- Did/Does your character have a good relationship with his or her family? (as a whole or individually)
Keldris' relationship with his family is...complex. Despite being a paladin, he is, in fact, the Black Sheep of his extended Badass Family, mostly because he's also the token libbiest liberal that ever libbed liberally in a basically conservative noble clan -- well, okay, perhaps the second. If the family really appreciated how liberally liberal Petris Pellegrin is, Petey would totally steal that designation from his big brother. The patriarch of the current generation, Martel Pellegrin, was a glass-chewing ultraconservative isolationism-preaching xenophobe who, once Stormwind was liberated from the Horde, promptly declared the Alliance to be the Worst Idea EVER and went about throwing his considerable political influence into pushing the idea that Stormwind had enough on its plate with restoring itself and that foreign political entanglements could only be detrimental to the kingdom's government and people. He was extremely displeased when Stormwind did not summarily expel all the foreigners from its borders, including the foreign allies who helped win back the kingdom, and was extremely disgruntled when elves and dwarves were permitted to resettle in the rebuilt capital. Unable to convince his government to support a unified vision of Stormwind for its human citizens only, he instead went about trying to grind into the heads of all his children that there's no such thing as a trustworthy non-human and most humans are untrustworthy bastards, as well, and that the only real people you can rely on are you own family, with decidedly variable success. Keldris ultimately rebelled in an assortment of spectacular ways against all this and, after a
particularly spectacular blow-up revolving around Keldris' traumatically non-platonic relationship with his Quel'dorei lover, his father had him formally, legally disinherited and removed from the Pellegrin line of succession. It took quite a lot of work on the part of Keldris' younger sister, Aelira, and a number of years of notably selfless paladinly heroism on the part of Keldris himself, for Martel's attitude toward his "wayward" eldest son to soften at all. On his deathbed, Martel rescinded Keldris' disinheritance and asked his next-eldest son, Valken, to reconcile the family and bring his brother home, dying shortly afterwards.
Keldris' relationship with his mother is strained, as well, though in different ways. Haelin and Martel Pellegrin's marriage was not a particularly idyllic one, despite the size of the brood they eventually produced together -- Martel's attitude about women can be summed up as Get Back To the Kitchen at best -- and Haelin was particularly bitter that she was forced to give up a promising life as a mage in order to secure a marriage alliance for her family, to a man who demanded that she cease her magical studies due to his sexist belief that arcane magic was too corrupting for a woman's weaker mind to withstand. Her anger, early in the relationship, led her to deliberately feed the personality conflicts between her husband and her two eldest sons -- a fact that Keldris eventually realized as he got older. And he was, to put it mildy, unhappy to think that his mother was using his genuine feelings as a weapon in an on-going fight with his father. Thereafter, he treated his mother with the respect he owed her for
being his mother but he was never really emotionally close to her again.
Keldris and his two eldest siblings, Valken and Aelira, were born during the family's exile in Lordaeron after the fall of Stormwind during the First War and from the very first none of them really had much in the way of childish things in their childhood. As the eldest children and heirs to the martial traditions of their house, Keldris and Valken were reared from a very early age to eventually become warriors, their toys wooden swords and shields. Martel trained his sons in arms himself when he was able, otherwise trusting their teaching to the squires and junior knights of the Silver Hand resident wherever they happened to be living at the time, and gave no one else the honor of teaching them how to ride. Most of Keldris' happiest memories of his father actually date from this time in Lordaeron. Typically, Keldris and Valken had a certain amount of sibling rivalry between them, mostly revolving around their father's attention and approval, which waxed and waned in severity. Mostly, they were friends, and Keldris took his responsibilities as elder brother and protector of his younger siblings very seriously, indeed. When they fought, Aelira was more often than not the peacemaker between them, and Keldris became particularly close to and protective of his sister, whom he sometimes felt was too kind-hearted and trusting for her own good. As they all grew older, the conflicts between Keldris and Valken reduced in frequency but increased in severity, especially as Keldris began rebelling against their father's attitudes, and became less about childish pique and more about deep-dyed resentment over what Valken viewed as Keldris' feckless disregard for the family's reputation and status, his place in it, and the