The Metaphrast

Character Name: The Metaphrast (‘Phrast’ for short)

Race: High Elf

Age: 295

Gender: Male

Character Description: An elf at the start of their Final March. Once-midnight-blue hair now bears fading streaks of blue-grey, and once-flawless peachy skin now bears the wrinkles of age. Phrast is a 7’0 figure of sharp angles, carrying himself with ruler-straight posture and an easy smile. He seems to dress lightly, and his clothes seem to be a mix of dwarven and elven in style. His voice has gained the slightest rasp with age, something that will grow only more noticeable. The tone of his eyes has lightened as well in a similar way to his hair, albeit somewhat less dramatically. 

Character Occupation: Bookkeeper, Scribe, Musician

Character Personality/Traits:

Contrary to what one might expect from his age, Phrast bears a keen and somewhat childlike excitement for the pursuit of knowledge and theory. He is incredibly slow to anger and blissfully quick to laugh, and he seems willing to share those emotions with any around him should they be open to it. Over a long time and majorly due to the influence of his wife and child, he has grown to be a deeply accepting individual – race no longer means much to him, though by habit and respect he still maintains much of elven etiquette. He has maintained a deep fondness of wordplay for nearly three centuries and has no intention of stopping now. 

Of note, Phrast seems to be almost constantly just a bit distracted. He’s easy to pull out of it, and when he needs to focus he can certainly do so, but it is as though there is always something else tugging at his attention.

Character Biography:

A lightning-intense thrill had run through a curious child’s veins when his father had hummed to him a tune from the opera he’d gone to see just a week before. Intense frisson from a series of notes, one among many that he now carried in his heart. Phrast was born to a civilian family of bookkeepers, and his childhood was filled with conversation, focused silence as he learned the family trade, and making a hobby of analyzing new sounds, new words, and the vibrations they made through different materials and instruments. Living in the boughs of Silivrenmîr among song and safety had been tedious at times, but it was beyond comfortable for a young man who found glee in whatever free time he could find in watching shows and plays, hearing the stories of others, and listening to distant military speeches.

It was in his early fifties that Phrast had first formed his theory, over months-then-years of a cultural bloom within the Elven city. The sensation he obtained from sounds, from even just their vibrations, prompted him to ponder the nature of sound and then of communication itself. This proved to be a seed that would continue to grow with him throughout his life, one first watered when he tried to make his thoughts explicit in long conversations with himself. The nature of communication, he figured, was divine – it had to be, else no system nor symbolic message could hold weight, nor could something become something else. It must have been an early creation of Demosto – a critical cipher, a genuine necessity of giving something form and meaning. Or.. perhaps a part of Demosto’s very being, imparted upon those he had created?

Idle thoughts with busy hands, strewn over time between work and prayers to Bothimir and Udero. He had by then learned to marvel at good numbers, those that flickered ever-so-much in their mind. Their experiences weren’t always pleasant, they’d found. Sometimes a pleasant tongue said a pleasant word that made him feel nauseous, and once a horrid, horrid woman being dragged towards execution had shrieked something so venomous and so incredibly pure that he’d stopped in his tracks. His synesthetic experiences grew more and more common as time went by, yet in spite of this they never quite seemed to get old or uninteresting. He learned to look for meaning in them, and more often than not found it – though of course he chastised himself for finding patterns in what was likely nothing. Yet.. could it hurt to experiment? To study meaning itself? 

At the age of 55, The Metaphrast sacrificed his name to the divine concept of communication. This was done as best he could – he would never use it again, and offered it both out of a deep respect for communication itself and, he would admit to himself, some… hope, that something would come of it. That he might communicate with some being that presided over communication itself, that he might know if there was any real reason or pattern to the strange sensations that he’d been blessed and cursed with his whole life. Maybe he’d drop the experiment in a year or two – and for those who he regularly interacted with he simply stopped referring to himself with his name, feeling no need to draw attention to what he was doing and not correcting them if they used it. After all, at the time, he thought it’d be temporary.

