| Relatives | Clan Tycho |
|---|---|
| Languages | Common, Draconic |
| Affiliations | None |
| Marital Status | Single |
| Species | Dragonborn (Brass) |
| Gender | Male |
| Height | 7'3" |
| Weight | 364lbs |
| Eye Color | Yellow |
Nassir Tycho is a Brass Dragonborn zealot barbarian, searching the world for glory for himself and his clan. He is a character in the Within the Wicked Wilds Community Campaign.
Physical Appearance
Nassir is a hulking presence, wrought from years of physical labour, training, and combat. Towering over most others, elongated scales and spines dot his body, alongside a pair of immense horns. Clan ritual scars circle his arms and torso, etched into the brown and grey mottled scales to commemorate both victories and defeats.
Personality
The personality of Nassir is a dour and practical one. He is often gratingly blunt to those he does not know, and has no interest in dulling down his opinions for the sake of others, though rarely intends to offend. Much of his personality is dedicated to his almost religious dedication to the traditions of his people, the tenets of which dictate almost every major choice he might make. He has a strong aversion to any kind of falsity, considering deceit to be the hallmark of the coward, who has no place in the clan. However, these principles do not stand in the way of a chivalric respect and fraternal friendship which also act as hallmarks for his conduct.
History
Early Childhood
Nassir was born in the winter of 866 to a family of 5, alongside a sister and a brother. His parents were lesser members of their clan of warriors, both by deed and by blood. His childhood was not an unusual one, and he and his siblings grew to the age of 5 as most young ones do - however, past this point, they would be subject to the harsh, draconian traditions of Clan Tycho.
Upon reaching the age of 5, every child of the Ordu begins the series of trials that determine their place in the clan. During the first night of their fifth year, Nassir and his siblings were taken from their beds, and brought into the wilds. They would be left there, defenseless, to fend for themselves for three days to ensure they had the strength to live amongst their elders.
First Trial
Nassir and his siblings were left approximately 10 miles from the settlement of Clan Tycho. Cold and alone, they fought to survive even the first night, abandoned in the dead of winter, and only managed to do so by finding an uprooted tree to huddle in the relative shelter of its roots. During the second day, Nassir suggested that the three of them split up to collect material to build shelter for the coming night, and find something to eat. This would be the last time he would see his sister. She vanished without trace searching on her own, and left Nassir and his brother Arven to huddle together alone. The final day of their first trial saw the true challenge of their ordeal - it happened that the uprooted tree they had been sheltering in was the home of a large boar. Upon its return, it attacked the two five year old boys, who were only just barely able to fight it off with the branches they had used to construct their primitive lodging. Nassir was gravely wounded during the encounter, though would be granted a mark of great honour - his first ritual victory scar, snaking around his wrist upon his return to the village the following day. The loss of Nassir's sister left a scar of its own, one of many marking losses Nassir would face.
Second Trial
Two years since the first ritual trial Nassir and his brother faced, it became time for their second. Now seven years old, they had both begun training in the basics of martial combat. Armed with primitive spears, they were cast out once again on their own on a hunt. They were to return with a beast, or to not return at all. The trial was an individual one, so Nassir and Arven went their separate ways in search of a prize to bring home. After several hours of searching and tracking, Nassir came upon and ambushed a young buck, catching it on his spear and killing it nearly instantly. Content with his trophy, he slung the deer over his shoulders and began his trek back to the village. About an hour passed marching through the trees with naught but the whispers of the wind passing through the trees - but...there! He heard the sound of someone calling out, weakly, for help. Following the noise, Nassir came upon Arven, lying wounded in the mud, alongside the corpse of a scorched beast Nassir could not recognize. Rushing to his brother's side, and realizing the severity of his wounds, he was faced with a difficult decision - rescue his brother, thus bringing Arven a great shame, or leave him to die. The answer, for Nassir, was simple.
Nassir dropped the carcass of the deer he had been carrying, and tied a thin rope around its legs and to his waist. With a grunt, he hefted Arven onto his shoulders and began the two hour journey home, covered in a vile mixture of mud and the blood of his own brother, through the fields of groaning trees.
Several hours later, the village had begun to write the two brothers off as dead. As the fires were lit approaching dusk, those on patrol were greeted with the sight of a stumbling, exhausted Nassir struggling to continue to walk. He made it to within 50 paces of the village edge before he collapsed, bringing both the sentries and his parents rushing to the two young dragonborn. It would not be until the following day that the story of what had happened would be told.
Shame
Nassir's actions in saving his brother had brought his sibling great shame. Through the following years, Arven began to resent him more and more - where tasks had once been cooperative, they became competitive. Everything Nassir did, his brother felt the need to exceed it to justify himself. As the years went on, and they grew older together, Arven's grudge grew; he would go so far as to damage Nassir's equipment to sabotage his trials and hunts, spike his drinks with toxic berries, anything that might have given him an edge. His actions did not go unnoticed - Nassir knew what his brother had been doing - but chose to let him continue. He could not risk losing another sibling.
