ALISTAIR REID
AKA Lord Reid
"Lament me, dear. Lament me when my garden wilts, my chambers clutter with dust; lament that I was once there."
Full Name: Alistair Nathaniel Reid
Race: Human-Orkhai (Corvo)
Gender: Male
Age: 33
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 288 lbs
Birthdate: Glade 88, Year 4589
Birth: Praetoria, the Griscian Commonwealth
Location: Genteven, Daravin
Raw Magic:
Baptism (Master)
Grave (Journeyman)
Profession: Sunderer
Titles:
Heir Apparent of House Reid; Heir to the Duchy of Morghent
Factions: House Reid (Exiled)
Clan: Saraghen
Enemies: The Divine Abolition
Religion: The Path
Address:
Conteromarón,
2216 Casablanca,
Genteven, Emperor's Lands,
Ardón
Partners: Vivian Kreine (Lover)
Sexuality: Homosexual
Languages: Fluent: Common, Gentevarese
Race: Human-Orkhai (Corvo)
Gender: Male
Age: 33
Height: 6'5"
Weight: 288 lbs
Birthdate: Glade 88, Year 4589
Birth: Praetoria, the Griscian Commonwealth
Location: Genteven, Daravin
Raw Magic:
Baptism (Master)
Grave (Journeyman)
Profession: Sunderer
Titles:
Heir Apparent of House Reid; Heir to the Duchy of Morghent
Factions: House Reid (Exiled)
Clan: Saraghen
Enemies: The Divine Abolition
Religion: The Path
Address:
Conteromarón,
2216 Casablanca,
Genteven, Emperor's Lands,
Ardón
Partners: Vivian Kreine (Lover)
Sexuality: Homosexual
Languages: Fluent: Common, Gentevarese
DETAILS
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Like all Corvo men, Alistair is exceptionally handsome. He is strikingly tall, with a radiant, warm appearance; he has well-kept medium brown hair, soothing light green eyes, and a smile of undeniable charm. He tends to keep a short beard, one that sculpts and compliments his suave complexion. Like everything else about him, it is well-kept and maintained, the Lord a pictured pinnacle of a presentable, noble masculinity.
Alistair is very fit, despite not spending very much time to acquire such a physique, another benefit of his Blight and being half-Orkhai. He has a well-rounded, robust muscular physique, with broad shoulders, an impressively weighty chest, large arms and a strong, thick set of thighs, calves and glutes. Alistair smells of a potent, pure, but refined masculinity; like a cologne fragrant with synthesized herbs and a hard day's labor, attracting the admiration of others. The exiled Lord is a veteran of the Brotherhood, excellent at crafting and shaping his image, turning heads and drawing others into his bed.
His attire widely varies, befitting his status as a social chameleon. When attempting to befriend those in serfdom, he may wear simple white tunics; with the elite, he'll find some way to "borrow" or appropriate some lover's attire to wear to a gathering. There are little constants when it comes to Alistair's attire or demeanor; he is always seeking to blend with others, and he appears to find great joy in doing so. Despite being an often reclusive, thoughtful man, those who see him in public will often find him to be exceptionally warm.
Being a Half-Orkhai, Alistair has a slight bronze tint to his lightly tan skin. When he does not shave them off, he also has short tusks that protrude up from his lower lip.
Alistair is very fit, despite not spending very much time to acquire such a physique, another benefit of his Blight and being half-Orkhai. He has a well-rounded, robust muscular physique, with broad shoulders, an impressively weighty chest, large arms and a strong, thick set of thighs, calves and glutes. Alistair smells of a potent, pure, but refined masculinity; like a cologne fragrant with synthesized herbs and a hard day's labor, attracting the admiration of others. The exiled Lord is a veteran of the Brotherhood, excellent at crafting and shaping his image, turning heads and drawing others into his bed.
His attire widely varies, befitting his status as a social chameleon. When attempting to befriend those in serfdom, he may wear simple white tunics; with the elite, he'll find some way to "borrow" or appropriate some lover's attire to wear to a gathering. There are little constants when it comes to Alistair's attire or demeanor; he is always seeking to blend with others, and he appears to find great joy in doing so. Despite being an often reclusive, thoughtful man, those who see him in public will often find him to be exceptionally warm.
