Velius Kross's page

Velius stands tall, a lean and muscled whip of a man with a sharp, if handsome appearance. His short dark hair and blue eyes show a strong Taldan heritage. Velius is often dressed in functional and professional attire, preferring to wear a Taldan military uniform when on duty, or plain cotton clothes. A number of faint scars can be seen running along Velius’s fists, arms, upper chest, and chin, showing a history of a rough and violent life.

Years of Taldan politics have taught Velius to be well spoken and well mannered, especially given his common birth. He has such a way with words he is able to tell people to leap head first into the World Wound in such an eloquent manner, that they would actually look forward to the trip.

Velius looks out foremost for the soldiers under his command, ensuring that they are well trained and kept, and that should the day come, their lives aren’t spent in vain. Velius is torn between respecting the chain of command, and respecting those who have proven themselves to him. He has difficulty in accepting wasteful orders and isn’t above modifying them to suit the actual tactical needs.

Velius’s first memory was hunger, it was a persistent feeling, one that stayed with him for a number of years. The memory was strong enough to blur the woman who, intellectually, Velius knew to be his mother, but could never recall her face. Even to this day his early memories comprise of feet, dirty rooms, and strange men. They all paled to the pang of hunger, it was always there, like a cold blanket.

Velius’s second memory was the cage, many years after the first. The hunger was further away now, Velius could think and felt better than ever before in his short life. A strange man brought him food regularly, better food than he had ever eaten before. The man told him that a special ‘buyer’ with ‘discerning tastes’ was coming to take a look at him and that he was to be on his best behavior or the food would stop.

The buyer was a rich looking fat man, a bad man. The way the man looked at Velius filled him with an irrational fear. So much fear that when the man reached out to touch Velius through the bars of his cage that Velius struck with the only thing available to him, his teeth. He bit down hard on the first finger he saw, biting straight through the first knuckle of the man’s finger, spitting the small digit out on the floor. The fat man howled beyond pain, cursing and crying as he ran off away from Velius’s cage.

Afterwards, the strange man’s rage was legendary. He beat Velius senseless - until the world went black and threw him out into the gutter thinking him dead. He would have been, if not for Smiling Tom, who picked Velius’s broken body off the ground and spirited him away.

As the name suggests, Smiling Tom was not an average man, he was a thief, a con-man, a burglar; a man who played the world as a bard played the stage. Smiling Tom always kept a sharp eye for the broken and the lost on the street, he found the talent young, he trained them, and in exchange they were loyal to one another. Under Smiling Tom’s care Velius found a home, and a family. The hunger was banished with regular meals, and he quickly gained four adoptive siblings: Tanner, Cayden, Zoe and Dwenn. Life was good.

Life in Oppara’s criminal world was brutal. Gangs turned on one another faster than the tide changed, knives drawing blood in the alleyways over the smallest slights, at times escalating into major conflicts, littering the street with bodies and burnt buildings. The survival of Smiling Tom’s gang was dependant on not being noticed as a major player, quick con here, a few lightened pockets there, never drawing too much attention from the larger gangs. The smaller gangs – ones eager to make names for themselves, were already more enough to worry about for their small family.

As the years wore on, patient tutelage from Smiling Tom and endless practice earned Velius’s a reputation for having light feet, with the brutal fights and bloody ambushes between rival gangs teaching him how to break bones just as quickly. As Smiling Tom’s advancing age began to catch up with him, he began to defer responsibility to Velius, attempting to teach Velius to use more than just his fists to solve a problem. As Smiling Tom’s health waned, so did the group’s taking, unable to reliably enjoy the same success they had in the past. Hoping to compensate for the change in the gang’s fortune Velius devoted his energies in a different direction, channeling his skills as a professional pugilist.

Fights in Oppara’s underground attracted a great deal of money, as befitting the wealth centred in the city. Be it from nobles slumming among the commoners or trade lords letting loose steam, fortunes were won and lost at the end of broken and bloody knuckles every day. As the entered the fighting circuit Velius quickly established a reputation as a competent if raw fighter, climbing quickly in the rankings, disrupting a careful equilibrium maintained by the larger gangs.

One day, before a match, Velius was dragged aside by a number of the more powerful gang leaders, and unceremoniously informed this would be his last fight. “Kid, you’ve got a massive bronze pair the way you’ve waltzed in here and started beating in heads, personally I love it. But the problem is, you’re costing us money now, our young fighters have turned timid, people aren’t betting as much. Bad business. We know you’re here because Smiling Tom is knocking on death’s door and your kin isn’t taking as much as before, so we’ve decided to help you out. We’ve sent a few Cutters to help Smiling Tom take that final step. So you won’t be having to worry about him anymore and scaring our fighters. As for you, you’re to go out there into the pit, and let that boy beat on you until we say stop. We’ll then drop whatever is left of your sorry self on the edge of town, it’d be best for you to piss off by morning.”

