Tristis Praesidium
Tristis Praesidium
Also known as Royal Flush Titles Founder of the Hounds of Nemesis; cleric of Eleos Race Children Creature type Humanoid Class Cleric (of Eleos) Age 34 (born 1507) Alignment Neutral Good Hometown A city of the Theocracy Family Abranos, Masilya, Dolerus, Alena Affiliations The Hounds of Nemesis; the adventurers’ guild of Arcadia Status Alive
Description
Physical Appearance
A man marked by his past: his back is scarred by fire, and the scars seem to move when looked at long enough, telling out the stories of the horrors he brought into the world - so that none who see them could mistake him for an innocent. At his throat hangs a teardrop of glass that nothing can scratch, the gift and symbol of his goddess.
Personality
Once a furious, frightened boy whose blood “boiled like a lake on the face of the sun,” he has been tempered by years of grief, penance, and mercy into a man who knows himself for what he was - and is resolved never to remain it. He carries a deep sorrow and a deeper resolve to become a giver of mercy to those who need it.
Biography
Born in 1507 in a city of the Holy Theocracy of Olympus, Tristis Praesidium was the second son of the baker Abranos and his wife Masilya, with an elder brother, Dolerus, and a younger sister, Alena - an inseparable trio the shopkeepers fondly called “the three Graeae.” His childhood ended when the Blue Eyes took his mother, Dolerus fled with the family’s stolen savings, and years of grinding labour followed.
The Hounds of Nemesis
When the tyrant Anton de Bousherie seized the city and had Abranos thrown into a dungeon, the seventeen-year-old Tristis - after cruelly breaking his sister’s heart with the truth of Dolerus’s theft - stormed the Typhoon Inn, the last gang stronghold of the slums. There he won an impossible knife-duel against the chief Gradient Lapidus, earning the name “Royal Flush” for the luck it took to survive, and forged the cowed gangs into the Hounds of Nemesis. For seven years he built their power against Bousherie - and grew, by his own later reckoning, into the very kind of monster he had set out to destroy.
The Witch and the Curse
When the Areanites abducted Alena, Tristis abandoned his gang and went into the great forest seeking dark magic to force her return. He found and murdered a witch who refused him; with her dying breath she cursed him, and he woke to find himself haunted by the spirits of all those his choices had killed - and his back marked with scars that tell their stories. Wracked by guilt, he surrendered himself for execution, but was instead locked away as a cursed madman, where for six years he punished himself, believing suffering his only due.
Redemption
He was freed by the half-orc priestess Crisinya, who took him to her mountain monastery of Eleos and taught him the triune nature of justice - mercy, law, and retribution. Confronting himself at last upon a mountaintop, beneath a warm rain of the goddess’s tears, he understood that he could not atone by suffering alone, but only by becoming the mercy others needed. Marked thereafter as a cleric of Eleos, he set out to find Alena, free his father, and one day, perhaps, look in the mirror and forgive - a search that has led him across the sea to the adventurers’ guild of Arcadia in the New World.
Important Affiliations
- The Hounds of Nemesis, which he founded.
- The faith of Eleos, the goddess of mercy.
Relationships
- Crisinya - the priestess who saved him.
- Alena - the sister he seeks.
- Anton de Bousherie - the tyrant he swore to bring down.
Character Information
Race Abilities
Class Abilities
- Granted divine power by Eleos, warm and soft “like tears.”
Notable Items
- A glass teardrop pendant, the unscratchable symbol of Eleos.
Appendix
Sources & Attribution
- Primary lore: the Tristis Praesidium backstory (Hebrew), archived privately.