Being a Half-Orkhai, Alistair has a slight bronze tint to his lightly tan skin. When he does not shave them off, he also has short tusks that protrude up from his lower lip.
Marks of Control
Mark of Baptism
Alistair's Mark of Baptism is much less visible than most, as is the case with many Griscian Risen. It was carved into his forehead with the finest, narrowest knife, the downward-facing scarred crescent nearly impossible to notice save for within very particular lighting, and with very keen eyes.
Mark of Grave
Alistair's Mark of Grave is an onyx-colored cross, with a pronged end to each tip and a symmetrical shape. It is located between his two clavicular bones, along his collar.
Mark of Baptism
Alistair's Mark of Baptism is much less visible than most, as is the case with many Griscian Risen. It was carved into his forehead with the finest, narrowest knife, the downward-facing scarred crescent nearly impossible to notice save for within very particular lighting, and with very keen eyes.
Mark of Grave
Alistair's Mark of Grave is an onyx-colored cross, with a pronged end to each tip and a symmetrical shape. It is located between his two clavicular bones, along his collar.
MENTALITY
Likes: Magic, Philosophy, Sex
Dislikes: Unflinching Ideology, Antimagic Rhetoric, Shallowness
Merits: Quick, Charming, Observant
Flaws: Impulsive, Self-Serving, Vengeful
Personality
Alistair is very cunning, but he doesn't always need to be. His interests are not always mired in a need to exploit; in fact, they often aren't. While his morals are questionable, his deeds are a mixed bag. He has left a positive impression and mark upon many lives; he has helped countless souls survive grave conditions, he's helped cull local threats. To those who can adapt to Alistair's way of thinking, largely driven by his own self-perception, he can act as an excellent companion. Lord Reid's ultimate desire is to achieve perfection and acclaim with others, to be enshrined as heroic, talented, an excellent lover. His heart follows after his whims, not all of which are good or evil, destructive or creative.
Alistair is deeply passionate in all things, even if most of those passions are fleeting, whimsical, certain to expire. When he loves, he does so with a breadth few men can imagine or grasp. When he loathes, he loathes with the hateful vengeance of a scorned soul, demanding for vindication. Lord Reid is intense, but he is also deeply changeable. He is ponderous and contemplative, though the conclusions he comes to are often strange. What is unique about Alistair is his incredible self-awareness; despite being aware of his often vindictive and self-serving tendencies, he finds little fault in them. He views himself merely as an animal, exercising the morality of a master seeking his own ascent. While others may or may not practice his own form of (im)morality, he does not particularly care for the rationalizations behind others' motivations, only their ultimate cause and effect upon his own life.
In many ways, Alistair is a hypocrite. He carries strong ideologies, but scorns many of the ideologies of others. He resents the Griscian structure of power, and yet would replace it with one that is perhaps equally as stunting. What lies at the core of the man's nature is a desire to become the core of everyone's life; to be the sun which the earth gravitates towards and around, to leave a mark wider and deeper than any man ever has upon the world.
Alistair is very cunning, but he doesn't always need to be. His interests are not always mired in a need to exploit; in fact, they often aren't. While his morals are questionable, his deeds are a mixed bag. He has left a positive impression and mark upon many lives; he has helped countless souls survive grave conditions, he's helped cull local threats. To those who can adapt to Alistair's way of thinking, largely driven by his own self-perception, he can act as an excellent companion. Lord Reid's ultimate desire is to achieve perfection and acclaim with others, to be enshrined as heroic, talented, an excellent lover. His heart follows after his whims, not all of which are good or evil, destructive or creative.
Alistair is deeply passionate in all things, even if most of those passions are fleeting, whimsical, certain to expire. When he loves, he does so with a breadth few men can imagine or grasp. When he loathes, he loathes with the hateful vengeance of a scorned soul, demanding for vindication. Lord Reid is intense, but he is also deeply changeable. He is ponderous and contemplative, though the conclusions he comes to are often strange. What is unique about Alistair is his incredible self-awareness; despite being aware of his often vindictive and self-serving tendencies, he finds little fault in them. He views himself merely as an animal, exercising the morality of a master seeking his own ascent. While others may or may not practice his own form of (im)morality, he does not particularly care for the rationalizations behind others' motivations, only their ultimate cause and effect upon his own life.