When the two had grown to the age of fourteen, the worst thing that could have happened to their relationship, did. Both their father and mother were killed in battle, leaving the two young boys to fend for themselves. Alone, and with no supervision, they grew apart. They may have still been marked as brothers, but they rarely spoke and never trained together. The shame of Arven's rescue from his second trial was too much to bear.
Blooding
By the time Nassir had grown to sixteen, the age of adulthood in his Clan, he had far outgrown his brother. While this added another level to Arven's resentment, it was not nearly as incensing as Nassir's success. He had become something of a young leader in the village, and had progressed abnormally rapidly through his training. When the time came to perform the final trial, the ritual of Blooding, he was fully prepared. His brother, however, was not. Arven's grudges had driven him to shirk his responsibilities in favour of spite-fueled acts of sabotage and vandalism. When they, and three other aspirants, were sent out with their spears to hunt a beast worthy of their blooding, it was he who would trail behind the others. After two days of stalking the swamps, they found their prey.
As the hunting party crept through the undergrowth, they spotted a giant crocodile, abnormally large even by the standards of the species. Close to thirty feet long, by Nassir's estimate, the beast was a bulky mass of thick scale and rippling muscle. As the young dragonborn approached the beast from all sides, they leveled their spears in preparation. Jiite, daughter of Hereern the smith, struck first, followed by the four others. Nassir assaulted the creature from the rear-left quadrant, thrusting his spear into its hip in the hopes to immobilize the immense creature. Arven rushed forward as well, striking the beast from the same size. Jiite, the first to attack, was caught by the crocodile's immense tail as it whipped around. The sound was awful, and the audible crunch of her ribs only preceded the spine-shattering crack as her body was hurled into a nearby tree. She collapsed into the mud, dead before she hit the ground. The four others continued their assault, leaping onto the beast to attempt to stay away from its jaws and tail. Nassir hooked his claws into the hide of the monster, stabbing repeatedly at its head and eyes in an attempt to blind it. Duular, another of the aspirants, was not so fortunate - as the crocodile writhed, its jaws hooked onto him, and clamped shut. His screams were cut short by the beast rolling over onto his head. They were now just three. They continued their assault, re-invigorated, thrusting at gaps in the monster's scales that had been made by their earlier attacks. The last of the other aspirants, Aviil, son of Bardan, was thrown from the beast's back and crushed underneath it as it continued to thrash, leaving only Nassir and Arven to continue their battle. Still striking at the crocodile's head, Nassir let out a roar, both of rage and of grief, and drove his spear into the back of the creature's head. It finally punctured, properly. He leaned on the haft, driving it deeper into the base of the beast's skull, and kept pushing until the creature finally let out a rush of air, and lay dead.
And that's when he felt it.
A piercing, throbbing pain in his back.
He began to turn, but couldn't fully. There was something there, preventing it.
Arven stepped back.
He no longer held his spear.
Betrayal
Nassir paused for a moment, stunned. Surely, he thought, his brother must have missed the mark, trying to fell the beast. It would make sense, he had shirked his training frequently. But it was no mistake. Nassir watched horrified, breathing heavily, as his brother drew his knife. Unable to react, Nassir tried to stand as his brother pounced on him, years of anger and resentment finally spilling out into murder. Arven's knife drove into Nassir's shoulder, right below the collarbone. After the intensity of the battle, all Nassir could do to shove Arven off so he could stand.
Arven leapt at him again.
Nassir swung his hand with all his might, a desperate swing to defend himself.
crrrchk
The two spiraled off the back of the crocodile into the mud, the spear still stuck in Nassir's back shattering on impact with the ground. Nassir groans. His brother does not.
Aftermath
Nassir's desperate defense had cost him the rest of his family. He looked in horror as Arven lay in the mud just a few feet from him, his head angled unnaturally to the side, neck shattered from the ferocious impact. He felt sick. He hadn't meant to do that, he just wanted Arven to back up...had he? The simple doubt that his actions had been purely defensive wracked him with guilt. Of course their relationship had been strained...but he would never do that, would he? He struggled to his feet, dragging Arven's knife from his shoulder. He looked at it for a moment, observing the wear and tear on the subtle carvings that their parents had made when crafting the piece. Gingerly, he drew his own knife, and let it fall from his hands into the mud. He stumbled towards the crocodile, Arven's knife in hand, and fell to his knees in front of the beast. Using the knife, he severed an enormous foot from the creature as proof of his success. Once he had finished, he again struggled to his feet.
He turned to look at his brother, lying in the mud.
"Ni su'cuy, gar kyr'adyc. Ni partayli, gar darasuum." He whispered the rite, voice hoarse and nearly gone from weeping. He wasn't convinced his brother deserved it. He wasn't convinced he deserved to say it.
Nassir knelt in the mud, and picked up his discarded knife, placing it in Arven's hand.
"Rest well, brother."
He stood, and began his long struggle back to the village. He did not look back.
