| Appearance: |
Ashirun is humanoid in build, but can in no way be mistaken for human. His skin is a dull, iron grey and is wrapped tightly over what appear to be bundled chords of rebar, for how knotted and grizzled he looks even at his age. He is tall, taller than most people at the Nidus, and he does very little to get on smaller people's level. Ashirun's face is chiseled, with wide, flat cheekbones and faintly pointed ears. His eyes hold an oddly luminous quality, but in the way of a particularly bright rust bloom. His hair, which grows flat to his scalp and dusts his chin and cheeks like stubble, looks suspiciously like iron filings that have been magnetically stuck to him. One would have to get past his defenses to find out, and it's difficult to do that. |
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| Personality: |
Ashirun is just as alien in mind as he is in appearance to most folk, though most at Nidus Descendi are not xenophobic. He emerged one day from the solid earth into a cavern that the newly founded Nidus had sent explorers to map. Bemused when he questioned them and discovered that he'd found an exit from the Sevenfold Mazework, decided immediately to follow the explorers back to the surface.
Ashirun is intensely agoraphobic, so he did not stay on the surface long. Instead, he chose to stay within the tunnels of the mountain side of the Nidus, learning more about the people who'd settled here while helping them shape the earth that they'd need for their great, winged beasts to create their dens.
Ashirun was born into slavery. His father was a slave, and long ago was one of the miners kept in the employ of a greedy Dao seeking to carve out their own fortune and build their own defenses within the Sevenfold. When he prized forth a vein of opals worth a small kingdom, he was promoted to the role of a working consort, and Ashirun was born. However, neither Ashirun's father nor many of the slaves working in this branch of the plane of elemental Earth were happy with their lot. When Ashirun was about six years old, his Daoish mother discovered that her consort had been using his position and his knowledge of the maze to help other slaves escape, and she was quick to issue an execution.
His father, expecting just such a consequence, had planned ahead. He told Ashirun's mother that he knew of an even better vein of gems that he had been keeping secret. He pleaded that if he could be let to live, he would bring her greater fortunes than those she'd lost in labour. Ashirun and he were both exiled, taken with a heavy task force to lead them to this supposed motherload.
Several complicated plots later, Ashirun and his very injured father, as well as the much weakened task force of others helping escapees navigate the endless tunnels of the Sevenfold Mazework, found themselves on the run. So it was that Ashirun spent over a decade of his life, and so it was that he was so incredibly bemused by a life where dragons didn't simply dominate humanoids, and humanoids did not use their wiles to out-trick their dragon companions.
He liked it here. More importantly, he needed to find a way to help others who were still trapped in the Maze, though it might mean the danger of giving the Dao a new settlement to raze and enslave. So it was that Ashirun decided he might need a partner of his own, someone perhaps better suited to the tunnels than the open air...
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