In many ways, Alistair is a hypocrite. He carries strong ideologies, but scorns many of the ideologies of others. He resents the Griscian structure of power, and yet would replace it with one that is perhaps equally as stunting. What lies at the core of the man's nature is a desire to become the core of everyone's life; to be the sun which the earth gravitates towards and around, to leave a mark wider and deeper than any man ever has upon the world.
HISTORY
The night of Margaret's marriage was a ball to end all of them, nestled within the topiary-rich courtyard of the Dunwich Rook, the ducal palace of House Reid. Dignitaries came from across the Commonwealth; a sonata was performed, tuned by the legendary hands of Godrick Barrows. She was to be wed to Nile Ghast, a bright, enterprising businessman; a man to whom flowed hundreds of thousands of farthings from the New World, extracted from the muddied, beaten backs of Hazànskar "laborers," and from the mounds of wealth he and his fellows plundered in the name of the Emperor. An Old World heiress and a New World aspirant who made it big -- it was the perfect union to cement Grisic's new age.
They certainly consummated. They were quite taken with one another, Lady Reid and Ser Ghast. Nile was handsome and Margaret was the key to a Kingdom; aristocracy, power within the Grisic mainland, connections across the broad spectrum of continental elites. Stars, and farthings, were in Lord Ghast's eyes; he had landed upon the bride of a millennia, all for the price of paying off House Reid's enormous debts. Margaret's mother had been a drunk, and her father a failure in nearly every way. He had buried them in loans, denied bankruptcy by the Emperor himself, who warned of the consequences of damaging the Griscian economy. Duke Reid had commissioned ships, castles, the fanciest and most extravagant clothiers and jewelers; he partied lavishly, sent gifts that wounded Praetoria's coffers. Worst of all, he made a poor investment.
Nile was broke, and Duke Reid failed to audit him before the marriage had been committed to; he failed to even ask. It wasn't until Margaret was six months with child that he asked for the payment for his heir's hand, only to be informed that Ser Ghast had "invested incredible sums into a wildly profitable New World industry" and that he "needed more time." That time came, months, and then years. During that time, Ser Ghast and Lady Reid began to hate one another, the woman feeling she'd been duped. Conflict followed them through every corridor and hall, made all the worse by their need to keep Nile's failure as a businessman secret from the surrounding crowds.
Alistair grew up in an environment of turmoil, for this reason, and neither of his parents particularly loved him. Margaret saw him as the progeny of a failure, while Nile had never been interested in being a father to begin with; he had always been more keen on what benefits and luxuries the marriage would provide him, his children an unfortunate aspect of the arrangement. In public he was a charming, diligent father, so much so that Alistair wondered why he wasn't like that all the time, and wanted for more of it. He would try to force him into crowds, he would keep to his side when others were around, only to draw out an increasingly limited amount of patience. Before very long, his father often became armed with a belt and foul temper behind the scenes, and while his mother feigned outrage it was merely one more battle she longed to wage against her loathsome husband.
At the age of six, Alistair began to grow tusks from his lower canines, and after a lengthy consultation with an array of private doctors, it was determined that he was half-Orkhai. Alistair's father, Nile, had altered his appearance through Necromancy to appear entirely human, despite belonging to a completely different race. At the discovery of this deception, the entire main branch of House Reid converged, planning and making arrangements to ensure the secrecy of this knowledge. Alistair's tusks were shaved off whenever they exceeded a normative length, additionally receiving medicines and ointments that would reduce the proliferation of an Orkish bronze undertone in his skin. After this, the boy noticed his cousins, grandmother, and numerous others within his family beginning to grow distant from him, something that never changed no matter how well he hid his race.
