All of this is way WIP.
Physical Description[]
Aelathar is tall and lanky for an elf, but like many of his kind, manages to appear slender and graceful rather than awkward or gangly. His facial structure is almost gaunt by elven standards, and yet remains high-boned and angular in human opinion. His nose is thin, and his eyes are a pale sea-green in colour.
He is never seen without a pair of thin wireframe glasses perched on his nose, and his blue-black hair is generally pulled into a messy topknot while on duty or not in the comfort of privacy.
Personality[]
WIP
History[]
Childhood and Early Life[]
Aelathar was anonymously given to an orphanage as a baby, and remembers nothing of his birth parents. He was never adopted and left the orphanage when he was old enough to work.
He was a wide-eyed boy, determined to help the less fortunate and make the world a better place. He took work in one of Silvermoon's public clinics, where he intended to learn the more mundane healing arts. Teenaged Aelathar was frustrated when his first five years were spent simply taking inventory and scrubbing the place down, but his patience won out. He was taken under the wing of an older man, Darranas Sunharrow, who, like Aelathar, possessed no latent magical talent but had been sewing up civillians and Farstriders alike for hundreds of years. Over the next eighty years, he taught Aelathar everything he knew, and the two grew very close. Darranas ended up adopting Aelathar as his own son.
The happiness was short-lived, however. Months later, Silvermoon was invaded by the Scourge, and though Aelathar and his father did everything they could to aid those fighting in the city, eventually they were overrun and had to flee.
Awakening[]
Aelathar and his adoptive father, Darranas, did their best to keep the clinic running even as the Scourge broke through the walls. As the thalassian forces were pushed back, they were forced to give up the clinic and took what they could with them, moving with a unit of Farstriders through the city and aiding whoever they could along the way.
As they swept through the streets, the Farstriders were pressed to a halt, trapped by an abomination and a corpsewagon accompanied by two necromancers. They blocked off the street, and the abomination tore through the unit while the necromancers claimed any elves that fell for their own purposes. Aelathar and his father were run ragged, unused, as the Farstriders were, to the chaos of pitched battles, especially in the familiarity of their own city. It was only when Darranas, Aelathar's father and the only person that had ever truly cared for the boy, was ripped away by the abomination's hook flails and torn in two that something awoke within him. The confusion, hopelessness, and grief momentarily faded from his mind, and he was filled with a sense of serenity; a singularity of purpose. As he watched his father ripped apart, something answered his silent prayer, and a blinding-bright column of divine fire crashed down from the heavens, striking the abomination.
Aelathar blacked out.
The Sunfury and Illidari[]
Seeing his people reduced to a shadow of their former glory, Aelathar's altruism took on a nationalistic focus. He resolved he would do anything to see Silvermoon and his former life restored, so when he heard their beloved Prince Kael'thas had escaped human persecution by seeking help beyond the Dark Portal, Aelathar was eager to join him among the Sunfury.
All the while, he struggled with the loss of his father, viewing him as the only person who had ever truly cared for Aelathar and who had been such a driving force in his life.
He also struggled with the display of power he had shown at his father's instantaneous death--something he couldn't really explain. He did not know such destructive forces were within him, and the thought frightened him.
As he accompanied the Sunfury through the Dark Portal and eventually to Netherstorm, at Manaforge Ultris, the normally anti-social Aelathar gradually came out of his shell. Describing what had happened to others in his company, he found others could exhibit similar power. It was a form of magic, they said, just like any other.
Once pure blue eyes turned quickly to a vibrant green as Aelathar took in the energies of the fel crystals around them, blind in his faith and his devotion to the goodness of their Prince. Rumblings from the upper echelons had rumours flying about the nature of their allies, and while some were uncomfortable with the delegations of naga and eredar that visited the manaforges, Aelathar trusted his Prince.
They all, Kael'thas said, must make sacrifices to see their people safe once more. So Aelathar sacrificed.
He shut away his compunctions and his complaints, and sacrificed what the officers called weakness for strength in unity.
As he grew especially close to a priestess named Belannya Dawnstrider, Aelathar found that with focus and an exertion of his will, he could emulate many of her techniques...though it never quite felt right to him. Belannya was a skilled interrogator, a confessor, for the Sunfury, and many of her favourite techniques dealt directly with the subject's mind and thoughts. Used in a subtle manner, she used a deft combination of pain and pleasure to extract whatever she wanted from her victims.
In their early days, Aelathar often expressed discomfort with the process, likening it to torture. But Belannya was always on hand to convince him it was for the greater good, and that all of their efforts were for curing their people of their addiction. Returning the Empire back to it's former glory. Didn't he want his father's death to mean something?
He never had an answer for her. And when she was killed in a raid, he took her position as confessor.
Confess![]
Aelathar found he had a talent for interrogation. Years went by, his methods getting bloodier and more violent by the day. There was no subtlety, no finesse to his technique. Where Belannya had teased information from her victims, Aelathar took it by force, and left those unwilling to compromise mere husks of their former selves. They were no more than drooling vegetables...if they lived through his regimen.
