Fitz Valziz

Fitz Valziz is a Dawnsworn, a paladin of Lemaina's order. He was born in Mossheart, but spent most of his life growing up in Dune Rest, training to be a member of Lemaina's devoted. He now travels all of Viru hunting down undead and those that would bring the dead back to life, and sin against Lemaina.

A Young Bookish Boy
Fitz grew up a reserved lad, preferring to read about adventures in his books more than entertaining the thought of going on any himself. Even had he not been a tiefling, easy targets for the mostly human town of Mossheart, he was certain he likely still would have garnered the ire of the other children that bullied him. He was just that sort of child, quiet, unassuming, unwilling to fight back...

Still, he found himself happy most days. He loved his family, his mother Arizis and his father Thyneadius, had decent jobs in the town, working as a seamstress and a woodcutter respectively. They all kept their heads down and lived a quiet and mostly comfortable life. That is, except for his sister Andi. She took a great deal of offense at having to keep her head down, having to hide her tails, file her teeth and wrap her horns. In truth, Fitz understood her plight, there was certainly something unambiguously awful about not being able to be the thing that you were born to be without being persecuted for those things you can't help nor change.

With that said, he just wished she would keep her mouth shut sometimes. It was that mouth and the actions that would follow it, that sent the Valziz family into new ruin, after all.

The Crimes of My Sister
The boys of Mossheart made a game out of Fitz. On the walk home after school, in the center of town when he was sent for water at the town's well. The adults watched on as the little bedeviled boy was toyed with and pushed around, left bruised if he was lucky, bloody on the days that he wasn't. He tried to make sure that when he was going to be in these situations, he as alone. He was both blessed and cursed with a strong-willed older sister. Blessed and cursed still that she had begun to show signs of the arcane in her blood since she had turned thirteen.

She would defend him if she saw him being picked on. And when she was defending him, very seldom did things end peacefully. That fateful day, they ended in blood and fire. One of the children did not come back from Andi's wrath, and the others would likely have scars from the flames she evoked for the rest of their lives, that day by the well.

Their parents, not knowing what else to do with their problem child, sent her out on her own. They disowned her, and left her to fend for herself. Something broke in Fitz that day when she left. He had never wanted the trouble she had brought on the family, but losing her was all the more awful. He did not feel sadness, however. He felt angry, angry that she had done this to them, angry that she had taken herself away from him.

A New Life
Fitz spent a great deal of time wondering Viru after his sister left. He stayed behind and traveled with his family from Mossheart to Denhollow to escape the scrutiny of the town people after Andi’s crimes, but Denhollow wasn’t exactly welcoming to the tiefling family when they arrived. There wasn’t much for them there so they then traveled to Dune Rest where his parents, Arizis and Thyneadius, got jobs working in the markets.

Dune Rest was large and eccentric and a perfect place for tieflings to live and soon Fitz found himself interested in the pantheon. It started when he began to study the history of the tieflings and the legends about their creation, about the corruption of the people who made deals with the demons by the lord of the hell planes, Orjaket - then his defeat and subsequently the removal of the demonic essence from tiefling blood, while leaving the tiefling people in existence on their own, the stigma they earned still attached.

Once he had read about the dark gods of the underworlds and hell planes, he naturally began to read about the other gods. He studied the gods that the various peoples of Dune Rest worshipped and found himself drawn to the ideas and patronage of Lemaina, the goddess of Death, Forgiveness and Fate. Many mistook the goddess as some sort of grim figure who brought about the end of life, but the truth was that she was to be honored as the goddess who brought about a natural end to things and the beginning of the next phase of existence. People went to her to pray for the safe ushering of their loved ones to a better place in death. People prayed to her for a better fate and destiny for their children at birth. People asked her not only for forgiveness for all that they had done, but for the strength to forgive those who had wronged them. All of these things interested and spoke to Fitz. He had hated his sister in truth, after she claimed to be protecting him that day, but had killed children and forced them to leave their home instead of just keeping her head down.

But he yearned to forgive her, she was his sister after all. He prayed to the goddess Lemaina every day for months and eventually he found himself filled with only love for his sister, Andi. And wished he could see her again, wished he could know what happened to her. His time in the church of Lemaina in Dune Rest brought him to the attention of the clergy. He learned about the hierarchy of the priesthood that worshipped the goddess of fate. The priests who helped the people and guided them, prayed with them. Then of course the leadership of high ranking clergymen who helped run the churches across Viru. What Fitz didn’t know about however, was the Paladins and Clerics that made up the order’s militia - the group known as the Dawnsworn. Undead had always been a threat, from the skeleton wars in the north for a time, to intermittent issues caused by wayward curses, spirits, liches and necromancers across Viru. To bring the dead back to unlife was one of the greatest sins against Lemaina and her worshippers. To take those who had left this plane, who had been ushered from this life by Lemaina’s careful hands and steal them from their fate was the greatest blasphemy, just like the dark magics necessary to enact such sins.

