Unis
Half-Orc
Lawful Good
Monk of the Broken Ones
The unions from which half-orc children result are often ill-recorded and ill-natured, and so it was with the boy known as Unis. What little he knows he was told by the Ilmatari monks who raised him. It was a sweltering summer in the great tracts of desert between the Hordelands and Kara-Tur, and bands of orcs were about as usual, though the monastery worried not; it had gone unattacked for decades by the monsters, who knew that the monks had little of value, and defended themselves well. And so it would remain this summer, but the happenings of the monks and the orcs would not remain completely divested.
It was one morning, Unis's master would later tell him, that the western woman showed up outside the monastery walls. She was starved, battered, and indeed near death. She collapsed unconscious at their gate, but the monks took her in and cared for her, yet her life held ever by a thread. The monks told Unis little of what she had looked like, shunning extended appraisal of the countenance of a woman, but would say that she had been graceful and fair, yet ever sad and in shadow.
Even when she regained enough health to speak, she proved amnesiac and half-sane. It was through random utterances and voiced nightmares that the monks would learn her terrible tale. She had been a maiden traveling with her merchant parents' caravan when they had been ambushed by the orcs. Most were killed and the stores ravaged, but some were left alive - and ravaged themselves. With almost ironic mercy of circumstance, the severe violence, starvation, and horror of her treatment had rendered her traumatized, and she remembered little of the tragedy beyond her nightmares, not even how she had escaped; the monks assumed she must have been left for dead, too withered for the foul orcs to even care to eat.
But, in the monastery's care, some flesh return to her bones, and that of her belly swelled most of all, for she was pregnant. Still frail, it was difficult for her, and its final toll was her life, ending peacefully the very moment Unis was born.
The monks cared for the boy as they had the mother, ever carrying a guilt for her death that Unis would inheret as he learend the martial and philosophical ways of the Broken Ones. He grew into a stocky, jutting-jawed young man, able to hold his tusks within his wide cheeks, and it was speculated that the boy's unknown orcish father had himself been part human.
As Unis matured, though, he attained both the superhuman strength of a monster and the careful wisdom of an evolved being, even developing with his master a furious new style of unarmed combat, a kickboxing-like system that emphazied his unique muscular power. Though wise, Unis still felt now and again the beastly call in his blood, but also the guilt for the very nature of his being. The suffering of his mother weighed heavily upon him: he had taken her life in beginning his own, a burden upon his heart, which pumped the blood that had been so ruefully merged with hers.
As he reached his twentieth year, his masters had no more to teach him, except to say that the outside world did. And so Unis set out into the wide world, wandering ever west across the Hordelands, the Wastes, the Anauroch Desert, and the Savage Frontier, eventually making his way north and west to Luskan, with an eternal vow to use his mind and hands to prevent and avenge the suffering of the innocent, for he carried his father's power in his limbs, his master's teachings in his head, and his mother's suffering in his heart.
Half-Orc
Lawful Good
Monk of the Broken Ones
The unions from which half-orc children result are often ill-recorded and ill-natured, and so it was with the boy known as Unis. What little he knows he was told by the Ilmatari monks who raised him. It was a sweltering summer in the great tracts of desert between the Hordelands and Kara-Tur, and bands of orcs were about as usual, though the monastery worried not; it had gone unattacked for decades by the monsters, who knew that the monks had little of value, and defended themselves well. And so it would remain this summer, but the happenings of the monks and the orcs would not remain completely divested.
It was one morning, Unis's master would later tell him, that the western woman showed up outside the monastery walls. She was starved, battered, and indeed near death. She collapsed unconscious at their gate, but the monks took her in and cared for her, yet her life held ever by a thread. The monks told Unis little of what she had looked like, shunning extended appraisal of the countenance of a woman, but would say that she had been graceful and fair, yet ever sad and in shadow.
Even when she regained enough health to speak, she proved amnesiac and half-sane. It was through random utterances and voiced nightmares that the monks would learn her terrible tale. She had been a maiden traveling with her merchant parents' caravan when they had been ambushed by the orcs. Most were killed and the stores ravaged, but some were left alive - and ravaged themselves. With almost ironic mercy of circumstance, the severe violence, starvation, and horror of her treatment had rendered her traumatized, and she remembered little of the tragedy beyond her nightmares, not even how she had escaped; the monks assumed she must have been left for dead, too withered for the foul orcs to even care to eat.
But, in the monastery's care, some flesh return to her bones, and that of her belly swelled most of all, for she was pregnant. Still frail, it was difficult for her, and its final toll was her life, ending peacefully the very moment Unis was born.
The monks cared for the boy as they had the mother, ever carrying a guilt for her death that Unis would inheret as he learend the martial and philosophical ways of the Broken Ones. He grew into a stocky, jutting-jawed young man, able to hold his tusks within his wide cheeks, and it was speculated that the boy's unknown orcish father had himself been part human.
As Unis matured, though, he attained both the superhuman strength of a monster and the careful wisdom of an evolved being, even developing with his master a furious new style of unarmed combat, a kickboxing-like system that emphazied his unique muscular power. Though wise, Unis still felt now and again the beastly call in his blood, but also the guilt for the very nature of his being. The suffering of his mother weighed heavily upon him: he had taken her life in beginning his own, a burden upon his heart, which pumped the blood that had been so ruefully merged with hers.
As he reached his twentieth year, his masters had no more to teach him, except to say that the outside world did. And so Unis set out into the wide world, wandering ever west across the Hordelands, the Wastes, the Anauroch Desert, and the Savage Frontier, eventually making his way north and west to Luskan, with an eternal vow to use his mind and hands to prevent and avenge the suffering of the innocent, for he carried his father's power in his limbs, his master's teachings in his head, and his mother's suffering in his heart.