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+----- Thread: Nichol Kless (/thread-269.html)
Nichol Kless - Alusq - 06-04-2014
Name: Nichol Kless
Age: 20
Gender: Male
Nation/Allegiance: Lycia; Thria (formerly Etruria)
Appearance/Description: Nichol stands slightly taller than average height, wielding a lance left-handed. He has light skin, black hair (formerly short and well-kept but now slightly longer and given only cursory brushing), and blue-grey eyes. Nichol prefers to wear only light armor, which is light grey (almost white) in color and unassuming in appearance. Underneath he wears a blue jacket and grey pants, as well as brown gloves and boots (which are slightly reïnforced with aforementioned armor). Nichol is somewhat paranoid in nature and fights relatively aggressively.
Bio/Backstory: Nichol grew up in a middle-class Etrurian family. His only sibling dying of sickness at a young age, he knew that he would soon have to provide for his family. One day there were Etrurian knights in town advertising an exposition of sorts— aspiring sword- and lancefighters were invited to attend and compete for border guard positions, which were billed as esteemed and honorable due to the threat of Lycian invasion.
Nichol barely lasted through half of the tournament, and he was sent home to go back to his devices. However, a robed figure visited his residence a week later and notified him that the border guard had changed their minds. A sage of some sort, the figure told Nichol that his average lanceplay was sufficient for now, and would soon be honed into something greater.
What Nichol did not know is that the sage had recruited him to a Lycian collaborationist group that aimed to accelerate the conquest of Etruria that was to come.
In the year -1, Nichol bade farewell to his parents as he left town to travel nearer to the Etruria-Lycia border with some other guardsmen. He reached the border fortress successfully, where he trained with the spear and even struck it up with some household practitioners of magic, curious about the books that they used to wield supernatural power. His first mission was to deter "bandits" who meant to cross the border from Lycia to Etruria. The platoon defended the border with ease using intimidation, taking acre not to step across anything that could be considered a line.
Three months passed, and Nichol wondered what could possibly be happening as the mages began muttering about a new church. News came in— not all of it truthful. Even still, Nichol believed every word that he read or heard: the church being created in outcry over an Etrurian repeal of religious freedom, the Etrurian capital mobilising an army of elites to drive the rest of the country into thralldom, and most ominous of it all the provincial leaders across the country being ferried from their seats into the gallows.
None of this "news" was true, obviously. But in the isolated border fortress that now let no man leave, on full alert, it was impossible to know this. A courier arrived at the fort— the sage who had recruited Nichol several months ago. He told the guardsmen that all of the rumors were true and that a clash between Etruria and Lycia was imminent. Worst of all, the feared corrupt conquerors supposedly had spies in the very fortress. A witch hunt was carried out in the next few months: one by one each mage disappeared, and then the border guards themselves began to accuse each other of being members of the conspiracy. Nichol himself was one of the top accusers, convincing his colleagues that this man and that man must be connected to the conspiracy by some means.
Then the sage intervened, revealing that he was from Thria, a Lycian territory.
The sage's name was Rengav, and he explained that the conspiracy that the border guards had been so amok about was advancing faster than ever. Showing Nichol and the guards a petition for Lycian intervention bearing the forged signatures of minor lords across the land, every man left in the border fortress joined the Lycian cause at that moment, believing the petition legitimate.
Minus one day: News of an Etrurian spy caught in Ostia arrived, relayed by Rengav, the collaborationists' trusted source of information in this time of extreme tension. They were sent on a mission to a city near the border with the objective of destabilising the area.
"You must understand, that petition is a forgery! I did not sign any such—" were the last words of the city's mayor. Nichol and his remaining comrades had been instructed to regroup— but not at their border fortress. Their new base of operations was to be in Thria.
Nichol left the purple Etrurian cloak he had donned until then in the mayor's house as it burned. He and a few others opted to ride an isolated route through the mountains to Thria rather than pass by Ostia. They encountered no bandits, but they did encounter scores of Lycian civilians, whose homes Nichol suspected were destroyed by marauding Etrurians. But what he heard from some of them was surprising— more than a few of them insisted that it was Lycian armor that had tromped through the streets torching the houses on those nights. Nichol told them that he could not help them and rode on, wondering if Lycia was really a better option than Etruria. At once, he recalled his parents. He had definitely abandoned them now: what was to happen to them? On the edge of a cliff, he rested as he leafed through the pages of a magic tome he had borrowed from one of the mages in the border fortress almost a year ago, trying to clear his mind. Nichol still couldn't read the arcane script of the tome; he hadn't gotten friendly enough with the mages to learn that much. He slammed it shut in frustration and looked up to see one of his comrades staring at him, wide-eyed.
That comrade was sent off the cliff in addition to the magic tome.
Nichol arrived in Thria, reporting that one of his comrades' horses had unfortunately lost its footing and sent the poor man off a cliff. Six months passed by in a blur as he found himself doing domestic tasks for Thria's church, such as escorting priests or organising mass tome-burnings. Nichol was known as a young lancefighter who had grown up not in Etruria, but a village that had been razed by Etrurians. His life was eerily similar to before— Rengav sending him off on missions somewhere. Rengav was not a sage but a bishop: although he had mentioned off-hand once that he was not a devout man, the Church of the Preservation of Sanctity was good for the Lycian economy and culture. Nichol was waiting, but he wasn't sure what for... until he was informed one day that he had been promoted from church enforcer to a full-fledged imperial guardsman. Later that day, he learned that Rengav had unfortunately fallen from a balcony and died, apparently in religious fervor as he supposedly believed that he had done enough to be able to enter heaven early by killing himself. The man was condemned by the church for his arrogant act of blasphemy.
Nichol wondered who could have actually killed Rengav, and exactly what sort of fate awaited in the Lycian imperial corps.
((If the bio is too implausible/plot-related, I can revise it. Rengav's name is a nod to Wagner of FE6 since they're from the same place and play similar roles as manipulators.))
Additional information:
·Although Nichol's allegiance is with Lycia presently, his mind would probably be changed if/when he finds out that most of the things he was told about Etruria were lies. He currently believes that an Etruria that submits to Lycian rule would have less bloodshed than one that doesn't.