Mathell

Name: Mathell

Title(s): Doomguide of Kelemvor

Home/Location: Temple of Kelemvor, Sestra

Birthplace: N/A

Age: 23

Race: Human

Gender: Male

Patron Deity: Kelemvor

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Appearance:

Mathell has been called sobering, melancholic and even gloomy at first sight.

All of the above are generally true.

His naturally fair skin is blemished and covered in reddened sunburns, a testimony to many hard days beneath the sun. Both his hair and beard are an untidy display, each a deep-settled black to go with his attire. That he is not an overly attractive man by natural means is not aided by the ragged exhaustion his face displays. Purplish black bags weigh heavily beneath the faded emerald tone of his eyes, his lips commonly chapped and the cheeks surrounding them gaunt with overexertion.

All of this only adds to the frightening display of his armored suit. Heavy, well-fitted custom plate-mail in tones of black and gray adorn very nearly the entirety of the young Doomguide's frame. A large symbol of the Lord of the Dead sits neatly in the exact middlemost position of his breastplate, decorated in gold tones.

Background:

Mathell has very little to share about himself with the majority who may ask. He speaks readily enough of his station as a Paladin of the Eternal Order, as well as the more practical title of Doomguide of the Judge of the Damned. How he obtained such and his childhood before it, however, is often a mystery.

It took a fellow member of the Eternal Order to piece together the larger scale of his history, and it was lost shortly after as he fell in a battle near Baldurs Gate. Such stories are held now by Mathell alone, though for what he did tell, they would be something close to this:

Very early on his childhood, Mathell was an orphan in the city of Neverwinter. Surviving as any street urchin and child beggar may, he found himself in eventual dispute with a children's gang of thieves and bullies. Unable to defend himself against the near constant taunting of the other children in the docks district, he found himself confronted by two obvious choices. The first was the most natural; to prostrate himself to the older and larger children, and play errand-boy to their whims until he himself was allowed into the gang. The second was the closer to unthinkable. To leave the city entirely, as there was no other district that could afford the oversight of his ragged state.

As a testament to Mathell's curious mindset and spirit even at such a young age, he opted for the second course. It was a small child's naivety and hope that led him to believing life could be better out of the city, and that there existed something more for him. Tragically, only a week and a half out of Neverwinter city, he learned how unfortunate and cruel reality could be.

A six year old child had been allowed to ride in the back of a caravan traveling east from Neverwinter, stopping at the odd hamlet and trade village as they would. The caravan master was an elderly fellow, a childless man but with many nephews and nieces that he was very fond of. He considered allowing the boy to travel with him a sort of endearing gesture to all children, and he after all did not cost a great deal to keep at the back. It was the unnamed caravan master's generosity that led to the scarring of the child Mathell's earliest memories, and also his step into a greater life.

The caravan made the fatal but unknowable error of stopping for several nights in a village recently struck by the traveling plague. The last day in, the first of the villagers began to show symptoms of the illness. It was a natural reaction that the tradesmen' loaded their wagons and set off within the same hour. It was the natural oversight that their boy companion was left behind.

Mathell had gone fishing. A pastime he had discovered on his first day in the village with a few of the other local children, and had immediately taken to. He found himself gleefully bobbing a line in one of the local streams when the caravan left without him. It was hours before he had realized they were gone. It was a full day before they realized he was. Unable to turn back for fear of the plague, and the boy unable to follow, Mathell found himself in the very center of a dying village.

And he too, caught the sickness.

The dead and the dying lay in the village's main street, some stacked over the others and some solitary souls clinging to the walls of houses and barns. The freshly trampled mud of the morning rain littered the faces and frames of everyone in sight. Some were silent but most called out, a terrible, lingering wail of pain and injustice. The children he had shyly played with days before sat crumpled in the arms of their mothers and sisters, lifeless eyes drooped in an accusing stare towards whatever material object had caught their eye before the end. And the stench.. Was terrible.

It was beyond what a child could take in. He felt he should cry out, as so many of the others had. He knew he should cling to life, as they -all- had. Confronted with the inescapable truth of his mortality, and those around him, the strangely spirited boy took a shift towards something far stranger still. Everyone had gone before him. The pleasant cheerful father of one of the local girls, the obnoxious older boy that had chased him about with sticks. Every face he saw was wrought with the truth of human fatalism. It was pointless to resist, and he had nothing to remain behind for.