Years passed. He met new people, but his job was fairly insular and repetitive – and it was so easy to manage conversations without saying his own name. In a decade he had playfully taken the moniker of Metaphrast – denoting himself as a translator. Words to numbers and interpreting symbols in meanings. Phrast had felt.. Correct, taking the term. It hadn’t rung pleasantly to them, but neither had it been vile as some terms were. It simply felt as right as the sun rising or the night swallowing the day.

More than a century later and something was coming. Phrast found himself plucked from his work and reassigned as a quartermaster’s assistant, and as anxious words exchanged by those scouts who sought his services came he began to understand the scale of what was about to occur. It didn’t take long for him to begin training with a variety of weapons in hand and always, always a shield, even for his role in logistics. Horrors and horrors blurred together and together and together again, the numbers telling objectively frightening stories. He wished then that some didn’t still seem so sweet – it made him feel like there was something wrong with him. He fought all the harder for it, a rebuttal against the beauties of a death knell. 

The fall of Silivrenmîr – the flames, the way his home had tumbled along with so many others, the screams and the banners and the courage and the magic and the brutally calculated losses – was a symphony that shot sugar and bile through his spine. He hadn’t expected to survive, hadn’t expected to live to retreat after his and his brothers in arms had done all the damage they could save for a final charge that might take down a few more of those beasts. The charge never came. Too little to gain, too much lost with each Elven life. Ten skirmishes later, moments of carefully sought opportunity, and Barkamsted became home.

More time, more work, more exciting if distant and impersonal interactions with races whose words and cries and threats and very motions threatened always to tear his gaze from his work. He chastised himself often, bringing his focus back to long days and longer nights spent contributing however he could.

At no point in time did Phrast even briefly imagine that he would meet his first and last love in the tainted light of a demon gate. They were kaleidoscopes of fiendish glory, the very sensation around them clawing into and gently caressing his skin between flashes of violence. The pain of passing through that gateway of sin and the constant agony of Hell itself paired with the wild adrenaline of combat, a mixture that dulled his thoughts until a burst of sizzling wildberries averted his death with a hammer about the weight of his entire body. Myrmoda was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, a dwarf woman breathing heavily and giving him a proud smile between dried streaks of tears and blood. She had nudged towards the way forward with her head, telling him to ‘stick with me, twiggyboy’, and he, stupefied and with an unseen and unnoticed heat in his cheeks, had immediately hopped to do just that. He remembered her laugh – the pain in it, it was still literally Hell – and how it served as her own personal bulwark against the vileness all around them no matter how forced it was.

It wasn’t until the Alliance had reached the Obelisk and returned again that it occurred to him that the thanks he’d given her were the first words he’d actually spoken to someone that wasn’t an Elf. It wasn’t until she’d slapped what she’d thought was his back but was actually his ass that he realized that it was the first time he had been touched by (and subsequently chastised) someone who wasn’t an Elf, as well. These sensations, followed by the sight of Orcs and Goblins fighting alongside the Alliance, made the whole… everything, feel otherworldly. Like he’d entered a new world and stepped unwittingly into the overjoyed arms of a (now becoming regularly chastised) dwarf whose name he wouldn’t learn for two months and twenty days after the gate closed.

The social reforms that followed the war had thrown Phrast back into the bookkeeper’s role, damning him with frantic hours of problem solving and all-too-brief moments of things running well enough that he could afford time off. It was while shamefully eavesdropping on the many meanings of awfully loud conversations in the Drunken Ferret that a heavy thud into the seat across from him had broken his reverie, and where Myrmoda had earned her third chastisement for startling him half to death before he finally got her name. The joy she took in teasing him threw him consistently off-guard, and the swirls of brilliant energy that leaked from her dimples kept him curious. They’d spoken for twelve hours and drained a much larger portion of their respective wages than either would realize before it occurred to Phrast to ask if she would be possibly open to another conversation at a later time in the best Dwarven he could manage at the time. She had corrected him mercilessly until he got it right before responding in annoyingly good Elven song ([E] “You could sing the whole time!?”) that she would love that. Those dalliances grew more frequent over time, and Phrast found himself looking forward to each meeting even as the world continued to move around him. 