responsibiliites he owed to it. The last words the brothers spoke to one another were angry ones and Valken never really forgave Keldris for abandoning his family in favor of fighting for a hopeless cause in Lordaeron, and resents even more the fact that their father never seemed to appreciate his own efforts -- and handed the right of succession that should have been his back to Keldris on his deathbed. Valken's bitterness and anger over this led him first to refuse to try and contact Keldris at all and, when Aelira went around him on that matter, curdled still further into a hatred capable of fratricide. Aelira, on the other hand, also entered into a profession of faith -- as a priestess of the Light -- and so she understood Keldris and his attitudes a bit better than Valken (who was a twice-a-year-plus-weddings-and-funerals adherent to the Church of Light at best) or their father (who didn't so much adhere to the teachings of the Light as use them as a bludgeon and to justify his own prejudices). She kept in contact with Keldris as best as she could through the Church of Light's connections with the Scarlet Crusade, tenuous though they were, and later through the Argent Dawn mission in Stormwind; the two exchanged letters semi-frequently and it was with Keldris' own letters home that she eventually softened Martel's heart. She is currently greatly looking forward to seeing her idiot big brother again for the first time in years.
Keldris' younger siblings -- Petris, Kaetrin, and Tardyth -- were all young children the last time he saw them and, to a certain extent, that's the way he still thinks of them, even though he knows intellectually that they grew up in the meantime and despite Aelira keeping him apprised of their doings.
- How does your character relate to his or her guild and friends?
Alienated and estranged from his birth family as he is, Keldris treats his friends and comrades-in-arms as though they were his family -- which, for all practical intents and purposes, is what they are. This has been the case since he was a callow young paladin-in-training in the household of Alexandros Mograine and continues to be true as a paladin of the Argent Dawn.
- If your character knew he or she would die tomorrow, how would they spend today?
Keldris is...actually dealing with this situation right now. He has, since his rather-past-near-death reunion with an old death knight friend during the Scourge assault on Orgrimmar, been not exactly in the best of health. It took him what he felt was an unacceptably long time to recover from the injuries he suffered at Orgrimmar and, even after he should have been wholly physically well, he suffered from bouts of pain and weakness that neither he nor anyone else could explain much less identify the root cause of and repair. Exacerbating matters were the nightmares that began occuring once he was recovered enough to travel and returned to the East, images of death and despair that were half memory and half vision coming to him with gradually increasing frequency and intensity. Even his ability to call on the Light began to suffer -- he could still reach out and touch the light, even channel its power, but doing so took incredible force of will and concentration and left him seriously weakened and physically ill afterwards. For these reasons he was not selected for the mission to Northrend as a member of the Argent Crusade and was, instead, reassigned to the Light's Promise mobile hospital unit where his entirely mundane skills as a warrior and field medic could be of use until the origin of his difficulties could be identified and addressed. Neither Ophila Ravenstadt nor Catlali Mooncaller, the lead healers of Light's Promise, have been able to make such an identification yet but their fear is that the ailment is both progressive and degenerative and Keldris' use of the Light for any reason seems to accelerate the degeneration at a terrifying rate. It responds to alchemical healing processes and so they have been afflicting him with an assortment of different herbal healing tisanes of widely varying efficacy and pungency in an effort to obtain a maintenance medication and dosage until they can figure out how to heal him properly. Though his friends are aggressively refusing to admit any such thing, Keldris has come to the inescapable conclusion that whatever he has, or which has him as the case might be, might well kill him before they can discover such a cure -- it has, after all, resisted not only his own efforts to cleanse himself of it, the efforts of other healers wielding the Holy Light, and the shamanistic healing practices orcs, trolls, and trauren. At the same time, he hasn't yet wholly resigned himself to an ignoble death by stupidly persistent illness, and has decided that the best thing he can do, beyond making efforts to set his rather minimal affairs in order, is to keep going about the task he's set himself until he simply cannot do so any longer. Beyond that...he has no real idea what to do. It is for that reason, when Aelira's letter informing him of their father's death and his reinheritance finds him, that he takes a short leave of absence to go home to Stormwind and set things there as best to right as he can.
