Jansensen, Gunderman fighter
Jansensen – Dark Templar, Gunderman (secret worshipper of Asura, the formless god of Truth).
“My father was an upstanding Gunderman soldier from the northern part of Aquilonia. My mother was a Stygian taken from her homeland by the invading army in which my father had been a soldat. I am the dark spawn of a people with infinitely sinful and decrepit morals and of a civilised, yet increasingly decadent, society.
“Yet I do not hate, neither do I pity. I just am. My life was determined before I lived. I must merely pay my debt to the cosmos and then I can depart as a free spirit.
“From my father I learnt the ways of war, from my mother, the dark arts of magic. I am balance. I am the force of creation battling the force of destruction. Balanced perfectly upon this cusp between life and death I truly live and at the same time feel my life slipping away as time marches inexorably on.
“My faith is a secret that both my mother, as a devotee of the Dark Serpent, and my father, a stoic worshipper of the good god, never knew.
“The tale of the awakening of my faith is a convoluted one; one that started me on this strange journey towards my death. I was a violent young man. I was in more fistfights during my youth than I can recall, partly because of all those blows to the head. In an act of defiance against my father, who continually reprimanded me for not following his ways of strength and honour - where those who have power must protect those who do not -, I took up as part of a bandit gang along the road that ran from Cimmeria and the Border kingdoms into Aquilonia. We fell mercilessly upon merchants and travellers who had journeyed far to bleed out their last upon that nameless stretch of road where we preyed.
“The bandits were a rough bunch and from them I learnt the value of a sharp sword and of keeping a dagger in your hand and your back to a tree. Blood was spilled over the slightest insult and knives sunk into kidneys for the last sip in a wine jar. I was slightly apart from them because of my prowess with the dark arts and they always grew moody when I showed my face at the campfires.
“On one particular day we spied a small group of travellers and set up an ambush point along the road ahead of them. Our chief, a huge, one-eyed, monstrous Cimmerian slayer, frowned as he looked at the group approaching our hideout. He chewed on his lip and champed his jowls as they came closer. When he spied peaked, black cowls among the travellers he immediately ordered his men to withdraw deeper into the woods and to give the wanderers a wide berth. Many men thought he had grown cowardly and whispered of it among each other until he used his wicked poniard to rip up one rogue from belly to chin. Through a blood-flecked beard, with dripping poniard in bloody hand, he growled that he was not a coward but that the priests approaching on the road could see what was hidden and knew of the ambush.
“I, at the back, snorted a laugh and mockingly turned away from my chief and set off towards the wandering ‘priests’. I walked out of the trees towards them and drew my sword, arrogant and confident. Their leader looked up and, as one, the group halted at my approach. ‘Hand over your valuables, priests of bird-****,’ I called to them. They merely stood and watched me. I grew angry and summoned my dark might to strike at them with a death from the depths of a Stygian temple. But before I could release my spell their leader merely gestured fleetingly and I felt my power cease, as if I had been trying to move the winds by waving my arms. I was stunned. Never had my magic failed me. Even when I had battled wizards steeped in the dark arts they could only counter my spells and hurl their own, not cause this sudden cessation of my might.
“Their leader walked up to me. I raised my sword to strike him down and growled my fury at my sudden sorcerous impotency. Again he raised a hand and my sword fell from my suddenly slack grasp. He drew a dagger and I felt fear enter my belly as I saw him walk calmly towards me, like the inexorable approach of death.
“The tall and grim man halted in front of me and reached out with his offhand to grasp my belt. I steeled myself for the burning feeling of the knife sliding into my gut. The priest extended the knife and cut off my sword belt, tossing it onto the hard earth. Then he turned away and sheathed his knife.
“I was dumb-struck. Never have I dealt with someone who seemed so passionless, so balanced and so mysterious. I fell to my knees and stared at the ground while my mind bled thoughts until I thought no more. The leader took his place at the front of the group and they set off again at their stately, measured pace. I knelt, unseeing and unfeeling, as they walked past me.
“As the last of the priests passed me, my brain fired only one thought: ‘I must discover the secret of their calm.’ My heart echoed the call and I never knew that it had felt such anguish at my arrogant ways. I rose slowly and fell in behind the group, measuring my tread to theirs. As we passed the point where my fellow bandits had hidden I realised that I no longer cared what they wondered, what they thought after seeing their champion join a cult moments after trying to slay its members.
“I tramped along in silence for weeks, following the cultists on their long, slow journey towards Tarantia. They spoke little and shared their humble food with me when we camped. No word they spoke to me and only the leader ever met my eyes, if only until I lowered mine.
