[Aicasarto]

Szollos walks with the calm and unhurried step of someone gifted with confidence. His skin is pale and his features handsome, though there seems to be a tinge of bitterness to his expression, or perhaps a hurt from which pain is still felt. His eyes are as dark as his clothes and armor, and his brows black—the only indication of his hair color, for if he were to ever lower the hood that perpetually covers him, his shaved head would offer no hint of it. However, what it would show would be a tattoo gracing the crown of his skull: a black circle surrounded by a ring of violet, the symbol of Shar.

His voice is soft when he speaks and tends to linger after he finishes, though there is always an air that he knows and observes much more than he is letting on. When he does have a rare flow of words, he has the ability to talk quite a lot, but without saying much at all. He tries to keep any conversation more about others than himself, offering his commentaries and trying to twist the topic down a route he wishes it to go, and any direct questions he either deflects or gives no straight answer to. Sometimes it seems that he has a low opinion of everyone else around him, with a snide comment or dismissive tone, but this is something he tends to keep to himself.

He makes no secret of his worship of Shar, often speaking to her in praise or offering a quick prayer under his breath, but aside from that there is little else that he gives or reveals, just as one would expect for a cleric of the Mistress of Night. 


[Lawful Evil]

[Aicasarto]

Events could move by so quickly, when time was inclined to do so.

All it started with was a feeling, an instinct he had long learned to listen to, telling him to turn and look behind him. He obeyed, and did not see anything extraordinary right away, though tavern common rooms were rarely extraordinary. But in the span of a handful of seconds, he saw what he was looking for.

Again, nothing extraordinary. One more face easy to overlook, if it was not for the fact that the very same face was drawn, pale, tight. Loss, he could see it easily, written like a book.

He smiled lightly to himself, knowing fertile grounds when he saw them, and made his way over to her table without a word, only stopping to grab a drink along the way.

Initially she was standoffish at his presence, especially as he so boldly sat himself down at her table without any invitation, but such things bothered him little.

She did not give much of herself aside from a name to his prodding—Tizergha, and even then  that took a little while—and her worship of Talona (which explained a lot) and, most interestingly, that she was supposed to meet a Red Wizard named Warrick Talman later to continue doing some sort of task for him. Searching underground for some lost kingdom of gnomes, apparently.

And then the pieces slid into place: why he was destined to cross paths with her to begin with. What he thought was a simple spreading of Shar’s word was now suddenly much more intricate.

*

Szollos was more than comfortable with the exploration of dark, dank, underground caverns, especially ones rich with secrets to uncover. Traps and illusions and riddles delighted his mind, and  he eagerly plunged deeper into the depths of the mountains.

Yet there was danger inside those depths, at claws and beaks of flying monsters that tore his skin, and even deeper still. So deep that he truly began to be concerned that they had reached the Underdark, when they reached the hellish room of an Inquisitor and its personal army. He battered them as well as he could, but their numbers were too much, too strong, and he fell.

He did not remember the time he supposedly spent being dead. All he remembered from the darkness was a laugh, and then he was sitting up again and breathing, coughing, and very much alive.

Even deeper they went after that, where light and air and a blue sky were almost a fantasy, and then they reached something…else. A settlement, but made by no hands of gnomes. A place known only in stories by now, one Victoria recited to them, and as Szollos listened the only thing he could think about what how much he  would have loved to see what was in that lost magic tome.

*

Coming back was a disorienting experience, dark and damp caves first, then sunlight and air in the next breath. Worlds away, so blindly oblivious to what could dwell within the bowels of the earth. He found himself almost missing it.

No surprise, then, when he and the druid ventured beneath the earth to comb through some local catacombs. A much more mundane venture, but no less rewarding as his eye spotted a treasure map upon the corpse of the goblin whose pockets he was digging through. A treasure map with secret clues, nonetheless!

The more he read, the more he felt as if his mind had been set aflame. It was all his patience could take to scour the rest of this section of catacombs clean before racing outside to find where the first clue was: under a carpet in the Citadel of Tyraturos. Fortuitous that they were so close to it!

No doubt he looked a fool to the guards and other passersby, trying as discreetly as he could to lift up the rugs in the front room to see what lay underneath, but his efforts were soon rewarded when he found a neatly folded slip of paper under one of the corner carpets. Snatching it, he unfolded it hastily, and was met only with a symbol painted on its inside: a purple triangle facing downward, with three amber drops inside of it.

His head snapped to look at the druid. Shar had more than certainly led him to cross the path of a Talona worshipper, he was ever more certain now. But there were several temples to Talona throughout the land, which one…

On a hunch, he held the paper up to one of the torches scattered about, letting the light illuminate it from behind, and saw a word that had been written upon it before it had been painted over.

Surthay.

Szollos smirked.