Post by The Iron Bull on Jun 26, 2016 19:09:17 GMT -5
| THE IRON BULL | |||
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[attr="class","cafbox"] 49 [attr="class","cafbox"] MALE [attr="class","cafbox"] QUNARI [attr="class","cafbox"] REAVER [attr="class","cafbox"]SOUTH THEDAS | |||
| [PTabbedContent][PTab=History] In some Ben-Hassrath strongbox in Par Vollen, curated by an overworked taarbas, the Bull's personal file is titled with his original name, which is no more than a long string of deceptively descriptive numbers. Each segment is more or less a cipher, indicating both parties who contributed to his conception (“mother” and “father” suggest a relationship that doesn't exist under the Qun, but “sire” and “dam,” too, imply something he doesn't like), his place and time of birth, and any genetic predispositions to certain flaws, in the event he would ever be selected for breeding. His tamassran called him Ashkaari, a thinker. The Bull was massive even in his youth, and there were fears that he would exert this physical advantage over his smaller brothers and sisters, as children who know they're bigger and stronger than everyone else often do. But as he grew, it became obvious he was more interested in using his size and the deference given to him by the others in his school to act as an intermediary between the children and their tama, reporting dangerous oversights to her, and quietly meteing playground justice on his own for lesser offenses. This was an authority that his tamassran knew she should have discouraged, but she seemed to sense this would be useful to him in later life, so she took a hands-off approach, allowing him the space necessary to do what he did best with the other children. Likely he would have made an excellent soldier. Probably part of the beresaad, someone who could easily cleave through the vanguard of any kabethari army with a handful of men and a decent rear-guard. But his reluctance to defer to hard rules gave her pause, and when he reached his majority, she gave him to the Ben-Hassrath, where he trained under his besrathari and a salit for upwards of five years. At 17, he was vetted and released with his new title of hissrad to do menial intelligence-gathering in Par Vollen, almost single-handedly rooting out a cabal of Nevarran deep-cover spies within the span of a few weeks. This earned the notice of a few anonymous higher-ups, who knew an asset when they saw one. The Bull was given a commission on Seheron, which gave his handler pause, but neither of them could deny a direct order, and truthfully, Bull didn't really want to: he wasn't the kind to dream of glory and accolades, but he craved a challenge and he saw Seheron as the opportunity to stretch his legs he'd been dreaming of since he was a boy. The letter he sent to his tamassran a week before deployment was hopeful, even optimistic; in later years, he'd re-read her last response to him and remember being exasperated by her repeated warnings to monitor his stress levels. She'd been right to warn him. The Bull spent ten years trying to bail water out of a sinking ship, watching scores of the young men, barely more than boys, assigned to him picked off one by one by Tal-Vashoth, Tevinter blood mages, hostile natives, and sometimes the local wildlife. Nothing in his training had prepared him for the sheer volume of death, the constant austerity measures, the sometimes fatal oversight from the handlers he reported to but never actually met in person. The last operative who had been posted to Alam, and the one before her, and the one before her had only lasted two years: the Bull held out five times that, and it took its toll. Later, the Ben-Hassrath would amend their guidelines for their operatives, keeping agents on a strict two-year tour schedule. But for the Bull, it was too late—after much of his outpost staff was murdered by Tal-Vashoth, he mounted a suicidal raid in retaliation on his own, fully expecting to die in the assault. If he hadn't been discovered where he'd fallen in a dirt track in the forest by a runner on her way to deliver a dispatch, he might have bled out where he'd fallen. Instead, he woke up two weeks later in the hold of a ship bearing him back to Par Vollen, missing two fingers from his left hand and much of the dexterity in his left side altogether. He'd tripped off a line of explosives the Tal-Vashoth had probably stolen from the Tevinters, the healer informed him, and he was lucky they'd only had the one, or the response team would have had to fish pieces of him out of the branches of the ironwood trees. The Bull doesn't remember much about the few weeks that followed, beyond that he'd spent a precious five or so minutes of lucidity considering what the Ariqun would do with him now. He'd heard from a few of his old contacts that his aggression and the savage, borderline-mindless fighting style that came intuitively to him had factored into the Ben-Hassrath's decision to render him ineligible for entry into the Qunari breeding program: for a moment he considered petitioning the Ariqun for a formal execution on the grounds that this reaver rage had developed into such an advanced state on Seheron that he was now a danger to civilians and too much of a liability to justify wasting food and medicinal resources on him. Probably they'd just dose him with qamek and put him to work hauling crates in a tamassran's nursery, or field labor. The idea of nothingness appealed to him. In the end, he gave himself one last-ditch effort to put his brain back together and applied for a reeducator. If asked, his opinion on whether it worked depends on how he's feeling on any given day—but he emerged six months later to a new directive from the Ben-Hassrath, telling him to go south and take on a cover as a Tal-Vashoth. Smart, he thought with only a little chagrin. If he bugged out and went insane again, he'd do it in enemy territory, and the bas would blame the lawless Tal-Vashoth for the deaths that would probably follow. He didn't protest the order, dutifully reporting in for his intensive briefing on kabethari culture before he was released and given passage south. In the lull of the next month that followed, he dicked around Minrathous, feeling out the man he was supposed to become in the unstructured mess that was the world outside the Qun's influence. Then