More than a decade and a half after Alistair's birth, divorce became legal in the Griscian Commonwealth, and Margaret initiated one immediately. Within two weeks of the law being passed, Ser Ghast was revoked of his affiliation to House Reid, thrown onto the streets with nothing but farthing pebbles to his name. Alistair's mother remarried, this time to a man she selected for herself; a Gilded within Morghent, who actually had the wealth to help manage her family's soaring debts. Within three years, the coffers and reputation of House Reid stabilized, and they were on the path to becoming Grisic's second wealthiest family, as they had always been before Margaret's father, who abdicated to her the very week before Alistair became a man.
There was little that could have dissuaded him, eighteen years into life, from the path that he had already chosen. Behind the scenes, he was far from the Griscian gentleman he had been raised to present, fornicating and dabbling in hallucinogens, befriending society's degenerates. Alistair had come to loathe his mother, he had come to loathe Grisic itself, and he became the pure synthesis of all things that reviled Empire of his found wicked. He became a mage, being initiated into Baptism by a man he sometimes called "lover." He became a heathen, swearing his commitment to the Living Gods, to effigies and occults, or any passing new belief that swung his way. He was lost, confused and ashamed, and though he acted well he couldn't hide his nature as Griscian elite. Alistair was blackmailed, and he paid every threat. When the requests for payment kept coming, he started hiring cutthroats to make his peasant accusers disappear, and after that the threats went hush.
He continued a life of debauchery for years, joining one troupe after another, becoming a Corvo as if it were natural and easy; as if he were born to it. Alistair found freedom and wonder in the duality of his days. He would attend balls and preside over court, only to end the night consuming Void, a drug common to Starkwayte's underworld. Alistair was a meteor on a course for collision; a wreck that continued to expand as more fragments blunted into it, forming a wild, amalgamated pile.
And eventually, the noise grew too loud. The wreck burgeoned tall enough that even the aesthetes above could see it, settled atop their towers of embroidered pearl, in their city in the sky. His family became well aware of how he tarnished their name; how he consorted with tumors below-ground, how he defiled the Abolition, how he filled his veins with foul magic in the name of Gods that had long since abandoned humankind.
At the age of twenty-eight, as he attended court at his mother's side, he was arrested by the guards that flanked him, imprisoned for months only to be displayed before all of Praetoria's elites. Alistair was exiled by his own family, revoked of his claims, spared only the executioner's blade by a half-hearted pardon from the Emperor meant to keep the peace.
He was left in Khadai's sprawling desert, offered only a flask of water and a bag of necessities for the bare minimums of survival. Had he not lived in filth within Praetoria's slums, and survived withdrawals and overstepping, he would've never survived. Ironically, the tools he'd gained as a vagabond-mage allowed him the necessary knowledge to live.
Alistair spent three years there, living in the desert, or in villages often overwhelmed by storms of ashen sand. He became stronger; he learned how the locals wielded their blades, he built up his strength and honed himself for the many battles to come.
Alistair found, living in stone hovels and subjected to the relentless glare of Khadai's ruby sun, that he did not like being a commoner. It was all fun and games so long as he had his wealthy estate to return to, but stripped of the option, he felt imprisoned in mediocrity and filth. The people around him scoffed and jeered at his ridiculous, posh accent, his flowery words. He began to resent them, and to resent himself for joining their rank; for throwing away the gifts given his birth. Alistair was, in his view, a man painfully absent of the will to power, a mortal's driving force. He started spending nights alone in his last days within Khadai, reading books of philosophy, pondering the point and purpose of the world, and his place within. A few months after turning thirty, he felt secure in his understanding of his own essence, and committed to changing the things about himself that he did not like.
Alistair left Khadai, seeking some sense of purpose, some vice to satisfy his existential longings. Daravin seemed just right; he could practice magic without fear, he could expand upon his own capabilities. He could become a noble, again, this time through merit, and there was no better juxtaposition to the Commonwealth than the Empire of Rust. The man settled into a tiny home in Amoren's endless outer shanty, before equipping the tools he'd gathered from his father and coercing some moderately wealthy rube into marrying him. Acquiring her humble estate in Genteven, and a few thousand farthings to carry him forward, the woman conveniently disappeared and the Lord held the barest foundations with which to begin his new life.
