#gorgeous comm and it's spring break so maybe time for a fic update yay

[dujour13]

Knight-Commander Raqim Ag Adar

art by the wonderful @mooreaux! 💕

character summary below the cut, with some pwotr spoilers

If I Betray My Heart on AO3

The Dragonmarked / Favored Son

Race | Human

Class(es) | Firewarden Ranger

Mythic Path | Angel -> Gold Dragon

Nationality | Rahadoumi

Ethnicity | Qadiran

Religion | Atheist

Gender | Cis straight man, he/him

Profession | Pure Legion scout

Sweetie | Seelah

Skills | Knowledge: Nature, Knowledge: Arcana, Perception

Appearance | Dark olive skin; neat beard; long, thick, black hair usually wrapped in a tagelmust. Eyes so dark brown they’re almost black. He wears the white-and-gold light armor of the Pure Legion but in Avistan rapidly adopts a thick fur cloak.

Personality | Dutiful, responsible, compassionate, rational, gentle but also fierce. A do-the-right-thing kind of guy you can trust. A zealous Rahadoumi atheist and not above some arrogant eyebrow-raising, but this is because he has something to prove to himself. He can’t otherwise rationalize how he treated his father.

Polite but surprisingly warm with those he gets close to. Dry sense of humor—only his eyes laugh. He likes to party more than he lets on. Prone to smoldering temper. No patience for religion but in need of spiritual healing. As the Favored Son and a former refugee he hates being chosen, special, different. Desperate to fit in. He willingly, unquestioningly shoulders burdens placed on him. He has always carried so much. He is a man whose regrets eat him alive.

Arc | How can you forgive yourself when the people you hurt are gone, and you can’t fix what you broke?

Quotes | “You people are dogs. I will join you, as always.”

“Let no man be beholden to a god.”  - First Law of Kalim Onaku

“A Rahadoumi laughs at death—but it’s a shared laugh, not a defiant one.”

“We will find our way.”

“My brother died. I was young. I didn’t understand. I ate what I was given, not noticing he was given nothing. Do not blame my parents. They had a terrible choice: to watch both of us die slowly, or only one. I was chosen to live, and he to die. If I could find him again I would share my food and we would live or die together.”

Story |

Childhood – Born to a family of goatherds in the interior highlands of Qadira, as an infant Raqim was chosen as an offering to a dragon that lived in the mountains to the south. Most children offered to the dragon were never seen again, but every now and then, one was returned to his family bearing the mark of the dragon’s blessing—in Raqim’s case, bronze scales across his shoulders and back. This did not bring his family the luck they had hoped for, because drought and famine swept the region, and when Raqim was six, they were forced to flee across the desert and the sea. Raqim’s mother and brother perished on the voyage. His father heard talk of the prestigious schools of magic in Rahadoum and worked on board a ship in exchange for passage there, with the hope that his dragonmarked son could someday realize his full potential.

Upon arrival, Raqim’s father was forced to hide his Sarenrite faith and accept poorly paid laboring jobs, shoveling sand in Manaket, or later working in the tanneries outside Azir. In the meantime, Raqim went to Rahadoumi school and unlike his father rapidly assimilated, making friends and learning the language and customs.

His father, once his greatest hero—who had brought him across the desert, who knew everything about the sun, the wind and the beasts—now became dependent on him, an old, superstitious god-worshipping refugee Raqim had to help for everything. In his teen years the contempt he felt for his father grew into resentment.

Adulthood – At eighteen, Raqim began his apprenticeship, training as a ranger with the Pure Legion.

Seven years later, his company smoked out a Sarenrite enclave near Botosani. The Sarenrites refused to cede and were put to siege. Raqim’s captain used him as a threat, claiming he was a fire-sorcerer who would burn down their compound if they didn’t hand themselves over.

The Sarenrites panicked, rushing the Pure Legion scouts and killing two of Raqim’s best friends and comrades. Cornered and desperate, Raqim destroyed them with fire, incinerating the compound and killing all the remaining Sarenrites within. When it’s quiet he can still hear their screams. The last thing he remembers is being gutted by a Sarenrite scimitar.

Areelu’s Experiment –

The dragon Raqim was offered to as an infant was in fact under a geas to provide children for Areelu Vorlesh’s experiments. Most of the children perished, until she attempted to graft draconic essence into one of them in the hope it would help the child resist the extreme heat of the stitching process. It did. Raqim was returned to his family and kept under observation.

When he came of age, it was time for the next stage of the experiment. She made sure he would not recall his kidnapping or the horrific process of the graft, which also expanded the Worldwound. He was fourteen, like her child.

Ten years later, when as a scout with the Pure Legion he attacked a Sarenrite enclave and was almost killed, she whisked him away to her laboratory to revive him. She then kept him in stasis in the lab for seventy-seven years to continue work on the Nahyndrian power she hoped would stabilize the graft.

Until Targona, an angel Areelu had taken captive, succeeded in escaping, and freed Raqim into the Worldwound, urging him to save himself. Areelu recaptured Targona and punished her for this setback in her experiment; still, she noted that Raqim was not only alive and stable, but gifted at surviving on his own in the wilderness. She bade Suture leave his clothing and weapons for him, and then kept a close eye on him as he traveled to the banks of the Sellen and southward toward Mendev. The wound on his chest reached critical instability not long afterward, and she was forced to knock him out and drag him into Kenabres on a stretcher to be healed by the dragon, and then fetch him a dose of the N.