“When we arrived in Tarantia, a city of splendour that I had never visited and did not see the sights of during my first visit, we walked towards a small, round-domed temple. The dome was covered with green-blue copper, left to collect the rust that tinted it. When we stepped inside I was shocked to find that the temple was very richly furnished. Black hangings decorated the walls and thick carpets lay on the mosaic floor. Bronze lamps cast a golden light over the corridor down which my fellows walked. As if a signal had been given each priest walked to his own business and I was left standing alone in the corridor.
“I knelt on the carpet, bowed my head and waited. I waited until a solemn old priest came shuffling along the corridor to extinguish the lamps. He looked at me with a frown and gestured towards an alcove. Turning towards it I saw a figure in its recess. The figure sat cross-legged, as people from the east do, and with an upright posture. Its hands were folded in its lap and it stared calmly out of its nest. I assumed a similar position and stared at the statue of what I presumed to be the god of this cult.
“I sat and sat. And in me a wondrous thing happened: I stopped thinking and merely existed – content – as I had never been before. The leader of the priests with whom I had arrived came to me and sat next to me. Together we meditated on nothingness and the meaninglessness of existence.
“I stayed with the priests for a year and learned about my adopted religion. Then, sternly, the leader of the priests, who was called Hadrathus, told me that my time in their community had ended. I knew this would happen because I am a warrior, a vagabond, a lunatic using meditation to cling to sanity, but not a man of the cloth. I bade my master and the priests farewell and, armed with my faith and my acceptance of death’s inevitability, I stepped into Tarantia.
“I saw the sights, of which there were so many in the great city, and then took a post as part of a caravan guard. Strange to think that I now protected those whom I had terrified but one year ago. Yet for these men I fought like a tiger, like a spirit of death incarnate. I knew from my faith that those who opposed me were not to be pitied, just as they did not pity me, because they had brought their suffering from a previous life. The caravan masters were in awe of my talents for they had not seen many mages who could fight as well as I fought.
“I journeyed with various caravans to the city of Messantia. Here I took work with a Stygian merchant aboard his ship. But in the night his guards fell upon me as I lay sleeping and stole my hard-won money and arms. They set me to work as an oar slave. But they were ignorant of my prowess with sorcery. They were not followers of formless, omnipresent Asura who penetrated the veil of the illusion of life as part of their religion. Yes, there is failing in me too because I had not seen the Stygians for whom they truly were: slavers. With this jolly thought a grin played over my features and I settled down to row.
“I rowed for the better part of a fortnight and excelled at the task because I am strong, young and willing to endure hardships. When I heard the captain call out that we were near the Barachan isles I knew my chance to punish the slavers had come. After using my sorcery to break my chains, I broke my oar to use as a club and turned to the slave driver who was rushing towards me. I blasted him with a boreal cold from the frozen north that caused him to shatter into lots of chunky bits that fell clinking at my feet. The other slaves stared in awe and faltered in their rowing. I laughed and smote the pins from one slave’s manacles with the slave driver’s mallet. I then dropped the mallet and left him to help the others while I made my way calmly up towards the poop. A Stygian soldier stepped out in front of me and swore in surprise. His head broke open under my oar, spilling his brains to the floor. Tossing the shattered remnants of my club aside, I drew his tulwar.
“Then there was hell to pay! I sang my sword song through the length of the ship and did not care if I died. The slaves freed all they could and like vengeful hounds from hell they rose from the belly of the ship and fell upon the Stygians. I delight in this tumult! In balance with this life, this death. I rode this delicious moment between being and non-being. I was alive because I knew of the inevitability of my death!
“Looking up from the corpse of the traitorous merchant, whose heart I had removed with a particularly vicious stab of my curved sword, I saw the ship heading for a tangle of rocks upon which the sea broke and foamed. I raised my sword in delight and hailed this event with a loud, crowing laugh. The chaos was delicious!
“The ship struck the rocks like an egg striking a floor. I was catapulted far out into the ocean and my wounds burned from the salt water that flowed into them. I lay there basking in my freshly sated bloodlust and the calm I gain from my faith. In this position on my back I could see the gulls wheeling above. I started to meditate, sure that a shark would take me soon. All thought ceased.
“When I felt sand under my shoulders I stood up in the shallows of a tropical island. I laughed with pleasure because Asura had determined that I must still pay off some of my karmic debt before I return to the cosmos.
“Dressed with naught but a bit of cloth around my loins and with chains dangling from my arms I stepped with a smile towards the remainder of the story of how I died.”
Inspired by REH's Conan, Robert Jordan and W.B. Yeats' An Irish Airman foresees his death.
