Blaze
Blaze is a tiefling born in the slums of Neptune, a heretic mercenary who wields fiendish magic. He serves the Morenar as second in command under Marcus in Neptun.1
The hanging
The Hanged Devils captured Blaze when he was a small child, and he suffered torture and starvation at their hands. During a gang celebration after a victory over the Gentlemen, a high-ranking member decided to hang him in public, to honour the gang's name and keep its reign of terror alive in the city.2
As the noose tightened, Blaze glimpsed a shadowy figure with burning eyes in the alley. The figure spoke straight into the child's mind, it is said, offering salvation and a chance to carry on the family tradition of power and fear. Tired of a life of pain, Blaze accepted without weighing the cost. Hellfire swept the alley, leaving charred corpses and blackened wood; at its centre stood Blaze, restored, his eyes burning with the same light that had given him his new powers.2
The Morenar
In the years that followed Blaze developed his abilities carefully, wary of drawing the kind of attention that could bring persecution. Wanting a community of people like himself, he went looking for a place to belong, and his patron guided him to the Morenar, where Dagoth and his students were already expecting him. At the Morenar's invitation he became Marcus's second in command in Neptun.2
Blaze tells newcomers to the Morenar that seeking power is in everyone's nature, an urge to overcome one's limits. Swordsmen, clerics and bards spend years perfecting their arts, he says, but there are quicker paths to power, more radical, more direct and far more dangerous. Only the seeker can know the true price, and having struck the deal with certainty, no one should come back to the door that granted the power claiming to have been tricked. Each must decide what they are willing to sacrifice, and what price is too high.3
When Ifanelle, a former member of the Owls hunted by her old masters, was led to him in Vansreik, Blaze loved her anger, seeing in it the same rage that drives him. Believing she would become an important asset for the Morenar, he hurried her initiation and arranged for her to vanish from the Empire's records; she now works under him.4
Lord Dagoth sent Neanoth Jeal’tlous to Vansreik partly so that his presence would check Marcus's fanaticism and Blaze's recklessness. Knowing of Neanoth's connection to Dagoth, Blaze and Marcus refrain from using the Morenar's power for personal gain. Luccas Mairein is intensely afraid of Blaze and grows very nervous in his company.5
In battle
Blaze has always enjoyed killing and is an expert at finding new ways to do it with his magic. He relishes the terror he spreads when he takes the field with powerful spells, and he is careless with his power, often spending himself early in a fight. He aims at the places where enemies are most crowded, caring only for members of the Morenar, and higher-ranking officers have warned and punished him for that carelessness. Beneath it lies a fear of being caught and imprisoned. He carries the Blade of Thar’um Valaar and can draw immense arcane power from his patron.6
Notes
Sources
This article draws on:
Images in this article
Mercenary Compendium (Bad Badger Games, 2024), p. 34. Art by the Bad Badger Games team.
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