Krondik Elfrender

From Zok

Expulsion Era

Krondik Elfrender is a Cern, named Krondik by his mother and named again later by his people for his exemplary ability to rend elves. He grew up a slave in Kashrak, where he was trained in combat by a noble who intended to use him as one of several training-dummy sparring partners for his nephew, who was studying the art of the sword. Unfortunately for his young elven master, Krondik was far the faster learner, and managed to accomplish his first rending and his escape from slavery at once, at the age of fourteen. Joining a tribe of wild Cerneen in the mountains, Krondik quickly became their leader by virtue of a combination of brute strength, elf-trained skill, and devilish cunning.

Several years ago, the Elfrender (as the Cerneen are calling him) led a horde of Cerneen berserkers north, down the slope of the mountains into Nyeir. Armed with goblin glass and trained by Krondik, they quickly took the walls of the city, and they took the fortress at its heart three days later. Most of Nyeir's elves were put to the sword, though several thousand were kept as slaves or sold to the goblins. He currently rules over Nyeir with an eye greedy for tribute, and he looks to expand his fledgeling domain northeast to Valtadre's lands. Krondik is responsible for much of the vitrio and violence of the Expulsion; his troops are uncivilized and guilty of near-constant rape and plunder of civilians, and are rumored even to stoop as far as devouring the flesh of their still-living foes. The elves see his brutal rule over a once tranquil elven city as proof of the bestial nature of the Cerneen, and Krondik sees brutality as the only manner in which to maintain his freedom and his power.

The Elfrender is a large man, standing seven feet tall and weighing just over three hundred pounds. He carries a greatsword on his back, and a slender curving blade of yellowed goblin glass upon each hip. Despite his height, he doesn't create the impression of being tall, rather he exudes a sense of simple mass. He tends to go about clad in a studded leather battle-skirt, leaving the thunderous muscles of his chest bare or clad in traditional Cern warpaint. He grows his red beard long, and pleats it like the dwarves, as well as his hair. His bearing is languid, like that of some massive and slow-to-uncoil serpent, but his ice-blue eyes betray his rapid intellect, darting quickly from place in the chilling display of mental calculus one might expect from an elven assassin some thousand years his senior.

Abilities

Krondik is known as the Elfrender for his habit of rending elves asunder. This is his primary ability, and it is what he's famous for: simply turning an elven warrior into two roughly equally sized chunks of elven warrior. Usually in a single blow. He has the innate strength of a tiger, and his time as chieftain of a barbaric tribe has taught him the cold fury of an avalanche. But he was trained to kill by elves, and any elf trained at Tein-Larion or the Black Mountain would recognize his style were they to see him dancing like a razor-edged butterfly along a crowded battlement, though they might be surprised at how quickly it changed to a completely different style once they began to counter its faults, and then (unless they were particularly well-trained) they'd be rent asunder and Krondik would move on to the elves standing behind them.

The Elfrender's greatest strength is also, perhaps, his greatest weakness. He has borne wounds in battle that should simply have slain him, and not felt their sting until every last foe lay dead at his feet. His men speak in whispers, claiming that some demon possesses him during battle, and that it will not let him fall while elven blood goes unshed; they have seen him collapse, unconscious, at the end of a particularly grueling battle, suddenly aware of the dozens of arrows and the three swords penetrating his cavernous chest. So far his priests have been able to heal him after each such massacre, but some of them warily warn each other that their chieftain's greatest glory will be his downfall.