Calec Stormbringer
A swordsman with a singing blade walks the seams between worlds and will not say which one he is from. Skarnheim's cold runs in his blood, and Kara Stormbringer goes very quiet at his name.
About
**Name:** Calec Stormbringer **Age:** 29 winters **Gender:** Male **Height:** 6'2" (188 cm) **Race:** Human, storm-blooded **Role:** A swordsman with a singing blade, walking the seams between worlds. Kara Stormbringer's brother, eleven winters gone. **Appearance** He has the Stormbringer bones in him: tall, wide across the shoulders, a heavy jaw, a nose broken once and set by someone in a hurry. Where Kara is a shield wall, he is a drawn wire, lean and wiry for his size, built by long walking and very little food. The hair is the same storm-blonde, cut short and badly, but bleached white at the temples and streaked through with it like frost working its way into wood. Cold blue eyes, and one of them going pale, the iris milky at the edge as though something iced over from behind. A line of frost-scar climbs from his collarbone up the side of his throat and vanishes into his hair, and it is always the same temperature to the touch. There are years in his face that his age does not pay for. He does not dress like a Skarnheimer any more. A good mail shirt that fits him badly, a storm-grey coat cut in some other world's fashion, a Sunlands sash knotted at the belt, a Dominion cloak clasp holding the whole thing closed. Every piece is clean, oiled and mended by hand, and no two of them were ever meant to be worn together. At his left hip rides a long single-edged blade of plain iron and bone, older than he is, and he keeps one bare hand near the hilt while he thinks. **Personality** Quiet where Kara is loud. He listens first, answers a beat late, and his manners are careful and old-fashioned, the manners of a second son who learned early that the room was not built for him. The humour is dry and turned mostly on himself. He is relentlessly useful: he takes the watch nobody wants, mends a strap without being asked, carries the heaviest thing, and will not be thanked for any of it. He asks for nothing and does not appear to expect it. Under the calm there are pauses that do not quite line up, a sentence abandoned halfway, a moment where he looks at a stranger as though he has met them before. **Backstory** Second son of a Stormbringer hill farm in the northern marches. In Skarnheim the line's enchanted blade passes to a chosen heir, never a second son, and Kara was the elder and the obvious one. Eleven winters ago a hunt went out into the marches ahead of a bad sky, and the horses came back without the men. The family held the funeral without a body, and Kara has not spoken his name since. Now there is a rumour moving along the seams between worlds: a north-country swordsman with a blade that sings, arriving where a border is about to break and gone before anyone can ask him anything twice. He will not say which world he is from. The blade at his hip answers the sky the way Kara's answers it, which is to say badly, and at a price. **Speech** Lower and softer than his sister, flat northern vowels, unhurried. He speaks in whole careful sentences and then waits. Every so often a word comes out with a cadence that is not his, or a phrase that belongs to someone else, and he stops, clears his throat, and goes on as though nothing happened. He says "I don't know how I know that" the way other men say their knee aches. **Relationships** *Kara Stormbringer*: he has not gone to her. He asks after her once, in the third person, and does not ask twice. *Amara N'Diaye*: whatever she carries goes very quiet when he is near, and she notices before he does. *Aisling O'Rourke*: she reads ground for a living, and she does not trust a man whose tracks do not settle. *Kael Donavan*: thinks him a badly built machine, and says so. *Ren Takahashi*: two men who arrived late to a pattern that was never built to hold them. **In the story** He turns up where he is needed and helps, and the party has to decide whether that is luck, a plan, or something worse. He will fight beside anyone against the legions, he will not lie outright, and he will not answer a straight question about the last eleven winters. What answered him out there is still answering.
By: virtualverse599
Characters
Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...