#all this Chain Him To The Radiator urge AND ability and nothing. what a waste

[nicollekidman]

i’m literally absolutely top notch at flirting it’s frankly a crime i am not practicing this skill more often

[kog0ruhn]

Hadyn is dead. Sort of.

Though born in the Windswept Plateau, Hadyn has spent most of his life as a ne’er-do-well in the crevasses and cliff faces of the Greatwyrm’s Breach. Notorious in his true life as one of the “Great Four”--a sort of underground elite of brigand society--he commanded an expansive and effective ring of cutthroats that did well for themselves by attacking, robbing, and occasionally stringing up wealthy pilgrims wandering Dragonhome who happened to take a wrong turn. To say that he and his wife, Damiana, made a killing would have been an understatement. And a joke made in very poor taste.

Their luck ran out when he crossed the wrong dragon: the necromancer, Dahaka. Though frail and delicate in appearance, the Fae was anything but weak. Having experimented with Shade-based occultism, Dahaka found himself corrupt and hungering for power beyond what the Arcanist would ever dream of granting him. Fearful of being found out, he tasked his underlings with uprooting his lab in the Starfall Isles and moving it to Dragonhome under the guise of a band of pious pilgrims on their way to the Pillar.

They never made it so far. Seeing their rather conspicuous wagon full of treasures from  a foreign land, Hadyn ordered his men to fall upon it like a clan of ravenous hyenas. Not one of Dahaka’s followers escaped alive, and every scrap of research material and magical artifact was taken to be divvied up between Hadyn’s own. He kept the most impressive artifact for himself: a necromantic medallion inscribed with ancient spells that Hadyn believed would fetch a handsome sum.

Then, word got back to Dahaka. He was not very pleased to hear of the loss of his hard-earned research and relics, to say the very least. The foul sorcerer resolved to recover his stolen artifacts at any and all costs.

Hadyn doesn’t remember much of his murder. He remembers that he was about to ambush a band of merchants and then, suddenly, there was a cold wind, a bright flash, and he was set upon by a veritable army of the undead. Whether the merchants were reanimated before or after the brilliant light that blinded him is even a mystery, though the end result was clear enough: his band of brigands scattered, the bulk of them were killed, and he ended up being murdered while trying to encourage his wife to flee.

With a swipe of his assailant’s brilliant claws, a good chunk of his throat found itself relocated about a meter away. It was not pleasant.

Everything went dark pretty much immediately. There was no time, there was no light, though he can remember the faint scent of cold air and a voice that thrummed through him like the beginnings of an earthquake. The words exchanged were meaningless and immediately forgotten, spoken in nothing he could understand. The smell, however, haunted his nostrils when he woke up on the bloodied ground of an undead-infested battlefield, overpowering the rancid stench of decay and copper.

His throat? Intact, if heavily scarred. His voice? A gravelly remnant of what it had been. His wife? Huddling with hunters, but alive. His complexion? Well, he had seen better days.

Curiously, he also found himself to no longer be attuned with the elemental magic he wielded as a brigand. Instead, almost everything he did revolved around hexes, blood, and necromancy. What a strange thing to discover he could inherently conjure the undying to do his bidding, though he prefers not to. They make him a mite uncomfortable.

Confused by this turn of events but relieved to have another chance, Hadyn decided to turn his life around and help the disenfranchised orphans of Sornieth with all of his ill-gotten gains. He became a local legend and fathered dozens of children with his beloved wife, extending a charitable hand wherever he was needed. The denizens of a small village of Snappers at the far reaches of the Shattered Plains built a hero-shrine to him and a holiday centered around his generosity is now celebrated on every winter Solstice alongside the emergence of the Nocturnes.

The Hunt for Dahaka

Ha, no, but really. He decided to track Dahaka down across Sornieth and tear his wings off.

His search led him from Cairnstone Rest to the Scarred Wasteland to the Viridian Labyrinth and the Southern Icefield. He looped around the continent countless times with Damiana always on his heels, finally landing amidst a massive battle at the foot of the Pillar of the World. The dragon he once knew as an Arcane Fae was now parading around as a Plague Mirror named Hashakgik, a feat accomplished through twisted rituals that drew the essence of the Shade out of the ether. Hadyn watched in awe and anger as the dragon he meant to slaughter was unceremoniously knocked clear off the mortal coil by his own dark, shadowy pawn.

