Hashna's page

Hashna is no sight for sore eyes. Rather, she is the visual ache presupposed by the idiom. A daddy-long-legs given human form, the young woman is an awkward assemblage of gangly limbs and stretched skin, tall and thin beyond any reasonable measure. Standing some 6’9’’, Hashna’s imposing height could have garnered respect among her fellow Kellids; physical prowess ranks highly among Kellid virtues. Paranoia ranks higher still, however, and Hashna is so far beyond the norm that some suspect her corrupted by the mysterious blight poisoning their land. While prodigiously tall, Hashna is no exemplar of athletic ability; too many harsh years replete with constant struggle for survival yet lacking in any steady diet have rendered her painfully thin. If beanstalks grew in barren Numeria, people would compare her thusly. Instead they reach for the stick figure totems employed by witches and shamans, finding ill omen in both.

Of course, tribal Kellids are similarly unfamiliar with books. As such, many have never learned not to judge a book by its cover. Because Hashna is strong, terribly strong, stronger than any draft horse pound-for-pound. Like whittling a branch into a club, the same harsh circumstances that have fashioned her into the almost sickly-looking creature she is today, have also conditioned her. On closer inspection Hashna’s limbs, while thin for the lanky frame, are corded over with lean muscle. No well-fed strongman, this is the musculature of a starved tiger, all sinewy cords under emaciated skin, almost grotesque in its transparency. It should then go without saying that Hashna has little to offer in the way of traditional womanly charms, even excepting her non-existent social graces. With no chest to speak of, sharp facial features, and hair haphazardly shorn with a none too sharp dagger, she is sometimes mistaken for a man.

Yet those brave few who look into the dark eyes find no animal cunning there. Although the brow above them is frequently found scowling - more so an involuntary defence mechanism than an expression of animosity - Hashna’s eyes are open and curious, even introspective, if dull with the determination of the simpleminded. They betray her young age where hard living has prematurely aged the rest of her.

Hashna opened her eyes. The sky above her was cold and dark. The earth beneath her was rugged and hard; something dug into her back. It was beginning to rain. But the ground was already wet. She raised a leaden arm. The blood encrusting it wasn’t hers. She was still alive.

Mind slowly catching up to reality, her breath came out quicker now, nostrils flaring. No. Don’t panic. Grum beat her when she was scared. Was Grum alive? The thought was sudden and intrusive as an arrow through flesh. No. No, she remembered now. He had led the charge against the metal beast. She had seen it shear him in half. A rain drop brushed her cheek. What was this feeling? Should she feel sad? Should she feel guilty for not feeling sad?

She turned her head with some struggle. There was a corpse beside her, the owner of the dried blood. A clan member of hers. She couldn’t tell who – too mangled. There were more lying beyond it. They were on her other side too, she knew, strewn about like so much cut reed. Her entire clan.

Of course, the so-called Flesh Tearers were no more a clan than a gaggle of crazed Mendevian crusaders were a church. Hashna did not understand this, but she knew – as children know – that they were different. A clan comprised a community, a family. It provided, built and empowered. It had a future. Conversely, Grum’s Flesh Tearers only killed, robbed and tore down, even among their own. They had no future. For theirs was a warband, plain and simple. Worse still was that they weren’t even a particularly good one. A band united only in spite against their respective clan elders, no one among the Kellid ever afforded them anything but scorn and rightly so, a tiny parody of a true clan. Elders projected that harsh Numeria would grind them down within the decade. Ten years is not a long time. But it is just enough to turn child into something approximating an adult.

This had been their eleventh year. And now they were gone.

Hashna felt a searing pain in her abdomen. She pulled back her other hand. She hadn’t realized she’d been clutching her side. More blood, fresh. She was bleeding. Her gut? She remembered the metal beast and its thundering cannons, the strange little steel bolts that felled warriors by the dozens. Had it shot her in the gut? She hoped not. That was an ugly death, a slow death.

