ghost (korost sharak)
age: immortal, but late 20s when he disappears
nicknames: goes by ghost! that’s all folks
origins: kharta circa ~800 years before the present
otherworlder: shatterface (seventh)
appearance: pretty badly scarred, and though he has been in lots of fights, most of those scars aren’t on his face. the ones that are on his face are from when one of his friends thought it’d be funny to push him down a hill. a really rocky hill.
background:
oldest of the sharak kids, and perhaps a little bit guilty for the fate that befell his brothers kherat and mukhari as teensy little days-old babies. but he tried his hardest to make things right and really, he did a pretty good job of it. still he wished that he could have prevented the whole catastrophe in the first place and was so guilty that he finally simply up and ran away from home one day, thinking that it was for the best.
then he went adventuring as a mercenary. he spent quite a lot of time in both symesa and sachra, but eventually he wandered back home to kharta. there he was part of the team that found and awoke corosa and company from their 50-year long sleep and subsequently brought them back to kharta proper, and there ghost met his little brothers again, after they were all grown-up. they didn’t recognize him and he kept it that way.
but his being in kharta made him severely uncomfortable, and also severely introspective, and there he came to a lot of big heavy life-changing conclusions that he tried to articulate to corosa, who probably didn’t quite understand. in any case, whatever realizations ghost made there eventually led him away from kharta again. and this time he didn’t come back.
he disappeared with hardly a warning and hardly a trace and then he never turned up again.
personality:
ghost appears to be fairly standoffish at first, especially when meeting new people. this is because ghost is a very careful person and likes to figure out what sort of situation he’s dealing with before he makes any moves. when he does make his move, he tends to upset everything. he is a difficult person.
and at the core of it, ghost is a nasty piece of work. like so many of his peers he doesn’t feel much remorse about slaying other people and he’s picked up some questionable habits, like scalping his enemies. he doesn’t usually torture people but he does think it necessary sometimes and won’t go out of his way to stop it. ghost has a very matter-of-fact attitude towards these things and none of it bothers him much.
he has lightning-fast reaction times and moves very decisively. he is competent at most anything he puts his hand to. people like him for that, despite the rest of his flaws. it’s good to have someone like ghost around, because ghost gets things done and he does them well.
ghost can be massively intolerant about certain matters and unbearable to be around when those matters are brought up, because it is impossible to get him to even think about changing his mind. he also feels very strongly about matters of faith, belief, and religion, though not about pushing his own beliefs onto anyone else. but due to his own particular beliefs, he is of the opinion that everyone should have some greater power to answer to. ie, ghost can tolerate all sorts of religions — but he can’t tolerate a lack of one.
relationships:
mukhari and kherat sharak were ghost’s younger brothers, whom ghost never got to know well. their souls were stolen a few days after their birth and destroyed and it was all ghost could do to get one soul back to them, which they had to share up until kherat died. ghost felt badly about his role in this disaster and left home to escape his guilt. when he came back to kharta, both his brothers were grown up and very different people. ghost spent some time with both of them, and could be uncharacteristically cordial around them, and also uncharacteristically distant. but in the end, he seemed faintly proud of both of them.
satero e ankhar and ghost hated each other, though ghost’s hatred wasn’t very particular — ghost hated quite a lot of people, and satero happened to be one of them. but satero hated ghost like burning and carried that hatred away with him even hundreds of years later, long after ghost had disappeared. this is quite possibly because satero and ghost were very similar, though mostly they shared the unpleasant character traits.
corosa nyem saw in ghost some strange sort of transcendence, despite all of ghost’s unpleasant qualities. in corosa’s mind ghost was something bigger than life, and fated to reach some greater end than the rest of them. ghost, however, was mostly unaware of all of this. he liked corosa because corosa was intelligent and ruthless and capable, and ghost was glad to follow behind him.