He prided himself on breaking any victim, revelling in his own personal game. You never really knew a person, he would often say, until you had brought them to the edge of death. "Everyone has a breaking point, and you meet the man when you bring them to it."
Aelathar did not sleep, barely ate, living from torture session to torture session and drawing energy from the fel crystals throughout the camps and taking solace in the rampant and reckless hedonism his people had turned to.
Finding the Light[]
The sin'dorei following Prince Kael'thas knew they would be followed through the Dark Portal to Outland eventually, it was just a matter of when.
All the same, although the forges had been prepared for battle, the volume was unexpected, and Aelathar's basic training as a combat medic could not have prepared him for what was to come.
Most of his days as a Sunfury inquisitor lie behind friendly lines, extracting intelligence from captured Horde and Alliance mercenaries.
Two other manaforges had been shut down when an Alliance priest, a human by the name of Corbus Hanalden, found his way into Aelathar's chair. The man was the only surviving member of a small fighting force sent to dismantle Manaforge Ultris, and Aelathar was tasked with finding out whatever he could from him.
As arrogant as many of his brethren, Aelathar reviled the man, as he did many of his 'patients.' He was a human--fat, slovenly, stupid.
But when the man, the first to do so, resisted his interrogation techniques and instead smiled and sang, the elf had to pause. How could he resist? How dare he?
Taking it as a challenge to overcome, Aelathar set himself to finding out as much about Hanalden as he could, and in doing so, began learning in earnest about the Holy Light.
Heel Face Turn[]
Corbus Hanalden was a retainer, he said, of the Church of Stormwind. The largest church in the Eastern Kingdoms, or indeed, Azeroth, of the Holy Light. It was a benevolent force that reacted most powerfully to the good in a person, and had the power to soothe, heal, and even bring back the dead. Indeed, it was the bane of all things evil and unholy.
Hanalden said he was a vessel through which the Light worked. It allowed him a clarity of mind, and the strength to resist Aelathar's interrogation techniques.
Maddened by his inability to 'meet the man' with Hanalden and with the intent of improving his technique until he could, Aelathar began learning under Hanalden. Nightly they would talk, and Aelathar would attempt to take what Hanalden had said and twist it against him, employing ruthless illusions and hallucinations which had driven others to madness. Hanalden only ever bowed his head and prayed.
Aelathar did everything he could to keep his calm--letting the subject know they had had an effect on the interrogator was tantamount to admitting defeat...but nightly, Hanalden drove Aelathar nearly to insanity with the ease in which he deflected.
Months of this continued, until Hanalden's endless patience won out. In speaking with Hanalden, Aelathar eventually came to respect the human priest, the Light, and even the Church from which he hailed.
After a time, the benevolence and altruism that the priest demonstrated resonated with Aelathar. Belannya's instruction began to seem more and more monstrous, and within months he came to realize the magnitude of what he had done.
This was not the man he wanted to be.
Aelathar came to find his work as an inquisitor reprehensible, and suddenly all the lives he had taken, forcibly and messily, against unarmed and perhaps innocent people, began to haunt him. He knew he could not remain with the Sunfury, but struggled to find an out--for both he and Hanalden.
The two slipped out in the dead of night, spending the next few weeks traveling to Shattrath City.
Defection[]
Once in Shattrath, Hanalden helped him in brokering his defection from the Sunfury. He regret turning on the nation, even the Prince he had loved and defended for much of his life, but he knew he could not have continued on as he did.
With information on the Sunfury provided by Aelathar, the Aldari gained an upper hand in the Manaforges.
Hanalden had become a close friend, and through him and many of the draenei in the City of Light, Aelathar's understanding of the Light broadened, and to his delight, the force that had once erupted out of him at the death of his father made more sense to him as a manifestation of that holy power, rather than just another form of magic.
Emboldened in the thought that this is what he was born to do, Aelathar spent months in Shattrath, and eventually came to revert back to his roots as a healer.
Ashamed and repulsed by his former duties as an inquisitor, he vowed he would never again take a life without grave cause, and would instead focus his efforts on healing and being a positive force in the universe.
Frozen Penance[]
With Hanalden's encouragement, Aelathar followed him first to the Western Plaguelands and Light's Hope Chapel, just in time to hear of an impending attack on the holy ground by the Lordaeron's former Prince and his death knights.
Aelathar was shaken. He hadn't seen a battle so chaotic since the razing of Silvermoon, and this time there were no Farstriders to protect him. He did his best to remain unshaken and to use the Light to beat back the Scourge, to heal his allies as best he could, but in actuality they were lucky to escape with their lives.
Aelathar, for the first time, saw the Lich King eye to eye, the man that had seen his home destroyed, and joined the Argent Crusade that day.
Commissioned from merwild.tumblr.com