he went on in earnest, sliding easily into mercenary work despite his obvious physical impediments. In the span of a few months, he'd built up enough goodwill with his first company to split with the best men and to form his own. Sometimes he found himself wondering why it took so little effort for him to find a place in these societies he'd been taught all his life were malignant to the soul, full of vice and unchecked decadence, but he feared getting so deep into his new headspace that climbing out would be impossible. Nonetheless, he enjoyed the freedom to forge the friendships of his choosing, to take the jobs of his choosing, to fuck who he chose to drink and eat the things he chose to drink and eat, even if he had to remind himself on an increasingly frequent basis that it was all just means to an end. He was finally The Iron Bull when the company split off and crossed into Nevarra for a job defending a paragon's luster mine from looters. A few miles west, he stopped in a tavern, and a brief confrontation with a group of Tevinters culminated in the recruitment of his second-in-command, Cremisius Aclassi, a Tevinter deserter. They took ship over the Waking Sea in the lee of the Blight, building up contacts and references and cultivating a peerless job success rate that gave them the reputation of being extravagantly expensive but capable and honorable. It was rewarding work, and the Bull took every opportunity to enjoy the side benefits of having his purse (sometimes literally) overflowing with coin and a squad of men who had a good rapport together. In hindsight, he can't say when he began to feel like Par Vollen was so far away that it stopped being at the forefront of his mind most of the day. If the Breach had appeared even three years earlier, he might have done the cautious thing and asked for dispensation to join the Inquisition that banded together to stop it instead of diving headlong into it the way he did. As it was, it might have kept him out of trouble with his superiors, but despite the avalanche of sternly-worded dispatches that followed, that, too, satisfied that need to do constructive work under the instructions of a capable leader that he'd searched for on Seheron so many years before, and he couldn't say he regretted it at all. That didn't soften the blow when a prospective joint venture between the Qunari and the Inquisition fell through so spectacularly that he was forced into exile from the Qun. In the quiet hours of the morning after, he thought through all of the ways that mission had basically been set up to fail from the beginning, the Inquisitor's decision to signal a retreat or not, and then was forced to admit that there was a significant possibility they'd really just been looking for a reason to wash their hands of him. The Ariqun was remote, and they remembered him as the ticking time bomb of a man who barely deserved his rank and title, who had betrayed their trust twice in the span of only a few months. It didn't matter that he would have kept to his original objective of getting close to the high command of the Inquisition in order to facilitate their eventual assassination, if it came to that. And he would have—he imagined himself turning on a dime, leveling the life he'd built in order to return to a home that didn't actually want him back at all. No doubt it wouldn't have actually happened that way, notwithstanding the fact that the Inquisition's management was singularly capable and crawling with people who were more or less probably the best of their respective classes in the world (and not even touching that fucked up ancient elvhen god shit), but his loyalty was indisputible even in the face of certain death. And now it was the Inquisition's. But he could make the best of that. He went to sleep one night Hissrad, woke up the next morning as Iron Bull, and life went on. Everything he'd done as Hissrad as early as twenty-four hours before, he continued as the Bull. What fears he shared aloud were always quickly mollified by the knowledge that any one of them would have done him the favor of putting him down like he wanted. Regardless, he spent the next few months living with the constant suspicion he was on the very precipice of madness, and a single bad fight might push him off forever. It never came, not even when the Inquisition mustered its army and pushed him headfirst into a mass of demons and blood mages so dense that he thought the fighting would never end. It didn't come when their campaigns to drive bandits and squatters out of stolen keeps kept him in a sustained battle mindset for almost days. It didn't come when his own people rallied against their dying Inquisitor, when the Viddasala offered him his place in the Qun back on a silver platter for the comparatively simple task of killing him. He'd had dreams about that a lot. But he'd had enough time to put his roots down, and he found it second nature to offer his polite refusal before he'd even had the time to consider it. The world wasn't completely out of peril with the Qunari driven back and a Divine restored to the southern chantry, but the Bull's life was his own now, and he could think of no better use for it than going back to the same work that had enticed him to leave the Qun to begin with. True, he was getting older, and his knees creaked when he woke every morning—Skyhold's weird semi-magical weather had ruined him for traveling on the road again—but there really was nothing else he'd rather be doing. Krem, he maintains, is going to have to drag him kicking and screaming into a care ward when he's too old to hold a weapon. [/PTab={height: 250px; overflow: auto;}][PTab=Miscellaneous] Gatt— You can burn this after you're done, since you're probably not supposed to even be using this drop anymore. No skin off my nose. I just wanted to say thanks. I didn't think it'd ever turn out like this. You probably didn't, either. Hope Salit doesn't give you any crap over me defecting. Gatt— Knew you were gonna use this drop again, figured I'd say a real good-bye. I'm sorry. Gatt— (The rest of the pageface is the phrase “SON OF A FUCKING BITCH” looped over and over so many times that it looks like meaningless scribbles, and a tear in the paper where Bull broke the quill nib pressing down too hard.) [/PTab={height: 250px; overflow: auto;}][/PTabbedContent] | |||