Return
Even before he returned to the village, Nassir had resolved to never utter a word of what happened in the swamps. He had already broken his brother's honour once - it was better for him to have died in glory, fighting a worthy foe. When he collapsed into the arms of the village healer, Ruusaan, he weakly explained the spear embedded in his back as an accident - he had fallen on it when he had been bucked by the colossal crocodile. Of course, no aspirant would ever try to attack their vod, especially not one's own brother. Nobody questioned his story. Nassir was left to ruminate, alone, haunted by his choices. Even as he was granted the honour of becoming a fully fledged clan warrior, as the laurels were draped around his shoulders, and the armour fastened to his body, he stood silent, staring at the woods outside the boundaries of the village.
I am here. You are not. But I remember, so you are eternal.
That night, Nassir sat outside his modest home, squatting on his haunches. He turned over Arven's knife in his hands. How did it come to this, he thought to himself. Looking to the woods once again, he raised the pauldron that now adorned his scaled shoulders, and continued his spiral of scars, the method by which Clan Tycho makes their records. He cut into the flesh of his shoulder, letting the blood flow down his arm and drip onto the dirt below. Placing the knife by his side, he reached down and thrust his fingers into the earth, taking a handful. Muttering a traditional cant, he packed the wound with the dirt to ensure the scar was darkened. There had been no victory this day. He would always remember that. He stood, wrapping his shoulder in linens to staunch the bleeding, and stared one last time into the treeline, as if he expected Arven to emerge from between the darkened trunks, before somberly opening the door and walking inside.
The Scouring
Several years later, in the year 885, much was the same in Tycho. The funeral rites for the fallen aspirants of Nassir's party had come and gone, as had three others in the following years. He worked as a sentry, left on hunts with other warriors, and fulfilled his roles as dictated by the traditional ways of his people. It was in this particular year, however, that everything would change. Nassir lead an Oya'tsad, a hunting party, into the swamps in search of food for the village. They had been successful, the four young warriors returning with as many deer and with their satchels rich with smaller game. Nassir lead proudly on, guiding the party back to the settlement, as was his role as the leader of the group. As the trees of the swamp began to thin, however, they realized the light did not grow with the retreat of the tree canopy - for the sun was shrouded in smoke.
The warriors increased their pace, from a steady walk, to a jog, to a run. They discarded their catch as they ran, ditching the (quite literally) dead weight, and drew their weapons. Nothing could have prepared them for what they saw.
As they reached the edge of the clearing, they saw their village in flames. Some warriors called battle cries, others rushed the village's children away from the carnage. Dozens of warriors already lay dead. As the hunting party sprinted across the clearing to the village, the cause of the destruction became clear - hunched in the flames of the communal hall that marked the center of the settlement was a fully grown, fire-spewing Red Dragon. It swung from side to side, trying to shake its massive wings to rid itself of the warriors clambering on its back and hacking at any exposed flesh they could find. Nassir screamed as he charged with his siblings-in-arms.
"OYA!"
The battle was unlike any they had ever seen. Fallen brothers and sisters were scattered across the ground like jacks. Flames whipped across the field, from the engulfed houses, the dragon, and some of the warriors alike. The elder warrior Kuurta, the man responsible for Nassir's training from childhood, was bisected by a swipe of the dragon's tail, a fountain of blood spraying from where his torso had been moments before. Two of Nassir's hunting party were crushed by a colossal slap from the monster's wing, their bones crumbling like brittle Haarshun bread. The warriors were undeterred. As every second went by, more and more fighters began to slash, stab, and hack at the monster's legs, wings, and neck. As Nassir joined the assault on the creature's legs, he saw the Clan's Alor, Hedaar, stride fearlessly towards the beast, swinging his cleaver. The immense weapon bit into the knee of the dragon, severing its tendons and bringing it to a crushing halt. Bolstered by the display, the remaining warriors sang a rallying cry, continuing their assault with renewed vigour. The beast began to waver, staggering under the weight of dozens of warriors and hundreds of wounds.
It staggers.
It falls.
But it had not finished wreaking its toll.
As the beast lay, writhing in its death throes, it whipped around. Hedaar, the greatest warrior among them, stood in the path of its mighty jaws, bracing his sword against his forearm. The warriors watched in horror as the dragon clamped down on him, blood spurting from between its teeth. But it stopped. Instantly. As its jaws fell open, the mangled body of Hedaar tumbled from between its teeth, leaving his blade buried in the roof of its mouth, the tip glinting, tinged with blood, protruding from the top of its head. He had made a final sacrifice to ensure the rest of them would live.
When Nassir had left with his hunting party three days before, the Tycho clan had numbered 164.
As the dust settled, there were but 38.
Leaving the Homeland
-TBD-
Languages
Common, Draconic, Tycho'a (Clan Tycho's traditional language, yes I burned a language slot for this and no it doesn't provide any utility)
Nassir's Mental Notes
Marion
Lambda
Sneeze
Kompi
Paris
Sabbatical
Jim
Attacks and Weapons
Nassir's preferred method of combat is with a massive greataxe, though he is prone when enraged to disregard his weapon and resort to animalistic brawling with teeth, claws and horns.