She remembered telling Grum, many summers ago, that she wasn’t bleeding anymore. He didn’t understand what she meant. His piggish eyes had scrunched together; she knew to be wary at that. She explained that she hadn’t had her monthly flow for three months. Hashna was quite proud of this. The women told her that this wasn’t right, that a woman was supposed to bleed, but Grum had taught her that, “Spilling blood was the right of the strong.” The strong did not bleed. Only the weak bled. She hoped he would be proud of her. Instead he had beaten her. He pummelled her to the ground, stomped on her, all the while demanding to know, “what stupid boy she had lain with.” Hashna hadn’t known what this meant. He called her ugly words, words she didn’t recognize then. At one point she had cried out, calling him “da”, trying to make him stop. Grum hated when she called him that and beat her harder.

How was the girl to know that her body fat was so low and her diet so infrequent that it had halted her period?

She blinked at the rain drops. The sky was darker now, fiercer. Hashna recognized now that she was drifting in and out of consciousness; time was slipping from her. Where had that memory come from? She hadn’t thought of it in years. She maneuvered her head again, looking to her side: all one giant patch of blood. But not flowing anymore. Had it stemmed? Yes. The steel bolts hadn’t nested in her guts, instead passing clean through her side. She would live. Yes. She couldn’t die here. She had to live. She had to live because she was strong. And because she was strong, she would live. The circular logic made sense in her delirious mind. The young woman tried rising. Her limbs felt heavy as any of the metal men’s. And yet those automatons moved just fine. The thought spurred her on. The metal beast had spilled her blood. It had killed her clan. It was strong. She had to be stronger.

It took hours and another bout of unconsciousness before Hashna was standing again, and this on legs unsteady as a newborn doe's. She looked at the barren plain, at the remains of the only family she had known. Not knowing what to say, she said nothing. Instead she gathered what weapons and armor she cared to use off them. In pillaging their corpses, she knew what she had to do. She had to ensure nothing like this could ever befall her again. She had to prove herself to Grum, to her clan, to all of Numeria. She had to prove her pain worthwhile. She had to become stronger still, stronger than any metal beast. Had to – this was not a want or a yearning, but a need and a must. She had to stand strongest in all of Numeria.

Only then would her life have meaning.

This is the Hashna that days later stumbles into the Foundry, Khonnir Baine's tavern, battered and bruised to hear of disturbances in the town of Torch.

For someone with a stated goal as juvenile as ‘standing strongest in all of Numeria’, Hashna is strangely meek in demeanour. Of course, when coupled with her impressive frame many interpret this diffidence as some sort of stoic hardass attitude. In truth, the young woman is an introspective soul, not revelling in strength or violence, but rather using it to validate her own existence. Life hasn’t been kind to Hashna. Whether she becomes the greatest warrior of all is the difference between all her hardships having been worth it, or whether she is what she suspects deep down: just the result of an abusive childhood. Not being able to accept the latter, Hashna goes with the former, no matter how infantile.

Single-minded goals like these tend to pair poorly with the simpleminded, and Hashna is no exception. She is driven like few others, knowing no other purpose in life. As such she has little to no interest in lofty ethics, gods, philosophy or other fanciful notions people cleverer than her subscribe to. She is, however, a Kellid. Honor being a chief virtue among the clans, Hashna tries to be fair and decent to – once again – an almost childlike degree. After all, every Kellid is kin to some degree. Foreigners are another matter, but even so she keeps her promises, and is loyal to a fault.

All this said, the young woman doesn't know herself especially well. Her upbringing not having given her much in the way of social graces, she can be comically serious at times, missing social cues entirely. While self-aware enough to feel awkward at this, Hashna tells herself - against her better judgement - that she will find self-fulfilment only in being the strongest in Numeria.

Although his raucous lifestyle has provided him with a healthy tan - doubly so since arriving in the desert lands of Osirion - Luke isn't too hard to pick out in a tavern. Clearly a foreigner in dress, right down to the classic Taldan longsword at his side, his height of 6-foot-something makes him all the more conspicuous. That same height coupled with handsomely chiseled features render the young man not unattractive, even if Luke isn't half the charmer he thinks he is. With his perpetual stubble, roguish grin and brown hair just a bit too wild for polite society, he may look like a mother-in-law's nightmare. However, at the same time he is just a bit too affable to star in younger women's dreams of the bad boy. Instead he treads a narrow middle ground, perhaps the straight-laced librarian's guilty pleasure.

The toad that periodically peeks out of some pocket or another certainly doesn't help.