Hours passed in a slow, prolonged agony. His lungs tightened as each breath grew more difficult to take in. His mud-covered sunny skin was burnt beneath the grime with welts and terrible marring spots. Every second burned, and every minute become a hope that the predestined end awaiting him would come soon.

His eyes drew closed after a final, terrible breath of plague scented air. The forms around him grew gray and blurred as each eyelid slipped further down, his last view of the world in the throes of his agony one of complete indifference. All things were the same, colorless and without life. And he would be joining them. The morbidity of his thoughts brought a restful smile over his bleak chapped lips.

It was the same moment that he realized his hope for an ending must be near, that he very abruptly realized he was still not gone. He had felt a certainty in that when he closed his eyes this time, all things would change. He would find himself elsewhere, or nowhere at all.

He understood something very different had taken place, when gentle hands roused him and pleasantly soothing lights caressed his frail frame. He was alive, and the gray figure before him had done the unspeakable and impossible. Those soothing lights had roused an ounce of his body's unshared desire for life, and he had returned once more to the battle with the sickness.

The Kelemvorite priests had spent tireless weeks in quarantining villages and towns rife with the illness, instructing local law enforcement and militia on the proper procedures. This particular village was but one among the frenzy. Many, many of the villagers were granted a quickened end. A soothing goodbye and reassurance of what was to come, before a painless ending to hasten their departure. Mathell was not one of them. The leading priest of the outfit had noticed the gaunt boy the moment they arrived. Every living figure squirmed and pleaded for aid, with that one child as the only exception. He could feel his breath from a distance, the tightened chords of his throat gasping for the last straining intake of life.

And Kelemvor spoke to him, a soft whistling of melancholic winds through the disease heaved street. That child was one to be saved, his time long yet in the coming.

Mathell followed the priests to their temple when all was said and done. They stored him in a backroom with a few of the very rare line of villagers that had survived the wandering epidemic. He later learned the caravan had perished much further eastwards on the road, as well. It was the boy's good fortune to have been at a site the priests could have reached, and the tradesmen misfortune to have made such great distance from it.

He slowly accepted life once more, as his body retook it's strength and the depth of his experience gradually dawned on his adolescent mind. He quickly became inducted as an acolyte thereafter in their temple along the northern Swordcoast, wherein the boy transitioned from priest of the Death Clergy to the abrupt and unexpected shift of Knight of Kelemvor's Eternal Order.

A title he maintains in the today, along the devoted calling of a Doomguide.

Character Personality:

Religion speaks for the entirety of Mathell's being. Since his earliest time as an acolyte of Kelemvor's church, Mathell has been a well-known figure for his unshakable devotion to his god. This stalwart belief has many drawbacks beside the great strength it offers him when overcoming trials of faith, however. Mathell is *often* perceived as an overly prideful, even arrogant young Knight with a morose fascination for warfare and death combined.

This is true only by matter of perception. The Doomguide lives by the strength of his faith in Kelemvor, and the tasks he performs on his behalf. As a Paladin of the Eternal Order, this commonly equates into the hunting and complete annihilation of all cases of undeath, and those who conjure them. An obsession with no end, Mathell is a zealot with the words of his god as his only moral compass. While this is comforting to all who follow Kelemvor in same, it makes him a ferocious and somewhat unreasonable foe to face.

Remarkable to many, and in great contrast to his unpleasant appearance, Mathell is known to be quite the public speaker. His voice is a deep, genuine tone with a pleasing ring around each word. His words themselves are carefully considered and always spoken with the most extravagant of tastes.

Significant Relationships:

Luther Quen: A veteran Triadic Knight, Luther was the first of the Triumvirate to readily include the Doomguide in strategic affairs concerning the rising threat of undeath and their summoners. They remain as close of an example of friends as any Mathell has known, along beside their stalwart comradery on the field.

Cecania Coraline: A former Templar of Helm's Waterdeep clergy and now commonly considered the Sundren church of Helm's Triadic representative, Mathell considers Cecania one of the few genuinely trustworthy citizens of the valley.

Edward, House of the Triad: Luther Quen's younger disciple, Edward and Mathell get along surprisingly well. From their great amount of time in sparring together and the frequent battles they've weathered, they exist as a strange, but blossoming friendship between two distinctly different churches.