Virvatuli Vara's page

About Virvatuli Vara

What can I say? I am a meaningless thing, fond of meaningless things. A bastard child of "witch blood" from a society that shuns magic; I keep a disgraced yet forgotten name. A slave turned slaver by a brutal meritocracy; I treasure the trappings of their shattered tribe. A "free" slave to foreign masters who abhor slavery; yet I do not take my freedom from them.

My vagabond father left me with a great reserve of thaumatergic energy and little talent for focusing it. This only further proved the prejudice of the savages among whom I was born. My mother lacked the will to abandon me and also the will to defend me. I suppose that if she had will, I would not have been conceived to begin with. I quickly grew to despise her as much as the rest of my tribe.

When the People of the Chimera came with the bond and the blade to my village I shed no tears for my kinsmen. I drew a short blade and my great grandfather's agile shield and ambushed a young warrior, stabbing him in the gut. One of the more seasoned warriors caught me in the act and was impressed by my audacity and when I regained consciousness I found I was to be trained with the more promising "acquisitions" to be a warrior.

My main instructor was a mystic from the east. Due to my agile and wiry frame he taught me to fight with the curved short blade of his people rather than the larger swords my fellow warriors preferred. While he was a skilled swordsman, he was also versed in the arcane arts. He taught me to parlay my limited magical talents into a form of powerful though short lived magical enchantments. The only possession I kept from my original tribe was the shield and my instructor channeled my attachment into a form of magical bond. With that familiar bulwark in hand I could more freely focus my attention away from my immediate surroundings and into the immaterium in order to shape my will into sorcerous power.

I grew into tall and lithe warrior. My anger and strange talents did much to compensate for my build and I had a promising career as a raider of the Chimera, until the Andorans came. In their quest to subjugate those who disagree with their philosophies they sent expeditions to crush the independent slavers of the north. Their fanaticism did much to compensate for their soft continental decadence. They employed unfamiliar magic and weaponry and set about to decapitate our tribe. Bereft of its leaders, they convinced many of the rest of us to lay down arms under promises of amnesty for us "brainwashed slaves". Having grown sly, I agreed to their terms.

Their honeyed words tasted of a lie but their rebelliousness deadened their own tongues to the flavor. I bided my time, longer than was necessary until I heard that they were recruiting from among their number to infiltrate a group of itinerant grave robbers. And so I came to be a member of the Pathfinder Society. I may let them think me but a ignorant barbarian but I quietly laugh at the lies they tell themselves so they can think that they are any different from the "Primitive" cultures they turn up their noses at. But who is the greater fool. The fool who does not see his own folly or the fool who does and follows another fool willingly?