Walther's page

About Walther

Walther can barely remember his life from before. Before the pain. Before the terror. The humiliation. The degradation. The horror, the shame, the evil. A time before the Count.

Walther was little more than a boy when he was first given to the Count. Walther can no longer recall the details - he may have been taken from his family, or given willingly as tribute. The people who gave him up may have thought they were condemning him to a painful death or granting him a life of luxury - Walther has no knowledge of these things. The one thing that he does know is that he lived somewhere in Ustalav as a boy, and that at some point the entire household moved to Nidal.

For more than eight decades, Walther's life was a cycle of total domination, then willing servitude. First prisoner then jailer; victim, then abuser. The Count, or one of his various offspring, would keep Walther dominated for years at a time, forcing him to commit unspeakable atrocities. Then, for no apparent reason, they would allow Walther control over himself for several months. It is the acts that he committed during these times that Walther remains ashamed of to this day. Many of the screams that were elicited by Walther over the years came during those times where no one was directly forcing his hand. That Walther was himself subjected to the same abuses does little to assuage the guilt that he still feels.

As the decades went by, Walther learned a great deal from the various victims that came and went at the Count's various dwellings. Including the power of faith. Walther encountered those whose strength of faith carried them through horrifying punishments - sometimes at Walther's own hand - on several occasions. While Walther had little sense of who he was before his current life, the Varisians who he met over the years often recognized him as one of their own, and shared their knowledge of Desna with him.

Two years ago, a cleric of Desna, who'd been captured the previous month told Walther something he had never realized. He could leave. If he ran away from the Count's household during the day, he had a chance to be free of the evil. A chance to be a better person.

And so he did. The next day, when he went into the village, as he often did. But instead of collecting a new townsperson to bring back for the amusement of the master and his family, Walther purchased a fast horse and began riding north. When his absence was first noticed, the youngest of the Count's offspring - who were responsible for this latest period of free will - began to search. In their rush to recover their master's favourite mortal, they simply spread out, believing that whichever of them found Walther would be able to bring him back easily.

Walther, though, had learned a great deal about Vampires and other monsters over the years - and about a wide variety of subjects for that matter - from the hundreds of mortals that had been brought to the master's court. Combined with his new-found faith, he was able to defeat the fledgling vampire. And while he survived the fight, his horse did not, and Walther himself was gravely wounded. He abandoned his horse, along with nearly all the gear he had taken with him, and resumed his northward journey, limping badly.

Walther doesn't remember passing out that day, but it must have happened, because he next woke a week later, in one of the wagons of a varisian caravan. They found had him unconscious on the road and had been tending to his wounds and his fever in the days since. With his fever broken and his strength somewhat returned, Walther rose from his sickbed to discover something astonishing - a butterfly shaped birthmark on his chest that he was certain had not been there before. Walther remains convinced to this day that Desna personally kept him alive during his escape.

Walther believes that his Goddess preserved his life so that he could destroy the monsters in the world that prey on mortals. He knows that he is no great warrior, nor a powerful spellcaster. What he has is knowledge. Both of general information about a variety of monsters, and of specific details of many of the powerful creatures in Ustalev and Nidal. And his plan for making the world a safer place for mortals is to spread knowledge, both by sharing what he knows, and by encouraging others to do the same.

Walther has started a new life in Korvosa, which, by his standards, is a wonderful place to live. He spends most of his days writing; either short, analytical works regarding specific supernatural and otherworldly creatures or on the memoir of his life in the Count's household. The memoir is important to him both as catharsis and as memory aid - he knows that he isn't going to live all that much longer, and wants to be certain that there is a record of all the harm that he and his former master have done. Each time that he is able to recall the name of a victim, Walther seeks to find and contact their family, so that they may at least know what happened to their missing loved ones.

He's been in Korvosa for more than a year now, and has started to be known to some of the locals as a potential source of information about the various things that go bump in the night; supplying that information has enabled him to keep a roof over his head while he works on his books.