Dorian Adricus

Kahn

The being that would one day come to be known as Dorian “the Viper” Adricus was born in the streets of Westgate in the year 1343 to a penniless failed thief and prostitute. The identity of his father is a mundane mystery, as it could be any one of numerous depraved and vicious men, from the corrupt city militia to the lowest ranks of the Nightmasks. The child grew to his fifth season in the slums of a city noted for the squalor of its slums, and learned the harsh lessons of the streets well. No one could be trusted, especially his mother. Even at the age of five, the boy was quick and intelligent, and knew well enough to make himself scarce when the woman was entertaining, besotted with cheap drink, or strung out on even cheaper Thayan spices. Unfortunately, it was during this year, 1348 that his mother, being a member of the Nightmasks and seriously arrears in her dues decided to turn over her young son to the guild enforcers as payment. They took the boy, marking him for the slave markets of the Inner Sea, and then killed his mother anyway. The child was well formed, intelligent, and healthy, despite the squalor in which he lived for five years, and so was likely to fetch a good price to those who took an interest in the purchase of young boys on the black market.

The slave auctions of Westgate are a demented carnival of human degradation and misery. The slaves offered up to the highest bidder are culled from nearly every walk of life, from peasants in debt to the current government to broken sellswords and mercenaries who crossed the wrong aristocrat. Given the representation of creatures that attend these affairs, Dorian’s prospects were grim at this point. He was as likely to end up in the perfumed harem of some demented noble as he was to lead a short, miserable life in the wheat fields of Thay. Whether it was the work of Tymora or Beshaba, though, he was destined for neither. For he was purchased by Keras of Darkhold.

Keras was a corrupt merchant wizard at the tail end of his successful but vaguely unspectacular life. His days were consumed alternately in the pursuit of coin or magic. His lack of conscience about the means to achieve either drove him first into the Church of Mask, and later into the ranks of the Zhentarim. By 1348, he had even been granted a position in Darkhold, a small suite of rooms including a laboratory and a counting house. Neither his coins or his magic could conceal the truth from Keras, however. He realized he was dying. Each day Auril’s touch grew stronger in his extremities, and each night, his dreams were haunted by nightmare visions of Myrkul’s City of Death followed by fervent prayers to his own patron, Mask, Lord of Shadow, that he might be considered one of the Thief’s Faithful when his final reckoning was tallied. Most distressing of all to the magic user, was the fact that he lacked both the wizardly skill to attain proper immortality through undeath, and either child or apprentice to grant him the virtual legacy that any Cormyrean sheepherder can attain. So it was that Dorian caught the wizard’s eye on one of his increasingly less frequent visits to Westgate. The wizard locked eyes with the frightened boy and knew, as a child knows its mother’s voice from across a crowded room, that there was magic in this one. A thousand gold ducats purchased the child, an unheard of sum for an untrained whelp. Thus was Dorian set on the path that would lead him to adulthood.

The next decade of Dorian’s life was a blur of pain, misery, and education in the arts of magic and criminal enterprise. Darkhold was never a place for children, and any color brought by the presence of a precocious child was leeched into the cold, black walls until all that was left was the gray, withered husk of a boy forced to grow old before his time. Keras was neither a kind or forgiving teacher, and never pretended otherwise. His own specialty lay towards the School of Illusion and Shadow, a realm much favored by Mask. The fact that Dorian showed absolutely no ability to control such magic only served to enrage the old man, provoking him to lash out at the boy with whatever was at hand before collapsing in a choking apoplexy. He did show a good deal of skill in the control of others and the manipulation of information, both of which skills he indulged in by practicing on the children of Darkhold’s servant population.

In the time that Dorian was able to free himself from his studies, he became a keen observer of the denizens of Darkhold. Much of the fortress was a military garrison, and Dorian learned to despise the brutish and ignorant thugs that made up the Zhent Army, Western Theater. The vicious merchant arm of Zhentil Keep composed the next section of the castle’s inhabitants, and these Dorian could more readily understand, having lived with the grasping Keras for much of his young life. He often questioned their sanity, however. To a man, they seemed consumed with the acquisition of wealth, and yet when the time came to purchase the smallest luxury for themselves, they would fight like rabid dogs before spending one gold coin. This confused the boy, who promised himself that when he made his own fortune, he would spend it and live in a place a lot warmer than the cold and dismal Sunrise Mountains. The final rung in the ladder of Darkhold were the wizards and appointed nobles of Zhentil Keep, headed by Semmemnon, the Prince of the Western Marches. Dorian found himself with little opportunity to observe such luminaries, but he truly did consider them worthy of the heights to which they had climbed. They had ascended the mountain of the Zhentarim by scaling the backs of their predecessors, using daggers as pitons and blackmail as the securing line that provided insurance should they temporarily lose their grip. No man is an island unto himself, and after ten years of imprisonment in Darkhold, the infant Dorian had become as consumed by ambition, greed, and corruption as any Sembian moneylender. And despite his paranoia, the wizard Keras was to live through the entire decade, growing more miserable and pathetic every day.

