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Areas of Influence: Sin, Torment, and Pain |
Part 1:
The denizen of the Abyss called Ilphrynn Darmo’che by those who dare speak His name aloud to Him, dates back across the span of ages and His outlook on the creation and perpetuation of life is as twisted as His blackened heart. He does not recall His birth or His childhood. Much of what passed for His “life” He has made the conscious decision to forget; and, furthermore, those few events He does recall He will not share with any Soul. The Lord of Pain’s past is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Not even the Lord of Oblivion or the Lord of Worms knows of his youth, or much of his coming of age, and They have never taken His silence on this matter as disrespect - They alone understand His unwavering fealty and devotion to Their cause as well as Ilphrynn’s usefulness as a supreme orator for Their belief. And if it is not important for His use to The Lords of the Brethren, than so be it. It harms Those Lords not, and They certainly have no cause to fear Ilphrynn, or the secrets He chooses to keep.
It is not until after he joined the Guild of Nightwalkers that certain events came to light concerning this most unusual Dark-Elf. His abilities were studied with no great amount of zeal. Although he understood that in order to battle those who sought His demise that He would be required to know His craft, it seemed to many (including those Lords who chastised Him about his underdeveloped skills and spells), that He did not care whether or not He won or lost in combat. He did not care if he fought one foe or several. If a simple battle ended in His death or the deaths of those who came for his blood, neither outcome engaged His lust for revenge or His anger at having been slain. He seemed always composed concerning such events, as though He knew, even at a young age (even for a Dark-Elf) that both life and death were transitory moments in the lives of all be-ings. His possessions meant little to Him, so losing them was of no great importance. Surely He knew that to own great weapons and armor would make Him victorious in battle, and when He claimed weapons of power do no doubt they were put to good use and many fell to his twinned blades; however, it was a rarity indeed that he sought out His prey. It was always more important to Ilphrynn to be possessed of what He sees as the greatest power of all- an intrinsic understanding of the motivations of sentient life and how the desires of be-ings shaped the course of history and the evolution of thought, particularly as thoughts morphed into beliefs. Much of His earliest time within the Guild was spent in libraries wherein He gleaned what could from those who came before. And once He had devoured all the knowledge these sages had to offer, He sought out books of rare wisdom. These were tomes hidden to all but the most dedicated of scholars. Tomes written by the Pantheon themselves, sometimes before Their ascension, other times in the time following their acceptance to the Host.
But Ilphrynn always found something lacking in every tome, book, and scroll. Every scholar He came upon suffered from the same Self-Obsession. Ilphrynn could not fathom how a be-ing could honestly believe that their thoughts would stand up against the tests of time- That their thoughts would ring true through Eternity. He began to question all that He had learned, and came to a realization which shocked even His normally logical sensibilities. This being, that no matter what a be-ing learned in their life, no matter how long said be-ing existed, that nothing that one does matters. It was this very realization that first set Him upon the path toward eventually becoming a follower of the Dread Lord, Vrrin, and a fierce devotion to the doctrine of Oblivion.
Ilphrynn was fanatical in His pursuit of the truth He saw in the Dread Lord’s tenets. He became obsessed with attaining a complete and intuitive understanding of the nature of be-ing. It was to this end that he began a regimen of intense self-mutilation, for it was only by experiencing extreme pain, He reasoned, that a mortal creature could begin to fathom the failings of existence and come to appreciate the release that Oblivion represented. Ilphrynn engaged in His self-flagellation with his typical zeal, and was soon so overtaken by the agonies He inflicted upon Himself that He began to actually enjoy the pain he wrought on Himself and that others inflicted upon Him. Though Vrrin acknowledged the gains Ilphrynn had made in, the Dread Lord condemned the Dark-Elf for the pleasure He derived from His suffering. Vrrin argued that Ilphrynn would never attain true Power until He abandoned all vestiges of existence. To this end the Dread Lord decided to remove Ilphrynn’s ability to experience tactile sensations. Though this is proved an experience that Ilphrynn would lament, it proved formative in molding His twisted and malevolent outlook.
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