- Has your character ever lost someone close to them? How did they die? How did that affect your character?
It would actually be easier at this point to list the number of people to whom Keldris was close that
aren't dead. Let's see...
Vangalos Halfelven: killed in the fall of Lordaeron City to the Scourge, raised as a mindless servant of the Lich King, freed during Sylvanas' rebellion, now a notably bitter and nihilistic bastard even by Forsaken standards he goes by the name
Morholt and has made a
career out of murdering paladins fueled by an absolutely world-destroying hatred of everything he once was.
Melias Darthalia: also killed in the fall of Lordaeron City, had the good fortune to get to stay dead, though Keldris has semi-regular contact with her not-so-lucky mother, High Executor Darthalia, in Tarren Mill.
Alexandros Mograine: betrayed and murdered by his own son, raised from the dead in service to the Scourge, physically killed again, SOUL DEVOURED BY FROSTMOURNE.
Renault Mograine: beheaded by spirit of pissed off undead father.
Darion Mograine: self-sacrificial suicide, raised from the dead in the service of the Scourge, unbrainwashed by Tirion Fordring, now emoing around Northrend not returning correspondence.
Aretegos Maugrisaine: joined the Scarlet Crusade together and got over their pre-existing relationship as Rivals, becoming Fire-Forged Friends, only for Aretegos to fall in battle with the Scourge, his body unrecovered; Keldris later has a well-past-near-death reunion with his new, improved death knight incarnation, Radiance, at Orgrimmar.
Florimelia Steelheart: betrayed to the Scarlet Inquisition by mutual little brother figure, tortured to death for being a dwarven member of the Argent Dawn, fortunately got to stay dead considering who found her body in the Scarlet Enclave.
Calathore Swift-Arm: like Aretegos, fell in battle with the Scourge, got to stay dead as a result of his own Light-fueled final suicide attack.
Kathva of the Frostwolf Clan: one of the first friends Keldris made in the Argent Dawn, they nearly went down together rescuing a group of overconfident young adventurers in the environs of Stratholme, shot from behind by agents of the Scarlet Crusade; he returned Kathva's weapons to Frostwolf territory in Alterac and has had semi-regular contact with Kathva's mate and young son since.
Martel Pellegrin: died of a massive stroke/was murdered by blackest magic; Keldris deeply regrets that they never managed to reconcile on this side of the grave. But the very worst was the death of his lover,
Solivar Eventide, because, until recently, he was never really sure what happened. Solivar was summoned home to Quel'Thalas to attend at the sickbed of his dying brother; Keldris was summoned home to Stormwind to attend to certain details surrounding his family's desire that he marry to cement a politcal alliance and to take up his place as the future governor of his family's holdings. Then...Arthas Menethil came home from Northrend. By the time Keldris managed to make it back north again, both Lordaeron and Quel'Thalas were in undead-ridden ruins and Solivar was not among the few, scattered survivors of Keldris' training nakama. Venturing into Quel'Thalas in search of his lover he found, instead, Solivar's broken sword buried in a Scourge corpse. And while he spoke to every elven survivor that he reasonably could, none of them could tell him more than what he had already seen with his own eyes. For quite a longer than common sense or even sanity allowed, he clung to the lack of knowledge as a kind of hope that Solivar might still be alive but, in the end, reality wore away his ability to practice epic denial and he went
completely insane with rage and self-loathing. (Before he went back to Quel'Thalas, Solivar asked Keldris to go home with him -- for moral support, to meet his brother, because he dreaded going home more than anything else in the world. Keldris refused -- in a moment of panic over the seriousness of that request, in a moment of human weakness, because he was afraid of what would happen if word of it got back to his father, whom he was supposed to be making amends to with his exile in Lordaeron. Solivar said he understood and went to Quel'Thalas alone and now all Keldris has left of him is a sword hilt with a bit of broken blade and a ring that symbolizes an oath sworn between them he never even tried to keep.) It was, for a pretty long time, only the combination of the Scarlet Crusade giving him a focused outlet for his hard slide into Retribution and Aretegos Maugrisaine refusing to leave him alone for more than an hour or two at a stretch that kept him from riding off to get himself heroically, pointlessly killed to expiate the guilt of abandoning his lover to die. ("He made me promise that I'd look after you while he's gone. He is...gone...but we're both still here. There's no reason for me not to keep my word." "...Bastard." "Idiot. Go back to bed.") It was, almost more than anything else, the realization that Crusade was no longer a cause that would have accepted Solivar into its ranks that began the process of disenchanting him with them and, after he joined the Argent Dawn, he actually started finding some balm for his many griefs among comrades he could actually feel safe caring for and trusting again -- no matter how tenuous their lives all were, ultimately they stood and fell
together. (Time eases all griefs and Keldris was just reaching the point where thinking of Solivar no longer made him feel as though he'd been stabbed in the heart a hundred and fifty times with a dull butterknife when, on one cool, misty autumn morning a death knight calling himself Mercy rode up to the gates of the hospital's temporary basecamp in Hillsbrad, with a memory made mostly of the holes you'd find in Alterac swiss, but knowing he needed to find a human man named Keldris Pellegrin. Things have been...complicated...ever since.)