The year 1358 ushered in the age of chaos in the Realms known forever after as the Time of Troubles, or the Godswar. The presence of the gods on the mortal plane caused magic to become as unstable and dangerous as a case of Gondish smokepowder in the hands of a fire genasi. The morning after the Cataclysm and the beginning of the time of Wild Magic, Dorian was walking one of the courtyards of Darkhold when he saw one of Semmemnon’s acolytes attempt a simple spell of opening only to turn the door into a sputtering torch which fell unceremoniously to the pavement. Running through the castle, Dorian listened with growing shock and horror to the tales of chairs running rampant through the library, the privy hole singing a dirge of praise to Moander, and even a rumor that Sememmnon himself had been attacked by his morning eggs which shouted “Death to the tyrant kings of Cormyr” before splattering him with hot yolk. As the morning wore on, the plan for a titanic prank formed in Dorian’s young mind. Returning to his master’s suite, he found the old man still asleep, lost in a haze of drink and depression. Rousing Keras with some difficulty, he enthusiastically asked the old sot if he might demonstrate the silent image spell one more time. Grinning like a fool, Dorian sat himself in the corner and prepared to watch the fun as the pontificating old goat made a true ass of himself. Keras, glancing suspiciously at his unusually enthusiastic apprentice, could nonetheless refrain from once again attempting to teach the clod his own signature spell. Dorian watched the wizard complete the gestures for a simple silent image and then stood stock still as the floor beneath the man cracked and a half dozen rotting hands shot out, grasping for the old mage. The stench of sulfur and brimstone filled the air as the fiendish limbs caught hold of legs, arms, and robe and systematically tore the frail wizard to tattered, bloody, screaming shreds. Ten seconds later, there was nothing left of either the dimensional rent or the wizard Keras of Darkhold but the reek of rotting eggs and the death screams of his master echoing in Dorian’s ears.

The wilderness of the Western Heartlands of Faerun was no place for a fifteen year old adolescent, especially not one who had spent virtually his entire life locked in the cold towers and moldy laboratories of Darkhold. Most especially not for one whose only chance at livelihood lay in the practice of the Art of magic at a time when daring to cast the smallest cantrip could result in the devastation of not only the wizard but all the land within a league’s radius. But such was the place where young Dorian found himself as night fell on the first day of the Time of Troubles. Not twelve hours ago, the young wizard reflected, had he seen his master and mentor torn to pieces by the wild effects of a minor illusion spell gone seriously awry.

Keras was a drunkard, a failure, and a fool, but he was not without friends, or more appropriately associates within the confines of the Zhentarim stronghold. So, standing in his master’s quarters, young Dorian had determined that the wisest course of action would most likely be to leave the wizard’s keep as swiftly as possible, lest he be implicated (not unjustly, in truth) in the old mage’s rather gruesome death. Gathering up the wizard’s spellbook, several potions, Keras’ staff, and some mundane supplies, the acolyte made his way swiftly through the increasingly chaotic corridors and courtyards of Darkhold and was unquestioned as he slipped out the main gate a little before noon.

“I should have taken a horse. The stupid clods at the gate wouldn’t have known the difference,” muttered the apprentice to himself as he pulled yet another stinging nettle from his now dirt-stained robes. As intelligent as he thought himself to be, Dorian had rapidly come to the realization that all the knowledge he had acquired through years of enforced study had not prepared him for the simple realities of a hike through the Sunrise Mountains. His feet were blistered and bruised, his robes where heavy and covered in the dust of the trail, his blonde hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, and his shoulders ached where his stolen backpack pulled against them. And to top it all, the sun was retreating beneath the horizon in front of him.

The mountains around him were cloaked white birch, pine and scattered oak trees. He had easily found this narrow trail branching off from the main access road to an from Darkhold, determining that for a fugitive on the run as an accessory to murder, he was probably best off avoiding the wide, graveled path. But his alternate route had posed and entirely new set of hassles as it switch backed up and down the mountains, heading for the broad plains to the west. Each time he scrabbled up a rocky rise, he’d long to see the glittering blue of the Sword Coast winking at him in the distance, but each time he was greeted with yet another vista of a new mountain valley to traverse. The unending ness of it was frustratingly perverse.

As if to punctuate his thoughts, it was at just that moment that the cross-chest strap of his canvas backpack decided to abandon all hope and separate from the bag with a rip and a snap. It seemed as if the contents of the bag decided to take this opportunity to scramble free of the confining cloth, skittering down the rocky trail as fast as gravity and inertia could take them. Dorian stood still for a moment on the lonely path, perhaps in contemplation of the ridiculousness of nature, life, and the multiverse before the pain, despair, and frustration of the situation finally caught up to him. Then, with a primal scream of pure rage, the young wizard turned on the traitorous canvas sack where it lay on the trail behind him, and with his quarterstaff, beat it within an inch of its canvas life.

That done, and his fury spent, Dorian then sunk down to his haunches beside a crooked paper birch and truly began to sob. What was it about him that made the world hate him so? Why must he, one of the greatest magical prodigies ever to walk the surface of Faerun, be made to suffer the trivialities of this meaningless existence?