Hadran Fellward - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Hadran Fellward

Nickname

The Last Fellward

Race (Grade)

Half-Fiend / Half-Giant (D)

Class

Bloodrager (Abyssal)

Height

8'3"

Birthday

Greenrise 20, 1263

Age

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Birthsign

The Radiant Treant

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Hadran Fellward, trying his very best to look harmless

Appearance

Hadran stands eight feet three inches tall and is built on a scale that makes ordinary people instinctively take a step back, which he has spent his entire life trying to apologize for. His skin is a dark slate grey, his eyes glow a steady ember red, and a pair of immense black horns curl back and around from his brow in heavy ridged spirals. He wears a short black beard bound in thin braids. Faint rust-colored markings cover his enormous shoulders and arms in swirling patterns that he did not choose; they appeared on their own as he grew. He dresses in blackened leather and heavy plate: a strapped and chained vest, massive gauntlets and bracers, greaves marked with skull-shaped knee guards, a tattered black war-kilt, and iron-shod boots. He usually stands with his arms folded, because it is the least threatening thing he has found to do with them, and it has never once worked.

Unique Characteristics

When Hadran enters a true bloodrage, the fiendish blood buried inside him rises to the surface. His muscles swell and his body grows until he stands closer to an ogre than a man; his horns darken, his eyes go almost entirely red, heat pours off his skin, and the markings across his body begin to glow faintly, like cracks over buried embers. At that point you are not really watching a man fight anymore. You are watching something that looks suspiciously like a boss encounter, fighting on your side. A childhood in the breach's shadow and twenty-one years standing in front of it have also made him almost impossible to move: he is dramatically harder to knock down, push back, frighten, dominate, or force away from a position he has chosen to hold.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Quiet, polite, and extraordinarily patient
Goes out of his way to seem harmless to strangers
Gentle with children, who are refreshingly direct
Does not move from a line once he has drawn it
Never boasts, and has never needed to

Challenging Traits

Refuses to count kills, claim credit, or tell stories
Has no idea what to do with a life without a breach
Stands in doorways purely out of habit
Mildly insulted by any talk of "demonic urges"
Terrifying in a bloodrage, even to his allies

My ancestor was a demon. [He folds his arms.] My grandfather was a baker. Which one am I supposed to behave like?

More than fifty? I wasn't counting. [How could you not count?] [A long stare.] I was busy.

[A little girl has asked whether he is a demon, and whether he is evil, and he has answered "partly" and "no." Now she wants to touch his horn. He kneels.] That usually follows the other two questions.

Likes

A doorway to hold, with people safe behind it
Children who ask what the adults are thinking
Warm bread, the way his grandfather made it
Being asked to help move the furniture
Quiet mornings with nothing coming through

Dislikes

Being asked how many he killed
People who assume that horns mean cruelty
Idle hands, including, lately, his own
Anything that tries to get past him
Doorframes, which were not built with him in mind

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Background & History

He Got All of It

Hadran was born in 1263 in Fellhold, a mountain settlement of half-giants high in the Dragon's Eye Mountains. His family's ancestry traces back, many generations up the tree, to a powerful demon. Most of its descendants showed little evidence of it. Hadran got all of it, and was born as much fiend as giant. The immense curling horns appeared before he reached adolescence, his eyes took on their ember-red glow soon afterward, by sixteen he was larger than most grown men, and by twenty he could lift one with a single hand. People assume someone who looks like Hadran must struggle constantly against demonic urges. He finds this mildly insulting. His demon ancestor is a very long way up the family tree. His grandfather was a baker.

The Fellwards

Fellhold was built beside the Fell, an ancient planar scar where the boundary between Xeres and an Abyssal realm had been damaged centuries before. Occasionally things came through it. Usually small things. Sometimes not. The people responsible for guarding the breach were called Fellwards, and Hadran joined them at nineteen. Over the years, people stopped saying "Hadran, the Fellward" and simply began calling him Hadran Fellward. It was never his family name. He kept it anyway.

