As part of the Warmachine/Hordes Narrative League that I’m helping to host at The Rogue’s Roost this summer, everyone gets to create a character and write that character’s narrative throughout the league.  My character, Adrik, is one of the Defiers – a group of beings brought forth from Urcaen to wreak havoc on the living.  Each Defier is part myth and part fact, the myth built up from a grim parable of what happens to a man who tries to take a stand against a God.

This, then, is the story of Adrik:

In the early days, before civilization had come to the northern reaches, Adrik lived peacefully with his tribe and his family.  Though he was of age to hunt with the men, he instead spent his time learning more about the wilderness in which he lived.  He showed the hunters to the herd, kept the water flowing to the streams, and helped his family prepare for drought or shortage.  In this he gained a modicum of respect, though he was often relegated to menial tasks by those above him.

One such task was to care for the sick; a task that often ended with burying the dead.

One autumn, Adrik dreamt of a great being overseeing all the world.  This light had singled him out to survive the coming plague, that he might see the error of the ways of his people and embrace the one true path.  He awoke from the dream confused – he knew not the name of Menoth, nor that his dream was a prophesy of what was to come.

The revelation of what he saw came one year later, again it was autumn, and his younger sister had come down with a fever.  He stayed by her side, day and night, as he treated her with every remedy he knew.  Slowly, her condition worsened from fever to boils and scabs and finally to a point where she could no longer eat.

The night she died, the great being again came to Adrik’s dreams and identified itself as Menoth.  Menoth and showed Adrik a path that would allow him to heal the sick, to till the land, and separate his tribe from the wilderness.  Adrik recoiled from the offers though, seeing them as an affront to the ways of his tribe.  He pushed Menoth away, and shut himself off from Menoth’s will.

Not long after, many others in the tribe began to fall ill, and their tribal gathering ground became a graveyard.  Each night Menoth promised Adrik the way to save his tribe, if they would only give up that which they were, to become that which Menoth wanted.

Each night, Adrik turned Menoth away.

Each morning, another fell sick or died from the plague.

When all others of his tribe were dead, and Adrik was alone beside the last mound, Menoth came to Adrik to show him the error of his ways.  Adrik’s tribe was dead, he would be dead as there was no way for him to survive the wilderness alone.  Again Menoth bade Adrik to follow him and forsake his ways.  Adrik defied Menoth then, and the corpses of his dead tribe rising from their graves to lend strength to his proclamation that he would not be cowed, even by a God.

Angered, Menoth cast Adrik into Urcaen, those very souls that strengthened his defiance pulling him down into the pit.  But, there, Adrik’s power grew as he mastered his control over the empty husks of the dead and found that his torturers were nothing but the nightmares of others not unlike himself.

Thus, when Zevanna Agha pulled him forth from that hell, and back into Caen, he was ready to unleash that power right back at Menoth, and any who would stand against him.