Hatched among the blistering dunes of the Meraz Desert in distant Qadira, Hratarsh showed great interest in his clan’s ancient oral traditions from a young age. While he excelled at recounting the numerous tales and lays that had been passed down among the clan for generations, his most memorable performances used a vocal technique called
xhti-ok tsek in the Iruxi language, “voice of split breath”, known to human scholars and musicians as throat singing. Rarely encountered among iruxi due to the anatomy of the species’ vocal tract, this manner of vocalising came to Hratarsh easily. Its versatility and singular musical qualities appealed to him – and moreover, once he began to study more deeply the bardic tradition which his people so greatly esteemed, he found it particularly suited to channelling the occult energies whose skilful wielding elevated a true bard above common verse-wrights and story-singers.
Aside from music, Hratarsh’s other passion in life proved to be the close kinship he felt with other reptilian beings. From the least dune-runner lizard to the fearsome basilisks, dragons and saurians found across the world, they all exerted a fascination on him which he was at a loss to explain but felt all the more intensely for it. In part, it was surely a result of the rare gift he’d been born with, the ability to converse with all such creatures as though they were other lizardfolk. Hratarsh had been surprised to learn that none of the iruxi in his clan shared this gift; what was as normal as breathing to him seemed like magic to them, or at the very least proof that he had been born under an auspicious star indeed.
Even so, life in Qadira’s harsh desert environs eventually became stifling for Hratarsh, the knowledge that an entire world lay unexplored beyond the dunes too much to bear. His decision to leave was much mourned by his clanmates, but in truth it came as no great surprise to them. No true iruxi bard had ever been content to dwell in one place, the elders agreed – most songs and stories belonged to the ancestors, certainly, but without sources of new inspiration and fresh truths, the old words would eventually turn as dry and lifeless as sun-cracked wood. It was sad that he must depart, but it was also right.
And thus Hratarsh Two-throats has been wandering Golarion for some years now, expanding his repertoire both mundane and magical while meeting a multitude of strange beings, reptilian and otherwise. Most recently his travels have taken him to the town of Breachill, which he learned holds a regular event known as the Call for Heroes. While Hratarsh does not think of himself as a particularly heroic individual, though, he does hope that participating in this event will further his most ambitious life goal: to encounter and speak with an actual dragon – specifically a copper dragon, for Hratarsh has been led to believe that there are no greater lovers of music among dragonkind than they.