To Become Dawnsworn
Fitz had never seen himself as someone who might excel at any sort of martial tasks, so he argued to the First Augur (Augur Kinsa Jannuet, female High-Elf, 321 years old) asked him to become an acolyte for the Dawnsworn. He felt that he belonged among the clergy of Lemaina but not as a warrior on their behalf, though he was honored to be asked. But First Augur Jannuet persisted and he dared not tell her no twice, though he was fearful that he would fail in the task and as such fail the First Augur.

But to Fitz's surprise he didn’t fail, in fact he excelled. His training came naturally and his connection to the goddess flowed freely through him. During the evenings he took courses on the advanced teachings of Lemaina, the deeper meaning of the surface prayers that the common Lemainites subscribed to. The history of the church, the secret legends of Lemaina and her place among the other gods. The stories of the Dawnsworn and their history, their heroes and their losses and great victories. Their important parts they played in the wars against the undead in the north and the tasks they partook in every day since. This all came naturally to Fitz, while Andi was driven and energetic, Fitz was always happy to voraciously devour book after book. And when it came to Lemaina he could not learn enough.

But before that, during the hot desert days, Fitz found himself sweating and bleeding in the sand of the training yards in Dune Rest with the rest of the Dawnsworn acolytes who had been chosen to train. He found his thin frame filling out and toning up, he let his horns grow in this place of acceptance. He learned to fight with all manner of martial weapons and styles and how to channel the divine power of his goddess into abilities and spells that could help he and his allies defeat their foes. He made friends among the other Acolytes, those who stayed through the arduous training found a home among the Dawnsworn and eventually they graduated from the acolyte training ranks to become Clerics and Paladins of the order - which they would become was decided by the Desticar - seer of Lemaina’s divine fate. Of course, it is also always assumed that it depends on where you excel the most in training and which of the jobs suit you better.

Fitz found himself, again to his surprise, as a Paladin. While Clerics were very skilled in martial combat, their largest strengths were in their ability to cast spells powered by Lemaina’s might, to commune with the goddess herself. The Paladins used that same might to fuel their martial prowess and make it even stronger. Fitz had always assumed he would be better suited casting spells and reading from tomes, but he found a set of plate armor, a shield, a longsword and a greatsword sitting at the end of his bunk in the Dawnsworn dormitory after the Desticar drew from fate.

Now he was Dawnsworn Valziz, Paladin of Lemaina, the Writer of Fate. He left his mother and father, they were happy enough working their jobs and keeping their horns down. No one bothered them and their son had found a respectable place in the church of a respectable and revered goddess. They worried that his position was one that would inevitably put him in a place of danger, but they were proud nonetheless. Still, Fitz thought of his sister, thought of the letter she had been left by their father, how unforgiving it had been. He prayed for her fate that night, the night before his first mission given to him by the clergy.

He was to investigate a series of strange happenings that seemed random at first, but their Desticars had seen the connection - undead, violence, and the god Rasputimon was involved, as he was in many cases such as this. First he went to investigate an ancient temple in the Boreal Cast. A small group of Dawnsworn were dispatched to each place of interest in the mission simultaneously and he and a cleric named Danford Wellers were given this task. There were no undead involved in this particular place of interest, but if each dispatched group of Dawnsworn could gather the information from each individual location they could come back and put each piece together to create a more informed big picture.

The temple was that of a group of monks - cat people - later he would idenfity them as Rakshasa, a people not unlike tieflings in their demonic roots, who had escaped those shackles to be their own people. Albeit a more reclusive lot than most. The temple was in ruins, a state of decay and was littered with corpses of malnourished Rakshasa. The back wall of the temple had been recently burned away in a perfect square and that final room, which seemed to house an artifact of some import, was empty of anything worthwhile. Before leaving he learned the story of the Scythe from the hieroglyphic walls. He and Danford, who he had become quite close with during their months of training and now weeks of travel, made their way to another monastery they had learned of. Perhaps these Rakshasa could shed some light on what happened to the others.

They were stopped, to their surprise, by a battle hardened Paladin who had once been a member of the Tulli’s Flame clergy - Fitz knew a great deal about Tulli and while he didn’t always agree with their methods, he knew fullwell the training that their warriors undertook. This paladin seemed to have been retired, however, though it was clear he still held the favor of his goddess. He told them not to go see the Rakshasa, they had no information that he couldn’t give them and they were very protective of their new tower of solace, which pierced the sky with over a dozen stories. The artifact was a gem of sorts that could control the elemental fire, conjure it from nothing, or control that which already exists, it was likely that the person he was hunting had taken the artifact and with the burn marks all over the final room of the temple it lined up.

