Name: Kasputin, surname unknown
IGN: Kasputin
Server: Govinda
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Age: twenty-something
Height: 6'1”
Classes: Priest/Rogue
Hometown: Varanas
Background: A product of the vilest and darkest alleys of Varanas, Kasputin grew up as the illegitimate son of a prostitute. His mother loved him dearly, and instructed him on survival as she knew it: thievery and daggers, and pilfering what you can from the rich and unaware. He grew very skillful among the shadows, and his intelligence became evident at a young age. He even taught himself how to read from the half-scorched books that survived the occasional clergy-sanctioned burning in the Central Plaza.
When Kasputin was only fifteen years old, a man appeared at their door. His fine blue robes were immediately recognizable as those of a priest, causing the middle-aged man to stick out like a sore thumb in the slum where Kasputin lived with his mother. The man fell to his knees in tears, and identified himself as Kasputin’s father. The guilt of fathering an illegitimate child years ago had nearly driven him to madness, and he appeared that day in an attempt to make amends. He offered to take Kasputin into the clerical school and educate him in the mysterious arts of healing and spring water. Whether he was doing it out of true compassion for Kasputin and his mother, or simply to appease the gods that he feared were angered, remained unclear. Kasputin’s mother was overjoyed however, viewing it as an opportunity for her son to leave the streets. She sent him with his father, despite Kasputin’s uneasiness at doing so.
At the academy Kasputin excelled in his courses, proving to be an excellent healer. His professors loved him, his classmates envied him, but in his heart he was unsatisfied. He saw how the men and women in the academy were all the children of aristocratic families; no one was really there because they yearned to heal. He quickly grew bored and disillusioned, finding true enjoyment in only one project: the Forsaken Abbey. Once a week, his class would journey outside the city walls and visit this desecrated temple to watch the master clerics as they attempted to keep the demons at bay. Where the demons came from, no one knew.
During one of the trips to the abbey, Kasputin felt a sudden and frantic urge. While everyone was scattered about collecting relics and taking notes, he slipped into the forbidden passageway in the cellar, which led into the catacombs. It was in these subterranean chambers that the lost spirits seemed to originate, and only the most seasoned priest was permitted to enter. Kasputin was well aware of the danger, but an unexplainable desire to proceed drove him forward. What he found left him awestruck. Amongst the howling and snarling spirits of tortured souls, Kasputin discovered ancient knowledge; tomes and manuscripts buried among dirt, bones, and dried skin. The ghosts never really bothered him, and almost every night he would sneak outside the city back to the abbey to join them. By dim candlelight, in the dank caves below, with moans and cries all about, he would read and absorb knowledge that was perhaps more than five-hundred years old. He learned about the dark arts of cursing, infecting, anti-healing, mesmerizing, purging, and even summoning. The fragile books told him that dark energy existed in the souls of every man and woman, one just needed to realize its potential. Kasputin carried on with his secret studies for over a year.
One fateful spring, a terrible plague fell upon Varanas and the surrounding countryside. The clerical students, including Kasputin, were quickly locked inside the university. Kasputin begged his father to unlock the gates. He felt that this was a golden opportunity for the clerical students and priests to help Varanas in a true time of urgent need. His father refused, telling his son that there was nothing to be done, that it was beyond the control of the priesthood. Enraged and hopeless, Kasputin paced the corridors like a caged tiger. He noticed how the nobles of Varanas, including clergy, many Eye of Wisdom, and city council members were also locked away within their thick granite walls. They sat around all day drinking wine and ale and discussing how terrible was the fortune of Varanas, while one would only have to peer over a balcony into the streets below to behold the real terror. Thinking of his mother, Kasputin climbed out a window one night to sneak into the city. He scurried through the shadows to his old home, only to find his beloved mother on the brink of death. Despite his most powerful spells, he could not save her, and the next day she died in his arms with a smile on her face at being able to see her son one last time.
Riddled with grief and guilt, Kasputin roamed the streets of the dying city for days, wandering through piles of corpses, crying for his poor mother who died so miserably. His only consolation was that he was with her at her moment of passing. He carried her remains to a small graveyard near the Forsaken Abbey, and buried her under a cherry tree.
Eternally infuriated at his father and the clergy for what he saw as their failure to help the poor and miserable of Varanas, including his mother, Kasputin renounced the priesthood and left the city to journey into the wilderness. He vowed to do what he felt the hypocritical and privileged priesthood wouldn’t: protect the weak. Even if it meant tapping into the demon within himself, and walking the thin line between dark and light. Kasputin’s obsession with justice would drive him to the farthest and most frightening corners of Taborea, eventually blurring the meaning of good and evil within his soul. His journey was only beginning, and his fate a mystery.
