Ebon Skull Archives: The Story of Azazel
From Atlantic Roleplay Wiki
This is reposted from OES documentation for the pleasure of the Atlantic Community. Story by Azazel of OES.
I.
Though not always undead, Azazel was never completely human. An orphan, his father was unknown to him, and his mother died a horrible, tortured death whilst deep in the throes of childbirth, an event which caused her to be nearly torn asunder as unholy force ripped through her body. The child was left abandoned in a daemonic temple on the Isle of Fire.
He came to be raised in a remote monastery dedicated to the virtues established by Lord British, although he was never completely accepted or trusted there. This estrangement could be attributed both to the foreboding conditions under which the child was discovered, as well as some extraordinary physical features: complete lack of any hair, eyes black as the night of a new moon, and extended canines which took on the semblance of fangs. His dietary needs were also abnormal; he spurned vegetable matter, and grew dreadfully ill lest he received a daily allowance of raw flesh.
The inhuman creature despised the moral system impressed upon him by the well-meaning monks, seeing the inherent potential for corruption and mediocrity when an imperfect race attempts to apply unattainable standards to its existence. He could not tolerate the unconscious hypocrisy displayed by the monks, and in a fit of rage one night when he had nearly reached adulthood, mercilessly murdered each of the inhabitants of the monastery and burned the structure to the ground.
II.
Years passed, and Azazel learned, among other things, how to manipulate people so as to make them trust him. Because of his prowess in battle and the "tragic hero" image he nurtured, his quest for power and a knowledge of his true heritage resulted, strangely enough, in his becoming a figure of some fame throughout the land of Britannia. He forever despised British's virtues, and served as an inspiration to many who would question the nature of their lord's ethics.
Through a stroke of fortune, he came to serve in the court of Lord Blackthorn as an executioner. With the establishment of the Chaos Guards, he saw an opportunity to gain real power within Blackthorn's ranks, and was one of the first to step forward to claim the shield. Although resentful of the fact that he would not be able to use his favored executioner's axe in battle, he lusted after the blood of the virtuous, and found a new calling as a crusader of Chaos. Many an Order Guard's final scream was ushered forth by the stroke of his fell sword and his sorcerous might.
His appetite for blood, however, was growing beyond the capacities of the scant few paladins to quench, and he began associating with bands of cutthroats and assassins in order to quell his homicidal rage. He killed in secret, or by proxy, that he might cling to his powerfully enchanted Chaos shield. This pattern of behavior did not last long, though, as Azazel began to harbor a seed of hate for Blackthorn's lack of action to back up his anarchistic philosophy. He saw open dissent and terrorism as the only way to abolish the pathetic virtues, and this sentiment became too much for him to conceal. He could no longer serve a lord who was as guilty by his failure to intervene as British was in his misguided tenets.
Returning to the daemonic temple on the Isle of Fire which he found unchanged since his youth, Lord Azazel began a diabolical rite, words forming on his lips without his conscious effort. Within the infernal depths of the ritual he experienced, for the first time in his life, the ecstasy that comes with discovering one's true calling. Standing in the midst of the bloody pentagram facing the unholy ankh, he intoned:
"I have taken thy name as a part of myself Mine is the path of the Unholy Avatar My blade runs crimson with the blood of the Righteous Martyred upon their ankhs in the Infernal Flame Mine is the justice forged in the fires of strength Mine is the victim sacrificed upon the altar of hypocrisy This mortal shell to thee, O Entropy Deliverance unto Oblivion"
In a climactic finale to the rite, Lord Azazel shattered the symbol of Chaos with a herculean stroke of his axe. A conflagration filled the evil chamber with ebon flame, and the mortal was destroyed forever, sucked into the gaping maw of Oblivion. There, the bastard child met his long lost father, a great and terrible Balron known as the Lord of the Abyss. The sable daemon told the dead knight that his stay in the world of mortals was not yet finished, that all of Britannia must be consigned to Oblivion. Azazel was to go forth, undead, and seek out the Lichlord Azalin, whom he would aid in this task by founding and leading a legion of Death Knights. Handing Azazel a great tome bound in scorched flesh, the fiend uttered its final words. "Thou dost hold in thine hands my Codex of Revenance. Take my word unto the world of the living, and reap. Forge, from thine realm's empty husk, the world of the dead."
III.
Lead the Death Knights he did; many of the land's most formidable warriors for the cause of virtue succumbed to the promise of life immortal and turned from their path of righteousness to the sweltering jungles of the Isle of Fire, where loomed the foreboding Sepulchre of the Damned and Azazel's Knights. Entropy's baneful agents wreaked terror throughout the realm for what seemed to be aeons before the dread lord felt Oblivion's cold hand tightening its grasp upon him. At long last he slipped back into the cold embrace, leaving the Ebon Knight Killer to succeed him as the commander of the wicked Knights. And so Britannia rejoiced, for the Daemon Knight was no more.
Twas long ago that Lord Azazel sought solace in Oblivion, and the story of the Daemon Knight has faded into legend. The citizens of Britannia have enough of the Lichlord's active undead to fear, and want nothing so much as to forget the lore of the vile founder of the Death Knights. It is said, though, that the deepest of wounds never heal, and some of Lord British's most gifted mystics have of late woken from fitful slumbers, bloodcurdling screams upon their lips and cold sweat upon their brows. They speak little of what they have seen, but what escapes their tormented gnashing of teeth hints of an unholy avatar clad in scorched metal perched atop a terrible steed, and of a wickedly curved blade dripping the blood of the sons of Britannia..."