I'm really curious about Brent! I'm pretty sure he's the main villain but I mean that's just a wild guess because he looks like a pretty evil guy. So what's up with him?
Well you’re right in guessing that Brenth is my main antagonist currently, though I’m sure this will change as the plot evolves. He is not alone in his spite; he is just louder than anyone before him. The issue surrounding Brenth is something that I have been developing over the years, because I do not want his character to be something simple, not to say I want to be able to relate to every decision he makes, but I do not want him to simply be the bad guy. To sum him up, he’s greedy, he’s fucked up, he’s mean, he’s selfish, and egotistical, but he’s also been molded to be that way. And damn, I don’t know where to begin with him, prepare for a bit of a character bio.
In the past I’ve made it clear his situation with his sister, but things were not always a sibling rivalry gone wrong, Path and Brenth actually got along quite well growing up in Cyurn. Their father was the one with somewhat of a chaotic disposition (one that I’ve explained before here) which Brenth took the brunt of in his adolescent years and Path, not Ia, was normally the one to console him when things got out of hand. However, when they neared the age where an heir would begin to take over control of one element, something would cause Brenth to snap. Before then he had simply been dealing with the constant pressure of life as an Oriancarus, he had his disagreements on how things should be taught, and how the city should be run, and preached them to either Path or Ia when he could, but I think it was also about this time when he had first met Chelgro, who had been holed up within the many coves along the coast.
Now Chelgro is an interesting individual in her own right. She actually quite bitter toward Ia for taking her home out from under her. So when Ia’s heir stumbles upon her cove, she is not going to be the friendliest of neighbors. Over the course of weeks, Chelgro tried to manipulate him. It was from her that Brenth first heard of an inheritance in Ia’s past life that she had given up to another Oriancarus. It was something of great power, respect, and great secrecy and something she had intentionally withheld from him in her teachings. Whatever his feelings on the matter, as Chelgro had intended, it bothered him enough to do his own research through Cyurn’s archives, and it was in this way he learned a minor use of glyphs and taboo casts in his own time, which he would use against his sister in the coming years.
So yeah, eventually Brenth would take this information, relate it to his predecessors and the overall order amongst the Oriancari, and he would let his entitlement (encouraged by Chelgro’s wrath) drive him to turn on his family, all in the hopes of regaining some semblance of self. And by turn, I mean he would wait till they were at their most vulnerable point and strike them down. Like you need to understand, he’s been growing up literally fending for himself against his tyrant of a father and the neglect of his mother and he has come to the point where he wants to put all of that behind him, to just bottle it up, throw it over his shoulder, and walk away. He wants to put his initial life in Cyurn in the past so that he can forge ahead into his own future. Now whether I would call attempting to murder his family something of retribution on his part, but c’est la vie, the asshole does it anyway.
He would come away with it by taking what is now the old Cyurn under his wing, alongside Chelgro, who would actually submit to him as well in time, and over the next half century they would raise up an army with the sole purpose of legitimately corrupting the eastern region of Vyrundal. He would drive Gairain into isolation, attempt to take back what was (to him) rightfully his in Orinacria (by murdering the Molten and Lightening Oriancari), and even Arron, in Kirn, would have to resign his authority over his territory to the inevitable threat Brenth will come to wield.
I think that just about sums him up just fine up until this point. He’s kind of a never ending project for me, he’s a bit hard to crack sometimes but of all my characters he frightens me the most, because he’ll do anything within his ability to get what he wants. And he has a fucking arsenal behind him. Since he’s the channel to Light, he tends to have this way about him that makes him the perfect fucking being and it pisses me off because he always heads straight for what will hurt the most with any individual and he uses his element to manipulate the hell out of everyone in his way.
Right now his main goal is to get at Ashtearul and bring down the original order of Oriancari that has been in place since Erracor and the First Elementals. He now knows of a source of power within Gairain and he wants it out of the hands of the Divine race’s descending line. Or at least that’s what he says. They all know he just wants Gairain and Orinacria for himself.
