even drugged, could eliminate most foes. Occasionally, there had been a skilled enough fight that he had to take extra time to end them, but he always won. His popularity as a nameless fighter had skyrocketed, and so too, did the allure of a full-blooded Orkhai under the control of non-Orkish people.
The popularity came with a heavier price. Not only had people been interested in his fights, but they had become transfixed upon the exotic nature of the Ork. From the new popularity stemmed a fetishization of his powerful body, and for high enough paying clients, he could pay for one-on-one time with the Ork. Drugged with a mixture of the mind-numbing IV he had been on daily since his capture, he was also given herbal remedies to increase his libido, earning him a reputation both in and out of the fighting ring. What honor Zilrud had before being captured had long since vanished. Nearly broken, he lived his life, the fighting feeding his thirst for blood, his carnal duties satisfying his internal need to dominate and procreate.
During his imprisonment and servitude, he had come in contact with more modern items than he had been acclimated to in Rokhan. One such contact was copper. With oxidized copper, a blue layer developed over the copper piping, dubbed copper patina, which was also found on copper items in the arena and in his cell. The resulting contact was absorbed by his flesh and directed into his Mark of Control, changing the colorless pattern to developing a blue-textured change in the colorations and feel of his Mark.
…The Finesse of Snow…
Punishment for the Orkhai was to remove the only humanity he had ever known. The cell he had been given had been rough for most, but he had come to appreciate it. It was out of the snow and not in the freezing temperatures. A favored punishment by his captors had been using the elements to teach him a lesson. Chained to a rock a short bit out of the city, he was left naked and alone. Thicker skin and denser muscles helped with the cold, often staving off the effects of extreme temperature for some time. However, the frigid winds and snowfall were not kind to the Orkhai’s body. The IV was taped to his shoulder, with remnants of blue powder on his face. He had not performed well in one of his late-night hours due to exhaustion and too much of the drug in his system, so they had left him overnight to the elements. His limbs had begun shivering, and his heartbeat seemed to weaken. The drug use had not cleared his mind enough to realize the confusion he had been feeling, and his skin, already red, had become brighter in color. He was beginning to freeze to death…
And as his mind wandered in and out of consciousness, he would swear (even into the day of modern times) that he had seen something. It was a soft golden color, glowing, and held a warmth to it. Initially, he thought it was someone with a torch and had a moment of panic and elation. Someone was there. But the light faded before him, and he found it was nothing more than a hallucination. With the tired Orkish eyes closing, he had just about felt consciousness leaving him when he heard a voice. Its words were not clear, and they seemed far off, but he understood it. It filled him with warmth, and in this warmth, Zilrud had found that his body could be felt. His fingers, his skin, his toes. Everything could be moved, flexed, and clenched. Once more, the voice called to him, filling him with vigor, enough so that he could rise from his slouch against the rock he had been chained to.
After a few moments on his feet, there was a metallic clank, as his chain had been torn from the rock, and in the moments blessed to him by the glowing light, he turned his head inward, his thickly muscled arm raising and his tusked teeth snagged against his cold flesh. Clumsily he bit at himself until he found the foreign-feeling object embedded within his skin. Teeth snagged it, and he pulled along his arm toward his bicep until the needle popped free from his skin and hung haphazardly, dripping the faintly glowing blue IV contents along his muscular forearm.
Dripping the drug down his arm, the naked Ork wandered into the snows of Lorien, finding solace. It was not merely solace from his captors, but he had also found solace from the torturous dishonor his life so far had brought him.
…Recovering Courage & Honor…
Since his escape from his captors, Zilrud had found himself wandering Lorien. It was not easy or feasible to aimlessly wander such a harsh land. It was easy to fall back into the patterns he had lived for so long. Fighting for money and winning, laying with whoever would pay him, and allowing them to use his body for their pleasure. It was all a means to aid him in beginning his recovery. Zilrud had nothing. His weapons were lost, his honor had been destroyed, and any semblance of the Ork he had been before his years of captivity was a mere memory.
Although he could find his way back to Rokhan with enough time and effort, Zilrud had thought about whether they would accept his return. The dishonor and weakness that had been shown were a disgrace to the Orks. The mere thought of being murdered for being too weak frightened him, a human emotion that had been instilled into him for being removed from Orkish culture. Before he could fathom returning home, he had to find himself and find his new purpose in the world. Rebuilding each piece of the foundation that was Zilrud, one stone at a time. It would take effort to find where he could begin and enough soul-searching to see if he was even worthy of his own truest desires. Honor. Courage. Worth. These were foundational pillars for an Orkhai to exist in the world, and Zilrud would begin at the bottom and work his way back up.
