Lutz
Details
Full Name: Ludwig Zauber
Race: human
Sex: male
Age: twenty-five
Height: 5’8”
Weight: 140 lbs
Birthdate: Ash 35
Birthplace: Kalzazi, Karnor
Profession: legionnaire
Housing: a simple room in Mistreach Keep
Partners: none
Titles: none
Factions: Dead Legion
Fluencies: Common and Synskrit
Appearance
A tousled mess of dark hair with strands of tawny browns in highlight. A sharp and slender pointed noise. Firm, thick brows over heavy hooded, piercing hazel eyes. High and angled cheekbones over a tight and exact jawline. Full lips, protruding ears, and a smattering of freckles from chin to cheek.
Confidence conflicts with castigation. Usually proud shoulders hunch and buckle, a sure sign of shame marring what would otherwise be pride. Clean when possible. The distaste for dirt and filth, grime and blood, is poorly hidden, but that desire to be punished persists, somewhere beneath.
Birdlike in observance. Foxlike in pursuit. Boarlike in confrontation. Quick and assertive. Tenacious and sly. When the only way is forward, hesitation falls to the wayside. Smiles fade for pensive frowns, but laughter, however gentle, isn't out of reach. Sadness lingers like a haze, humid with anger and frustration, tinted with that bitter taste of regret. A desire to improve, newly discovered and foreign, that pushes and pushes and pushes - too much for comfort.
Personality
Proud but not because of what's been earned. A baseless pride, inflated with the hot air of lungs in men and women with expectations set high upon those grand pillars of Tradition and Blood. A fostered pride, grown fat and pulsating, fed through firm nods and firmer hands. A towering pride, teetering and twisting, threatening a tumbling return to the murk below with each weighty brick relentlessly added.
Confident but because it's expected not born of strength or wisdom. An unflappable confidence, unfounded in logic or reason, leaves it an ever-present current through each and every action for better and for worse. A rationalized confidence, for what else is the truth but desire made manifest, but want repeated over and over until fiction becomes fact. An empty confidence, bringing with it no comfort, only the motions, the words, all but the spirit of what it might inspire, ringing hollow in the heart however firm the mind refuses to be swayed.
Passionate but without direction or cause. A violent passion, born of morals never quite aligned and paired with an unspoken and unknown need to be heard, to be felt. A volatile passion, bright and blazing one moment only to fade the next, no anchor to keep the fire firmly rooted. A desperate passion, a child's cry for some unknown panacea to cure the hurts and fears that relentlessly rise from that deep and dark void of uncertainty, the tear between what is and what might be.
Guilt weighs heavy after the fact. Its cloying influence only settles in when thought and time allow, slowed by sharp-eyed attentiveness and genuine desire to seed strength where fallow fields lay barren to all but weakness. That desire drives. It surges forwards, shrugging off doubt and worry and fear, until fatigue inevitably sets in and that timeless advance is halted, allowing reality to flood back in and over.
Movement, then, is paramount. Always forward. Left foot in front of right. Run and run and run through a labyrinth carefully constructed of each and every unwanted thing and thought. It is not fear shame, rather an inescapable knowing that to linger, to catch breath, to ease the ache of side and lung and leg, is to inevitably succumb to the crushing weight of deeds done. No redemption. No liberation. No absolution.
There should be more. There should be kindness, perhaps, or mercy or wisdom or wit or jolly jocularity paired neatly with a firm but gentle touch in matters of importance. Wisps of these remain, tarnished by the ever-asked question of what is right and what is wrong and where and how can any answer ever be found. Kindness must know cruelty. Mercy, intolerance. Wisdom, ignorance. But grey is a pallor most confusing and confounding, and rarely paints a picture clearer than the fog it so often composes.
History
Zauber.
Names carry with them a history; it's an inescapable legacy, one that clings to and claws at even the most resilient, and while it can be changed, hidden, obfuscated from the eyes and ears of everyone else around, it's never truly gone. Some wear names proudly. Others seek to better theirs. The Zaubers, however, have, over the decades, turned their name into their brand - a very specific sort of brand known to the rich, powerful, and discerning, but otherwise of little note to those who lack means.
The Zauber name is synonymous with magic, a notoriety founded upon the claim their bloodline produces exceptional children naturally inclined to accept the volatile energies of magical runes. Whether this wondrous chance twist of nature is true or not is of little matter now; their children are greatly sought after and willingly married of to and contracted with interested families - after, of course, the purchase of one of the Zauber's infamously, egregiously over-priced porcelain dolls fashioned after their own children. If there is scandal, no eyes seem to see it, and noses only poke so far before they inevitably find something far more foul to sniff out, pockets jingling and purses hanging all the lower than before.
The children are groomed for success, raised as close to nobility as they can come through money and influence alone. At the age of eighteen, they undergo their first initiation, most often the magic itself is determined by the most interested party and heaviest purse, though availability of a mage to begin with supersedes any other influence on the choice. Even Zaubers fail to pass through the process unharmed - those who perish are given modest burials while those who survive are then taught the trade of doll making, at least to the extent their fractured minds or bodies can handle.
Those that succeed are very swiftly adopted into their new families to train under their new masters, perfect their arts, and, if they are lucky, marry. Coins change hands, new babies are born, and the cycle begins again and again and again. If there is an end, it is certainly no where in sight.
-
There was never any doubt. There never was any doubt. To be a child of the Zauber family was to be doubtless. There was power in their blood, their bones, their pale freckled skin and dark heads of hair. The be a Zauber was to be more, and that was all there was to it. Simple. Clean. Indisputable.