Velius had no chance to get a word in otherwise. The gang leaders had half a dozen bladed toughs frogmarch him into the arena, unceremoniously kicking him in with a boot to the back, shortly followed by the ringing of the arena bell. As the shock cleared, Velius emotions erupted with anger and defiance, not wasting a heartbeat he assaulted his opponent with the fury of a thunderstorm landing half a dozen blows before he realized that he was attacking a dead man. To this day he only vaguely remembers climbing out of the ring, and fighting a path out from the arena as he ran back to his gang’s hideout.

His worse fears were confirmed when he arrived. Smiling Tom and his adoptive brothers and sisters, had all gone down fighting, their blood and bodies showing that none backed down in the slightest. With the wounds taken during his flight from the Arena burning and knowing it would only be a matter of time before the cutters returned for him, Velius fled the city. His family was gone, there was no reason to stay, he wasn’t strong enough to enact revenge on the stronger gangs, especially once they mustered their strength and he didn’t want to die.

Velius’s flight from the city lead him southeast, fleeing through the Border Wood until he reached Lionsgate. Broken and aimless, Velius had little to live for. He survived by living mechanically, helping the villagers with their toil, helping bring in the harvest in exchange for food and lodging. Had circumstances been different, he may have settled in the small village and never left again. Due to its proximity to the Monastery of Seven Forms, Lionsguard was a common stopping spot for the travelling monks and petitioners. The few demonstrations and sermons that Velius sat in on were more than though to inspire him to become a petitioner, it gave him the stability and introspection that began the process of healing his mind from his trials. He lived in the village as a petitioner for two years, working on his physique and discipline.

Adjusting to the life in the monastery was different than his life in a gang. Velius dove into the arts of self-perfection and reflection with single-minded determination. The years that followed in the monastery allowed Velius to move past the death of his adoptive siblings and to make peace with the trials his early life brought him. He channeled his newfound peace into developing his martial talents, particularly those found with the bow. Because the monastery focused on a more traditional route of teaching, and because it was largely underground, it wasn’t long before Velius outgrew what the monastery had to offer him and decided it was time to leave in pursuit of honing his skill even further.

Velius returned to Oppara, now older and humbler, he could hardly recognize the city that he once left. There were more cracks in the streets, maintenance had slipped, Taldor was rotting. Even when Velius looked in on the old gangs that patrolled the underworld, he could barely recognize it. He learned the old gang leaders that had run him out of the city had largely been killed or run off themselves. The new gangs were now run by the small and young urchins he remembered seeing during his days with Smiling Tom. Older and much wiser, Velius didn’t harbor any thoughts of revenge. The life they lived was revenge enough.

Without a tie to family or a patron, Velius was an Unbearded and had next to no social standing. Social standing was earned through decades of hard work, or military service. Above all, Velius wanted to hone his martial skill, and a quiet life of labor was not for him. Being an adept historian, Velius recalled countless tales of the Taldan Military, especially the role of the Taldan Phalanx. When Velius applied to join the military, and demonstrated his skill was the bow, he was quickly accepted in. As the years passed, battling Qadrian skirmishers, rebels and beasts Velius earned a fearsome reputation for being the deadliest shot in the empire. His tactical know how and military prowess ensured that he rose quickly through the ranks. With the rank earned, came politics, Taldan Politics. Velius quickly became adept at manipulating, coercing and appeasing both the Brass, Nobility, and Royalty with incredible skill and finesse.

The higher Velius rose however, only stood to show him how far the rot had spread. The nobility was almost exclusively corrupt as they engaged in excessive debauchery or focused solely on lining their pockets. At times it was difficult for Velius to tell if a General served the actual military, or was a paid and bought for arm of a Noble. It is all Velius can to do reduce the damage done by the Nobility on a daily basis, going as far to change orders, bully superiors, and arrange accidents for those he deems a danger to Taldor. The once patient monk who at first joined the military as a means to hone his craft, has nursed a growing level of frustration with the state of the country that he has come to love. Of late, Velius has been focusing all his energies on mitigating a civil war, while also watching the distant Qadrian boarder. Change was coming to Taldor, whether they wanted it or not. Whether Velius would tear down the Royalty while fighting the countries many enemies, he still didn’t know.

But he was certain, no matter what he did, Taldor would rise again.