Ancient Osirion has fascinated many across Golarion and naturally so. The sand-blasted remains of the millennia-old civilization, all towering obelisks and grand temples, are only eclipsed by the imagination they inspire, the image of a civilization at its peak brought low. With the possible exception of its home country, nowhere does the fervor for this bygone age run hotter than in Taldor, a society detractors jeer as itself beyond its peak. There, Osirionology is high fashion, mania even. The very idea of the Osirion that was invokes spirited, if taboo, discussions on imperial decline in the decadent nation. Relics, entire buildings are imported and reconstructed, there for sirs to gawk at with an overpriced cup of tea from the in-house café while madams prance about in petticoats fastened with scarab brooches.

Of course, what some would call ‘importing’ others would call ‘stealing’. Modern Osirion being a young and vulnerable nation, freshly revived from its Qadiran occupation, is still vulnerable to preying from older, more established powers. And there are undeniably more than a few Taldan noble coffers heavy with Osirian gold.

The respectable Caradoc family has more than a few such coffers, although the value of their contents is more so historical than monetary. A fact soon to weigh heavily on their youngest heir. Their patriarch, an esteemed museum director, took on the new fashion of Osirionology with aplomb, filling both his displays and home with pharaonic ephemera. His enthusiasm was either shared or supported by colleagues, spouse and children excepting one: his youngest son, Loukas. As typical a boy who ever lived, he never showed the slightest inclination for his family’s academic avocations, instead pursuing such interests as tree climbing, very fast horses, girls and carousing, in that order. A tall, handsome youth in possession of more wit than smarts, his became a life of late-night hijinks and later mornings' regrets. A good life for any lad.

All of which screeched to a halt when his father ran afoul of the mummy’s curse. It was a popular enough story, of course, that of the sarcophagi warded by a baleful hex there to blight whoever dared disturb its occupant. Loukas – ‘Luke’ to his more lowly friends – never put much stock in such tales. Who would care enough about corpses to protect them with traps and magic? Well, the Ancient Osirians cared, and the proof was evident to see in his father, supernaturally withering from the spiteful curse of a mummy. The exact account is hardly worth telling; Luke certainly didn't care for the details. What mattered was that the Caradoc patriarch's latest acquisition - a sarcophagi containing some long dead noble or another - had afflicted him most terribly when opened, seemingly accelerating his aging. His mortal coil aged years within a day, and this was the horror his helpless family had to endure witnessing. For a week, they saw the poor man grow steadily older while feebly trying to rally the resources to cure him, to find a priest to undo the curse.

Sadly, the Osirionology had damned the man in more ways than one. For this was no affordable hobby, and the family's resources were now revealed to be dangerously drained. In fact, they owed a substantial amount to the Abadaran church. Before any other solution could be found, the proverbial sands of time ran out; Luke's father died in his bed looking nothing so much like the mummy he had so offended.

In the wake of this tragedy, the dire straits of the family became clear. And with most of his other siblings having families of their own to support, a newly galvanized Luke took it upon himself to remedy the family's debt. Some years later, this is where we find him now, a treasure hunter. Always the black sheep of the house, Luke utilizes the same predilection for ancient history as his mother and sibling to amass funds, but where they work in academia, he ransacks digs sites and tombs for antiques and relics. And he's particularly pleased with his latest target. An Osirian necropolis never before opened to explorers? It almost feels like destiny. How perfectly appropriate for the son to save the family with ill-gotten gains dug up from the very same sandbox that damned the father. Why, the long dead pharaohs practically owe him this, the miserable old bastards.

It is in other words a more spiteful Loukas Caradoc than the carefree upper-middleclass lout that was, who sets out for Wati, one hardened by a few forays into murky old tombs and murkier black market dealings. Is this animosity towards an ancient civilization that never knew him irrational? Of course it is, and Luke knows it. While no intellectual, the young man is not half as dumb as he likes to pretend; he understands that there is no justice in grave robbing. But dwelling on his own loss only makes it that much more weighty, and dammit all, if having someone to blame doesn't feel good - anyone but himself, the prodigal son who perhaps could have been there for his father. And so he does, ignoring his own better sense and seeking refuge in his old life as a rake when he can, in the simple pleasures of drink, good conversation and perhaps a nice girl or two.