Doubt was for lesser breeds of men.
No surprise then when Lutz woke from his fevered dreams of fading self and rising tides of a world without barriers of time or space his rune of transposition shone sharp and clear upon his chest under the thin sheen of sweat that still lingered. No cause for celebration. It was an expected outcome. The only outcome. And he found himself once Ludwig Zauber now simply Lutz, his childhood nickname re-bestowed in that transition from a child of the Zaubers into something more.
Metamorphosis. Evolution. Self-actualization.
The word itself didn't matter because whether this or that, he trod forward unflinching and would not have balked nor turned for any arbitrarily chosen term. Life then was simple: do. And he did.
His gift was in perseverance not natural talent, one of the many somethings carefully instilled within him since long before he was capable of remembering, because while magic benefits from talent it thrives in the souls of the tenacious. Mistake after mistake wore no holes of worry or fear into that thin, puffed chest filled with pride. Each was a lesson to learn, a small step forward to take no matter how many times he was forced to stumble backwards. Again and again and again...
Until the pressure against could no longer match the press forward and progress was inevitability made.
Every word he took to heart. Every lesson. Every teachable moment. Magic had always been a part of him, so when the aether all around him made itself known, surprise was brief and wonder briefer. This was more than just his destiny. It was who he was - a new normal, a true normal. The self he was supposed to be and had been all along; a self he was required to foster so that he might thrive.
And thrive he did. At least, for a time.
With magic and power came more than a true justification for his confidence and pride; his curiosity found itself enamored with both "why" and the ever tantalizing "to what extent". Such questions seeped their way into all aspects of his life. The latter proved to become quite the issue.
It was never enough to simply succeed. Never enough to accomplish. A thing was not learned, was not experienced, until it was completely wrung through, forwards and backwards, inside and out. With spells, such a mindset was invaluable. With romance, not quite so much.
Delicate beauty wasn't sturdy enough for his liking. It was bent and bruised, tarnished and battered, far too easily. Strength of frame, fire of eye, a willingness to struggle back and forth, to play with power as one might a ball, that was the sort of flames he sought out. Not in a desire to cause pain, but with that same overwhelming need to to experience everything.
Reciprocation, then, when it did come, knocked him entirely off balance.
For all his life, praise was never given. Success was expected. Failure was not. Simple facts, simple expectations, clear cut paths to tread with no need to make certain his feet might not falter. Those failings had been worked out and polished up long before he could even realize they'd existed in the first place.
His downfall was a kiss. A single, wholly unexpected and unbidden brush of lips, twinkle of eyes, and tender touch. A memory seared so deeply into him the scar upon his soul still aches at the thought. That simple gesture brought to light an entire world outside his control, outside of perseverance and practice. It was something that could only be given, never taken nor earned nor any other manner of effort that could be put forth by the self.
But it didn't stop him from trying.
He sought it out from every encounter, pushing harder and harder, firm grips becoming vices, locked lips becoming gasping prisons, thrusts better suited for swords than sheets. The more he tried, the farther away it all seemed to become, and that only served to drive him forward, because what other path was there to take but to barrel blindly down the center. Faster, faster, faster... until he found himself staring down into glassy eyes, that gentle click of bone and sinew beneath his white knuckled fingers, skin still warm and soft bruised black and still.
Too far.
Honor is a rare trait for a Zauber. It has little place among those carefully molded young minds, but a master's place is to teach what they find lacking. So Lutz was taught of justice. Of honor. Of deciding for himself what is right and what is wrong. The morality of it. The weight of it.
And a life, he found, was heavier than anything he'd ever held in his two hands ever before.
Without hesitation, he brought his master to the scene, explanations failing while stunned grief found itself fermenting into guilt with bubbles of trepidation rising to the surface. He deserved punishment. Recompense. Retribution. But it never came.
He was far too valuable. Tark was a nothing. A nobody. A square set of shoulders and lopsided grin. Magicless. Talentless. Fated to move boxes from cart to floor then cart again until his skin sagged and his back no longer straightened. It was a kindness, really. An act of charity. Clearly the boy had enjoyed those last few moments; a better death than he was owed.
Coins changed hands and tongues saw fit to wag over how unfortunate it was poor Tark had such abysmal taste in brutish boorish men. No comparison to the young, upcoming, well-behaved Lutz.
At first it all seemed a dream. A nightmare. Something to wake from, to recall vaguely, to forget. But ignorance had a price he couldn't pay. It weighed on him with each passing day. Greater and greater, that life taken by his own hands for reasons not even he could quite fathom. A mistake. An accident. He hadn't meant it-
But he had. He did. It bothered him to no end because he didn't regret it. He should have. But he didn't. And that was what began to pull him down. It disgusted him, all this talk of justice and morality hypocritically tossed under sumptuous rugs and wall hangings. It turned his stomach, the thought that he was no different, that his lack of regret foretold a repeat of history he knew he didn't want. He didn't want to want.
And it would come, because there was nothing to stop him. No one. No thing. Only himself - the same self who had done the deed in the very first place.
The decision to volunteer for the Legion came to him in the middle of the night. It simmered and stewed for weeks, the only relief in the unbearable weight that sat in the pit of his stomach, an indigestible slab of unrelenting granite. The longer he waited, the more he mulled, the clearer everything became. If there was no one who would punish him for what he'd done, he do it himself.
It's only a matter of time now before he either finds the redemption he's seeking or dies trying.