He had chased him to the shores to the north with a group of other like minded individuals, a tiefling, a dwarf and a drow - strange. But the bastard had gotten away on an escape ship, though the strange group had also boarded so who knew if they had stopped him or not. This had been weeks ago, the Paladin had sat on that shore in quiet contemplation of his failing for the entire time without eating, perhaps as some sort of penance for letting the culprit escape. Fitz forgave the Paladin and asked that he look to Lemaina for just one evening and see it in himself to forgive his failings as well before turning back to Tulli’s justice and flame. They then parted ways only knowing that the ship had been bound for Kazzo’s Pupil, one of the other locations of worry for the clergy, a place that one of the other teams had been sent.

And so with all of that information found he began his journey back to Dune Rest, and to his church to give the Desticar and the First Page their news. He and Danford traveled back to Ironbone Keep and took a boat to the deserts. He never thought he would think of a desert fondly but the dunes were ever-welcoming as he traveled across them back to the desert jewel, the grand bazar, Dune Rest.

He gave his briefing to the First Page and was given commendation for his quick and concise mission success, he and Danford smiled and thanked the First Page then were given leave for the next 2 days while the other teams returned, they could go back and see their families, they could sleep in their beds at home rather than the dorms they had spent much of the last several months in.

But when he arrived at the small apartment on the second floor of a multi-apartment building, no one answered the door when he knocked. Mother, father? No one was there, he picked the lock, something he had learned in his youth, though he dare not give Andi the satisfaction of knowing he had been mischievous once or twice himself, and found the house disheveled and empty. His parents had gone and clearly there was something malicious afoot.

He went to the local constables and was told that this was just one in a string of missing people around Dune Rest and Anew-Inik, and the majority of them had been tieflings. No one knew quite what was going on, but Fitz found it strange that the focus seemed to be on his people. And so he asked around himself, using his leverage as a Dawnsworn to gain information. The next 2 days of leave were spent in the underground of Dune Rest, talking to the henchmen of the Warlords and the less reputable mercenary companies. For all of their sins, they had the best intelligence on the underbelly of the city.

There were rumors of cult activity, though even these miscreants couldn’t give him too much information. Cults were never good, especially if it was in service to a dark patron, and if the tieflings being the most targeted was any indication, it had to have something to do with Orjaket or at least one of his demonic cousins. Either way it was not looking good. Was this the fate of his parents? He asked his goddess, and then the clergy. The First Page smiled a warm smile and proceeded to give him permission to continue his investigation. She felt that the only fate he had found was his destiny to figure out what had happened, the targeting of his parents had been fate's way of choosing him to fix this despite it being out of the purview of their clergy.. Danford, of course, volunteered to join him. He spent the next several days around Dune Rest, he investigated an escaped prisoner, a dragonborn and was eventually given a lead that it may be connected to all of the happenings that his order had been investigating. And he heard again about this motley group who seemed to be hunting the same prey he was, though this time it was a tale of a Drow a tiefling and a blue Genasi… how muddied such long-tales got over time. What doubt he may have been harboring about his fate was gone at that, it was all connected just like the High Page surely foresaw.

And so he traveled. Back to Anhew-inik to the east and took a ship down the Quntauk Channel and to the last place such things had been rumored to have happened. He made his way to a small fishing village west of Ebonveil and made his way to the Elven city. He took his armor off and put on his robes, replaced his mighty hammer with a staff, the elven people were easily alarmed and he was a tiefling. He was surprised to find the elves more hospitable to his kind than most he had met, tales of Corinth had always intrigued him and the stories of their alliance with Ebonveil were not a farce. The idea that there was a place where tieflings could live and not only be safe but accepted outside of cities that were too big to breath in was something fantastic.

From what they knew of Corinth, they had only recently come out of a war with religious zealots, so Danford and he took off their own armor and wore robes in the hopes that they might at least have an opportunity to present themselves to the people of Corinth, in case religious devouts were not quite as welcome. They loaded their gear into the back of a trade cart that was headed to Corinth and he, Danford and the driver made their way in that direction.

When they arrived it was to the sounds of panic and screams, they opened the gates but undead flooded out, surprising the driver who fell, danford stepped in front of the horde and was overran. Truly, even with their training, there were dozens of undead that were on them before they knew what was happening. In the last moments of consciousness Fitz shut his eyes and prayed and felt the goddess’ fury flow through him. Then the world was black.