Time marched on. It was in 74AW, about 45 years ago now, that Phrast had first spectacularly impulsively kissed Myrmoda after she’d sang for him and gotten his first chastisement because she had wanted to do so first. She got the second and the third, and the fourth for good measure. The Metaphrast found no cause for complaint, though the two kept their relationship more subtle regardless given the views of their respective races. 

New races entered the scene, each with unique forms of communication that served as candy to the Metaphrast. The more-recent-to-him orcs and goblins and half-elves of all sorts, the Ca’liar, the dwarves who were not recent to him but which Myrmoda kept insisting on exposing him to, the strange chants of Witches, and even the bizarrely meaningful meaninglessness of the mindless Void served to constantly reinvigorate his curiosity. The Plague’s arrival had prompted them to work as more of a unit, with Phrast serving as a willing, disease-proof go-between for his now-largely-homebound dwarf. It was a mix of pure fortune and careful preparation which saw that the spreading sins never struck the pair, though the stress of those times did a number on the woman. This, perhaps, was why she threw subtlety and tradition out the window by suddenly asking Phrast to marry her in early 82AW, shortly after the two had moved to Falkvard. He had answered immediately with an intelligent [D] “Yes? Hm – [E] wait, what?”, as well as a second, real affirmation afterwards to his pouting new fiancee. 

They had married (and begun a long journey of aggressions both micro-and-not from others) the year following, having left just before the attack on Barkamsted by the Ca’liar. The subsequent war in Acaedia was a distant but avidly asked about thing, the two veterans of the Pact War finding themselves unwilling to take up their weapons again unless they truly had to. This attitude was solidified with the (deeply surprising) birth of their daughter in 87AW, a year before the war in the Mesas. She was a dwelf, yes – and one dearly beloved (if just a little overbearingly due to too-recent memories of historical attitudes) by both of her parents. Raising Saerid (they had made a compromise between a Dwarven and Elven name) absorbed his and his wife’s attention for the next several decades, albeit to widely varying degrees as she grew. 

Life continued in a comfortable routine until the Sons of Itiris launched their attack within Falkvard proper. Tonka had fortunately been home at the time, but the sudden burst of violence still demanded action. Old though they were – very much so in Phrast’s case – the two had done what they could during the attack, wielding old weapons and armor that the two had nevertheless continued to care for and inviting a pair of half-demons into their home to take shelter once they realized what was going on. Little Saerid kept promising them it would be okay as Myrmoda held the door and Phrast joined the combat outside. The combat was short, in relative terms, though their daughter had seen death and neither of her parents had come out of it fully unscathed when some of those fanatics realized their quarry was in the pair’s home. Myrmoda suffered what was now a long scar across her torso, while Phrast had had his shoulder effectively shattered. Both were able to get treatment at the hospital and blessings, though Phrast still feels an uncomfortable stiffness in his right shoulder to this day. 

The remaining years up until the present were, thankfully, mostly calm for the family – fighting was avoided and shelter was taken during the cult attack on Falkvard, while a shared focus on their daughter as well as keeping up to date with the world through socialization brought a wealth of pleasant memories. The Long Winter was the last major event to cause them direct hardship, though the Metaphrast had often praised the work of those who had managed the Kingdom’s stores with respect that stemmed from a lifetime of similar work. Careful adherence to what food stores were available and rigorously measured usage of stored fuel carried them through the cold and out the other end without too much upheaval.

Last year, their daughter reached adulthood and began to attend the university. This year, Phrast got to experience the bittersweet pleasure of his own grey hairs starting to come in to finally match his wife’s. She would, gods willing, outlive him. He now spends much of his time doting upon her and his daughter, and has decided to take up an old idea that had nevertheless stuck with him throughout his life. He has now decided to use at least a portion of his remaining years pursuing his long-held theory and passion – the tantalizing exploration of communication itself and all its divine bits, and the long-fed hope that he might one day have a chance to confirm or deny his ideas.

Other/Extra:

Languages known: Elven, Common, Dwarven, VERY scattered bits of other racial languages (if possible, none enough for true communication, but if not then just Elven/Common/Dwarven!)