The Night the Fell Ruptured

When Hadran was thirty-one, the Fell did not open. It ruptured. Dozens of fiends poured through before the warding circle could be restored. The settlement was evacuated while Hadran and eleven other Fellwards stayed behind to hold the breach, and the fighting lasted most of the night. By sunrise, ten Fellwards were dead and one lay unconscious. Hadran was still standing: barely, but standing. More importantly, nothing had gotten past him. The surviving stories differ wildly about how many creatures he killed that night, and Hadran refuses to give a number. When someone once asked whether it was really more than fifty, he said he hadn't been counting. Asked how he could possibly not count, he gave them a long stare and said, "I was busy."

No Next Thing

In 1303, after centuries of failed attempts, a circle of archmages finally sealed the Fell for good. Everyone celebrated. Hadran suddenly found himself unemployed. He had spent almost his entire adult life preparing for the next thing to come through that breach, and for the first time, there was not going to be a next thing. So he left. Not because of tragedy, exile, or revenge. He simply realized that he had absolutely no idea what to do with the rest of his life.

Wandering

For three years Hadran traveled, taking difficult contracts and killing things that ordinary adventurers could not. He uses whatever weapon suits the opponent, whether a huge sword, a warhammer, or a polearm, but he is perfectly comfortable fighting with his hands, and he grapples monsters: ogres, trolls, giants, and things with entirely too many teeth. There are stories of him seizing creatures that other warriors were desperately trying to escape and simply dragging them backward. In between contracts he occasionally helps people move furniture. He is remarkably good at that, too.

Four Doors in the World

A contract near Bannon brought Hadran within reach of the portal to Goodberry, and curiosity did the rest. He came through in the autumn of 1306 and found a town with four open portals to distant cities, an intelligent dungeon beneath its streets, and a thousand-year-old fortress anchored in its sky. To most people that is a list of wonders. To a man who spent twenty-one years guarding a hole in the world, it is a list of doors. For the first time since the Fell was sealed, Hadran knows exactly where he ought to stand, and he has decided to stay.

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Goals & Aspirations

Something to Stand In Front Of

Hadran does not need to be paid to guard Goodberry, and he has not been asked to. He simply intends to be there when something comes through one of its doors, crawls up out of its dungeon, or falls out of its sky that everyone else looks at and immediately thinks the town will need help. When that day comes, he will roll his shoulders and say, "I'll handle it." The frightening part is that he very possibly can.

Learning to Stand Still

For the first time in his life, Hadran has free time, and he is not good at it. He has tried fishing, carving, and sitting in the sun, and he has not yet found the knack of doing nothing without feeling that something, somewhere, is about to come through. He is working on it. In the meantime, if anyone in Goodberry needs a wardrobe moved up three flights of stairs, word has already gotten around about whom to ask.

The Other Eleven

Ten Fellwards did not see the sunrise after the Fell ruptured, and a part of every contract fee Hadran earns still goes back to their families in Fellhold. He writes to the eleventh, the one who lay unconscious beside him that morning, twice a year. He has never told anyone what the letters say.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Goodberry

Role

Monster Slayer

ATTENTION!

Hadran Fellward is a D-grade half-fiend, half-giant bloodrager, eight feet three inches tall, and very possibly the single most dangerous warrior living in Goodberry. He can physically overpower giants, survive blows that would kill an ordinary warrior outright, break through magically reinforced doors, leap from heights that make everyone else start calculating falling damage, and keep fighting through wounds that should have ended the fight several rounds earlier. In a true bloodrage his fiendish blood rises and he grows to nearly the size of an ogre. Above all, he does not move. If something enormous charges and everyone else prepares to dodge, Hadran lowers his shoulders, and the monster stops. If he plants his feet in a doorway and says "Behind me," get behind Hadran; that doorway belongs to him now. For all of that, he is quiet, polite, patient, and gentle, and he would genuinely prefer that you were not afraid of him.