- How do you, as a roleplayer, tackle the question of death in a video game where resurrection spells and spirit healers abound?
Death is a natural thing, even in a word with functional healing and resurrection magic capable of restoring life to the most broken of bodies, or necromantic magic capable of forcing existence back on those who should, by rights, be dead and gone. One can generally not be resurrected following a death by natural causes -- old age, most forms of serious illness that could not be healed before hand, traumatic injuries so massive they caused instantaneous death, death that leaves no body (such as incineration by natural causes or pyroclastic magic). (One of the things that Ophila and Catlali are wrestling with is the not so unrealistic possibility that Keldris is dying of something
entirely natural, which is why their efforts to purge his body of Scourge-created toxins has categorically
failed.) Necromancy naturally does not respect this rule, except in the case of no body to raise or traumatic injury that compromises the integrity of the brain or spine -- in those cases, the soul can still be enslaved as an incorporeal minion or later shoved into another convenient body. And, just because resurrection magic exists, that doesn't mean that everyone is eager to use it -- resurrection has a
cost attached to it. Asking a Spirit Healer to guide a soul back to the body it just vacated instead of beyond death requires more than just knowledge of the magic -- it requires the willingness to exchange something of value to the Healer, a bit of soul, a piece of memory, something that, once surrendered, can never be regained. Further, the actual resurrection itself forges a subtle but indissoluble tie between the souls of the caster making the sacrifice and the person they are resurrecting, a bond discernable by individuals skilled in magics relevant to matters of the soul -- priests, warlocks, shaman -- that can be manipulated for certain ends by the unscrupulous. Attempting to resurrect someone whose body and soul are under the influence of necromantic workings that will force them to return to "life" as a function of the magics that sustain their unnatural existence can also have rather deleterious effects on the caster. Even the most well-balanced undead being, confronted with a power intimately connected to both the natural death and the natural life that they are being denied while in a spiritually vulnerable state have a tendency to Come Back Temporarily Wrong -- which is to say slightly Axe Crazy. Interrupting an attempted necromantic raising with an attempted resurrection has happened so infrequently that likely the only observers of the phonomena associated with it are Kel'Thuzad, Ner'zhul, Ophila Ravenstadt, Catlali Mooncaller, and Keldris Pellegrin -- though, to give three of them the credit that they deserve, they're so virtuously clueless about the effects of necromancy it's going to take a death knight or two to educate them on the matter.
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the_longest_night. This is a fic theme community similar to, and inspired by, such luminaries as the LiveJournal community ![[info]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
31_days -- but, as the name implies, our theme is the Winter Solstice, the Longest Night of the Year. How will you keep warm on the longest winter's night? Hopefully by posting your response to one of the twenty-one prompts supplied below. This year, the Winter Solstice is December 21st, and so all responses should be posted by that date -- though, if you wish to post later, I'm not going to be a rules-lawyer about it.