Oren

"This world aches for salvation, and yet we deny its heroes." —Alistair Oren entered the world owing it blood. His mother died in childbirth, and his father—a soldier bound to the ranks of the Mosune—was absent so often that memory reduced him to fragments: a mailed silhouette at the door, a calloused hand on his shoulder, the smell of steel and wet leather, then months—sometimes years—of nothing. By the time Oren understood grief, he had already mistaken it for normalcy. The world taught him its laws early. Loss came first. Fairness never. Hunger made a thief of him. Anger made the rest easy. He drifted toward a life destined to end in a ditch or at a rope's snap, until the Collective—a militant brotherhood established to defend humanity against the corruption enveloping Tya—took him in. Within the Collective, Oren found purpose for the first time. Training tempered his fury, and discipline gave it direction. Yet, the order's unity felt brittle: one faction clung to rigid principles of light and faith; the other embraced darker, more expedient means. Oren became frustrated with what he saw as meaningless conflict. Protect the weak, punish the cruel, and put an end to the suffering plaguing the realm. Such were his creeds. His pragmatism, though admirable, earned him enemies who threatened to undo him, enemies whose thirst for power now far outstripped any former sense of goodwill. Unknowingly, or perhaps naively, Oren placed himself at the forefront of a growing struggle within the Collective, his pursuits now a shell of their shared past. To this day, he does not know which hand of the Collective set a force upon him, but it delivered a curse so savage that it remade him entirely. Cold nested in his veins as his body iced over, and his presence itself became a hazard, as if winter followed his every step. From this, Oren stood both more powerful yet more isolated than ever before. Fellowship became impossible, as no one could remain near him for long without feeling that unnatural cold bite through armor, cloth, and bone. Where Oren once found a home, he now chose to step away, lest he be claimed by the Collective's squabbles and finished for good. He would set off across Tya in search of a cure, or at the very least, a place to die on his own terms. Years passed, and cryptic rumors reached him—that of a crystalline vessel housing the primordial flame of a Phoenix, hidden within the walls of a volcano. Descending into the pit with frost in his blood, Oren endured what few could, and as he emerged, ice and fire now coiled together within him, a new weapon was born: A man cursed twice-over, now capable of enduring himself. In his absence, though, much had transpired. Two factions splintered from the Collective, namely the Chaos Dominion and the Supreme Arbiters, and while both claimed their right to supremacy, Oren remained all the wiser, for in truth, they were but two heads of the same beast. The only question that remained for Oren was how he would bring this beast to heel.