Kaivaan Usairo.
Name: Kaivaan Usairo. He also goes by Kai and K.
Age: Twenty-one.
Race: Human.
Eyes: Blue.
Hair: Kaivaan’s hair is a ruddy ginger. He doesn’t tend to it often, so it can become quite unkempt. It sits somewhere between his ears and shoulders.
Height: Five foot eight.
Weight: Seventy-five kilograms.
Weapon: Kai usually carries his sword and spear with him. The spear has a three-foot handle, and no hilt. The blade is a handspan wide and a foot long. The sword has opposite dimensions; a foot of handle and three foot of blade, as well as a thin hilt.
Armour: Kaivaan’s only armour are the two shoulder-guards and gauntlets he wears. They are made of titanium, but crude in design.
Strengths: Usairo is quite an adept combatant, with or without his weapons. He is extremely fit, and can fight for hours without tiring. Kai’s fighting puts stress on the speed of his weapons, rather than the physical strength behind them, and as a result can strike before an opponent has time to defend themselves.
Weaknesses: Despite being quick with his hands, Kaivaan is not especially fast on his feet. This can lead to him being run down, so he doesn’t often have the option of flight over battle. He also has no ranged weaponry, and this, coupled with his slow movement, means that enemies can quite easily escape from him if they get out of range of mêlée. Although having an adequacy with weapons and physical combat, Kai has no magical abilities or affinities whatsoever; against a mage or other magic-user, he would be at a severe disadvantage.
Appearance: Kai is not especially tall, but relatively thickset and muscular. As well as his armour, K wears a shirt, pants and boots. The shirt is a once-white v-neck, and the pants are maroon and quite baggy. Being shod with steel, Kai’s boots are heavy. They come half way up his shins, and lace up.
Personality: Usairo is a carefree person who carries little about with him. Having spent most of his life in abject poverty, he has no wants for luxuries. He is also quite friendly, though not extroverted. In contrast to his other, rather simple aspects, Kai can be said to be almost bipolar, with a slight air of anger about him at times.
Biography:
Out in the mountains, where the grasslands swept up to peaks and crags, ravines and immensities of native stone, the hard soil yielded little but grains for alcohol and grass for animals. The people were hard, rustic and determined, with little attributed to them but the rocks that surrounded them. Where the grasslands gave way, so did the Imperial reign. But there was nothing like freedom there.
At a small town nestled between immortal mountains, there would soon be the last harvest and the snows. Rain was falling in sheets and folds, wrapping the place with the smell of wet earth. It was cold, and the rain did little to sweep away the frost on the ground. Clouds hid the sun.
The townspeople that were not in their homes were wrapped in furs and coats, hands not far from the weapons at their hips. There was a ragged wind blowing off the plains and into the hills, and even the children knew what this bode for them. The sentries shifted with unease in their saddles.
When the attack came, it was not what they expected. As the growls of the mountain-wolves came down from the heights and the warriors ran to meet the beasts, an assault of far greater calibre came in from the plains.
Slowly at first, the dark shapes moved in. They did not group or congregate anywhere. They only slid into the town in absolute silence. The numbers grew steadily as the din of men fighting beasts grew outside the confines of the streets.
With a cold efficiency, the dark things went into houses and halls. They grabbed the younger women and girls, hoarded every boy that could walk. What was not taken was tied down, made useless.
All Kai remembered was blurred. The smell of oil, the scent of terror and the sound of screaming. And then nothing more than fires and blood.
***
The sea was thick and almost sluggish. The waves were hard, high and sprayed the deck incessantly. A grey and black sky was the only other thing than the ocean, and it issued forth a scream like the rending of worlds. The wind had numbed them all.
Kai was getting thinner. His crewmates were, one by one, being taken into the abysms of madness and death. He spoke to no one.
Finally, the Imperials, behind their impenetrably black armour, had succeeded in drilling out of him any chance of hope, any past other than warfare. All he knew were the edges of his weapons and the hollow in his chest where something had once been. From time to time, the wenches down bellow would be free of the other men, and would call after him. He ignored them.
They were to fight some neighbouring kingdom, some stunted fiefdom that sought to overturn the Empire. But Kaivaan didn’t care for the kingdom, either, and would do as he was told.
He was promised, occasionally, loot and women and a hero’s homecoming to some far-off city he cared nothing for. To other men, these were a source of hope and purpose. To Kaivaan, they were empty sounds from behind cold masks, bearing nothing but the lies he heard from the hollow skies and the depths bellow.
***
The homecoming was a lie. The women were a lie. The loot was never there for anyone but the Imperials. Two years on that boat, which slowly rotted.
Kai whooped and hollered, screamed and howled when the Edge came. Men whispered of it in fear, but Usairo held it as some kind of deity. Of course, the Imperials would not have a word of it. Their world was infinite, unending and nothing but lands and seas to conquer and control. Their humanity was something unstoppable, something beyond gods and infinitives.
The sight of it, that emptiness that could be nothing but what it was, snapped something in Kai. Sea that suddenly stopped and gave way to white. Reality ceased to be and spilt away.
Kai took it upon himself to put the admiral’s own sword through his armoured gut and push his pitiless form off the boat and into the emptiness.
***
Heaving. Tearing.
Kai felt his body sunder and give way to emptiness, to the whites of nothing. Then he felt himself surging back into a reality, into somewhere on the other side of the Edge.
“Papers,” growled the voice, heavy and thick. Kai floundered and retched.
There was a noise of intolerance. “Those in the city without papers are subject to death. Do you have them or not?”
Kai was lying at someone’s feet. He was too relieved to be out of that other world to speak or open his eyes, and ignored the threat. But he wept when he did roll over, open his eyes and met the gaze of an Imperial.
***
“You’re garbed and armed like a Low Imperial soldier, kid. And yet no identification!” The guard laughed as he dragged Kai along. “Impostors like you deserve death.”
***
Kaivaan soon found out that the ‘fiefdom’ they were supposed to be fighting was not as small and puny as it was made out to be. In fact, it was quite the opposite; the Empire controlled only its capital and the surrounding towns, and the Kingdom of Huvhaer spanned over two and a half continents, with forces far superior to the ‘Empire’. Usairo had always been one for irony.
When the Huvhaern cavalry arrived at the Imperial Capital, the Low Imperials on duty were nowhere near enough to stop them. The Emperor issued the order that all citizens, however old, were to take arms. Even the prisoners.
***
Kaivaan jumped out of the trench. Rocks were hailing down from the sky, along with arrows and cannonballs. Dirt was flying, blood was spilling and the Empire behind him was crumbling. The Huvhaern were beyond no quarter, and only killed those who opposed them. Kaivaan Usairo had only to slip out of the ranks and walk away.
He was going to somewhere beyond the Kingdom and the lands the Empire had pretended to control. Somewhere beyond the mountains he faintly recalled, somewhere beyond the seas that the mountains gave way to.
Kaivaan wanted the Edge.
09-27-2009, 03:22 PM