It was quite the way to go. It looked painful and satisfying. But still. That was meant for him.

Rather than immediately leave, Hadyn staked out The Abandoned in the aftermath of the struggle, watching as dragons floundered in the wastes and struggled to put the pieces back together. Entire clans were seemingly decimated, homes destroyed, nests ruined, and the survivors were shaken and weak. They would have been the perfect prey and it would have been quite easy to revert back to his old ways, save for one thing.

Mia. She was a brilliant dragon made of pure light and radiating peace, a dragon that Hadyn had never seen before in his entire life. Yet, he was transfixed on her, the feeling of deja vu so strong that it became an obsession. He knew her from somewhere, he hadto know her from somewhere. And more than knowing her, he felt immediately drawn to her, like their destinies were intertwined in a way he never would have thought possible. When even Damiana began to express interest in her--likewise convinced that she knew her from somewhere--Hadyn swallowed down his anger and ill-intent and initiated contact.

Mia’s eyes glowed with delight upon their meeting.

She announced, proudly, that after so many years, she had finally found her Charge.

The Graveborn

The pieces fell into place after that, one after another.

Mia was one of the Myrian Six, a group of adventurers who had split into two following a rather nasty happening in the Hewn City. One, he learned, which was organized by the dragon he had known as Dahaka and The Abandoned had known as Hashakgik. Like Hadyn, they had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to track him down, a feat that proved nigh impossible due to his ability to shapeshift. At the forefront of the Six was Ne’Aht, a Pearlcatcher necromancer who had succeeded in trailing a certain train of “pilgrims” through Dragonhome that bore the seal of their nemesis’ lab.

Pilgrims that Hadyn later robbed, causing a chain reaction of events that nearly flushed the morpher out of hiding.

Ne’Aht had staked out Hadyn’s men thinking Hadyn might have been Dahaka. When Dahaka sent an army of undead to liberate his possessions, it was Ne’Aht who reanimated Hadyn by borrowing some of Mia’s healing power to, essentially, bring him back fully from the dead. With Mia’s magic coursing through his veins, it was no wonder he felt so instantly attached to the Guardian. In time, his loyalty to her grew.

Now trusted enough to run her clan in her stead, Hadyn now acts as the figurehead for the steadily growing ranks of what once was the Myrian Six, now known as “The Graveborn” in his honor. It’s a strange place to be but, if he could wrangle a crew of murderous thieves, running a clan of reasonable dragons will be a cakewalk. Right?

Personality

Hadyn is a curious critter.

Though he radiates necromantic magic and speaks like he swallowed glass, he has a strange sort of charisma that attracts people to him. While he tends to solve his problems with violence, others can’t help but be wooed by his silver tongue and his charming sense of humor. Be it lady or (as he prefers) man, he tends to be followed by an entourage of curious, infatuated clinger-ons that he keeps around to mostly boost his ego.

To those who have earned his respect, however, Hadyn is an intensely loyal ally and a very dedicated leader. Those who serve under him never cease to be surprised by the lengths he’ll go to to ensure their well-being and success, even to the extent of losing his own life once upon a time. Even those who disagree with his past and tendencies can’t help but admire the trait, grumbling from afar about how much they loathe him but secretly wishing him success. Talons are constantly crossed that his ill-breeding will one day leave him.

But not all is good. In private, Hadyn is a troubled dragon, physically ailing from his reanimation and struggling to keep tabs on the ones he cares about. While he now has a very cavalier attitude toward his own death, he fears for those around him, especially his wife. He has a need to control every aspect of those around him, an urge born of paranoia that he struggles to keep buried deep, deep in the back of his mind. Though his moral compass is extremely skewed, he has a lingering fear of driving the closest to his heart away from him through means of manipulation and abuse in his attempts to keep them safe, secure, and always under his watchful eye.

Eventually, it’ll heal. He won’t be as scared of loss. At least that’s what his wife says, and she’s always right.

… Right?