Appearance
Full Name (Presumably): Sarcand Bakari
Given Name: Akhen
Age: 24
Height: 1m85 - 6'1"
Weight: 185 lbs - 82kg
Race: Human
Gender: Male
Date of Birth: 30th of Spring 493AV
Birthplace: Ahnatep
Language
Fluent Language: Common
Basic Language: Shiber
Poor Language: Pavi
Description
He's the colour of polished ebony, a deep mahogany, with eyes the stuff of a black, starless night and a distinctive anatomy of hair, an afro. Akhen stands tall and lean with the economy of a panther. A rugged face is the start of his features; the strong, tight jaws, full lips and wide, flat nose. Strong, graceful shoulders slope down from his neck to his long, powerful arms – arms built from years of mercenary work and a childhood spent championing in an illegal ring of bloodsports. He stands, moves and fights like a dancer with his long, muscled legs and slim waist.
A light vesture consisting of his weathered jerkin covers his simple shirt, a belt holds up his light pants and light boots cover his feet. Jutting slyly from his left shoulder is the hilt of his sheathed sword, which is held up by a leather sword-harness. Almost always does a pipe burning Blue Vision hang on Akhen's lips, so everyone he meets is bound to find him in a state of euphoria; but because he's been burning the herb since his early years nobody can be sure.
Character Concept
Personality: How much blood and corpses does a person have to see until they tire of it all? How many times does a person have to see the life snuffed out of another being until they grow desensitized by it?
Akhen knows. He is one of these people.
Akhen finds no pleasure in killing, his youth has factored in that. He's not heartless, just numb to the act. But his conscience is still intact unless one begins to think otherwise. The young man is very upfront with people, if he doesn't like something or someone there's a very high chance he'll tell them. If someone draws a sword against him, he will reply to it equally and swiftly without hesitation. If someone asks for help, he may help, only if he sees that the individual needs it.
Whether he spends one night in the comfort of a lavish mansion and other in the cold, muddy barracks of a battlefield the next, one can be certain that Akhen won't complain – it's not in his nature. As a born survivor, Akhen has learnt to adapt to whatever situation he's in and isn't ashamed to leave something incomplete if he thinks it's a waste of his time and energy.
To think of his demeanour as cold, distant, rude, or hardhearted would be looking at the desert-born Akhen one-dimensionally. Akhen is in fact a talker and scholarly individual, his love of literature is unbridled and though not the one to start conversations, Akhen can and will most often talk to someone if they initiate a conversation; which in his presence would dispel the myths that Blue Vision addles the mind and makes a habitual smoker a lazy, unenlightened herb-fiend.
Aspirations: To survive.
Beliefs: Though not religious, one could classify Akhen as a spiritual individual. He's very critical of the gods, one's such as Ivak are irrational, querulous and nonsensical because of their actions
Likes: Blue Vision, Literature, Living.
Dislikes: Many things...
History
Within the walls of bordelloes and seraglios; friezed in ivory, azure and gold, where the golden dunes of Eyktol stretch eternally into a glittering sea of mystery to meet the bleached skulls of forgotten wanderers. Within the blood-pits and mansion floors, stained crimson and bronze with blood, laden in the corpses and shattered bones of defiant whores, cheating cut-throats and crooked emissaries, he was born and raised.
His mother would have named him Sarcand and his last name would have been Bakari, like that of his father – but he doesn't know these things. He was named Akhen, and it is because of thus...
In Ahnatep there worked a servant girl, whose poverty had driven her to working for a criminal with ties to the rich and prominent in the city; the man was a relatively moderate malefactor from Sunberth who'd come to make it big in Eyktol by starting his own, private blood-pit. Over the years he gained a following from the most shady and crooked members of Ahnatep's society, the most degenerate and sadistic came to place bets on their contenders and fighters as all blood-pits are known for. But his had a twist, his bloodsports used children instead of grown fighters. Child slaves were brought from all over the city and sometimes from Sylira to fight to the death for these individuals for large sums of money.
The servant girl worked for the man for a few years and one day, she met a charming city guard at the marketplace. The young man was an artist, a painter, but was failing to sell his works in the luxuriant city; upon meeting the servant girl he was so entrapped by her beauty that he spent all his hours painting her and her alone.
Finding the fixation the painter had on her, the girl spent her free time in the company of the artist as his muse. And what began a simple friendship turned intimate, and with that intimacy : passion. What was meant to be night of passionate lovers in the each other's throes would quickly spiral into madness.
Time naturally played its part and whence the girl discovered her pregnancy she began preparing to leave her employer – especially when she discovered she might conceive soon. The night she planned to tell him she overheard him talking to someone...
“Aye, she's with child, a boy most likely... I'll gut her and take the baby for myself once she conceives, it'll be good to raise a fighter of my own!” he chuckled.
With that she began plotting an escape with her lover hastily. For weeks the guard spent his hours selling any of his sell-able paintings, gathering enough gold so he and his lover could sojourn to Kenash where they would begin anew, but their plans were shattered when the guard's friend delivered a message one night and told her that the former had committed suicide. He'd drowned himself, she was told. Distraught to a state of madness, particularly when she asked her lover's friend about the gold and was told there was none, she took a rope and hanged herself; believing that she'd rather they all die together than allow her employer to take her unborn child for his own gains.
Her neck snapped! She hung from the ceiling swaying, but then her womb expelled the child! The employer came rushing down to the room when he heard the baby's wailing and found him sprawled beneath of his dead mother's feet, his umbilical chord still apart of her. Aghast and slightly overjoyed he severed the last thing tying the newborn to his mother and took the bundle. He hired a whore as the boy's nursemaid and named him Akhen, after hearing the name brought good luck from the whore.
Akhen spent his youth watching and learning from the people around him, from cut-throats, crooks, mercenaries, whores, and emissaries. He remembers everyone of them, even the one's who were killed right before his eyes. The boy was naturally drawn to books his days and nights would be spent locked in the ink-blotted pages he found in the manor's library, he learnt to travel to the gallant Sylira, icy Avanthal, stormy Wind Reach, savage Taloba in the those pages in his imagination in those young days.
And killing, that he learnt in his fights in those wretched blood-pits.
As he matured, by his fourteenth Spring, he grew tired of it all, the fighting, the killing. He hated that life and the people who were committed to doing it, even though he'd become his adoptive father's champion. His knuckles had grown numb with the blood of the dull-eyed children who died slumping over, whimpering, as they slipped into death in their final moments never knowing freedom. He wanted out, he wanted to see the world outside Eyktol and he did just that.
One day he took his essentials, packed them in a travelling bag, stole some gold from the man whose face he'd come to loathe and disappeared from the lavish seraglio he'd come to know. Young Akhen soon joined a travelling band of sell-swords, spending his youth in grimy battle from jobs they did before he decided he wasn't experiencing the world the way he wanted too, after a few more jobs the young sell-sword took off on his own... |
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Akhen 
by Akhen on April 30th, 2014, 7:29 pm 
