art credit
2 → kite/idiacanthidae
6 → minicow
blackened (giarkh idal)
age: immortal, appears early 20s
nicknames: blackened/black, godkiller
origins: kharta circa ~800 years before the present
appearance: fairly short (5’0”) and small. bright gold eyes
background:
blackened was raised by his mother (jhaya idal), and has no recollection or even speculation of who his father was and what happened to him, though rumor has it that he was murdered by jhaya. jhaya raised blackened in an extremely isolated and sheltered environment, until she died when blackened was somewhere around thirteen years of age. rumor also has it that blackened was the one who killed her.
as a result of his upbringing and his temperament, blackened has no friends and little outside contact other than with mukhari sharak, a fellow (more normal, and more mediocre) doctor. he later became acquainted many of mukhari’s friends in turn, including corosa nyem, whom somehow managed to cultivate an actual friendship with blackened. as for the rest of mukhari’s friends, most of them were not on good terms with black.
personality:
blackened was raised from birth to be a doctor and tries to do a damn good job of it, except for the fact that he’s a violently misogynistic psychopath who targets and kills women and girls. even when he’s not killing his patients his methodology can be more than a little bit deranged: he’s been known to break patients’ legs in order to keep them in bed.
in general, it’s fairly easy to detect that there is something the slightest bit off about blackened. he is permanently angry and easy to set off and hostile towards everyone for absolutely no reason. he is also deeply agoraphobic and will not leave the house unless he’s with someone he trusts, and he trusts very few people. blackened is also highly unreasonable about taking care of the sick and injured: see note about breaking legs. though he tends to kill them afterwards if they’re of the wrong gender.
after achieving immortality, blackened’s sanity grows even more questionable. on the surface he seems more pleasant than before: he exchanges some of his ill temper in favor of a maniacal sort of cheer, shakes off most of his agoraphobia, and learns how to maintain halfway-pleasant social interactions with the rest of the world. but a little deeper down it turns out that blackened has frayed considerably and is permanently on the verge of killing everyone. the only thing stopping him are some new feelings of guilt and empathy that may or may not be the active work of the otherworlder(s) possessing him.
he is also constantly under siege by hallucinations and nightmares, and while he’s doing a fairly good job of keeping himself from indiscriminately murdering everyone, he has a bad tendency to abuse his newfound power of driving other people mad. in other words, he is still an awful person.
relationships:
mukhari sharak was one of blackened’s first and only friends for a very long time, as mukhari’s incredibly tolerant personality made him able to deal with blackened. their friendship was also aided by mukhari’s own brand of stupidity, which made him oblivious to blackened’s hobby of murder until corosa nyem practically grabbed him by the collar and rubbed his face into it. ever since that realization, their friendship awkwardly deteriorated, especially when they suddenly found themselves on the opposite sides of an extremely bitter fight. hundreds of years later all that has been put behind them and they are on reasonably amiable terms, but blackened’s new brand of insanity and mukhari’s slowly developing fortitude ensure that there is still a fairly solid rift between them.
kherat sharak was less of a friend and more of a sometimes-ally. he could see blackened for exactly what he was, but was enough of a bastard himself to say and do nothing about it, as he found blackened to be fairly useful to his own shady, nefarious ends. their relationship was mostly short and professional but blackened displayed certain degrees of loyalty and respect towards kherat that he did not have for anyone else, until corosa nyem came along.
corosa nyem was actually a friend of blackened’s, who could somehow acknowledge all of blackened’s flaws yet still see something of worth in his character, though even corosa had trouble articulating exactly what those worthy qualities were. however, because of this, blackened rapidly developed a near-fanatical level of devotion to corosa that has never quite died away, even centuries later. in fact, blackened believed and believes in corosa like one would believe in a god.
