Role

Chapter 1

Oroas, whose soul thrummed with an insatiable hunger for the vast and
unknowable expanses beyond his claustrophobic birthplace, harbored a fervor
for exploration that was almost religious in its intensity. The concept of
the world outside the stifling confines of Dagdan, where the air was thick
with tradition and unspoken rules, called to him with the seductive whisper
of a siren song, promising wonders and horrors in equal measure. Yet, this
fervent desire was a solitary flame in the face of his father's relentless
pragmatism.

His progenitor, a solitary pillar of stoic discipline, was a guardsman whose
very blood was alloyed with loyalty to the town that Oroas found so
excruciatingly mundane. The elder man's life was a mosaic of regimented duty
and unyielding structure, a stark contrast to the boundless dreams that
danced like will-o'-the-wisps in Oroas's mind.

Oroas was not chiseled from the same stone as his father, the art of war, the
dance of steel and shield, was anathema to his inquisitive nature.
Recognizing this dissonance, his father, ever the pragmatist yet not devoid
of affection, steered the boy towards the arcane. Shapeshifting, an art as
mercurial as Oroas's own dreams, became the canvas upon which he could paint
his soul's desires. It was a practice that flirted with the outer edges of
reality, where the fabric of existence was thin and malleable, much like the
young dreamer's yearning for a life less ordinary. In the mutable forms of
shapeshifting, Oroas found an echo of the freedom he sought, a brief respite
from the suffocating order of his world.

Thus Oroas surrendered himself to the whimsical tides of his imagination, a
stark contrast to the rigid discipline of his father's world. While the elder
stood sentinel over the mundane reality of Dagdan, Oroas danced with the
spectres of his desires, his soul taking flight in daydreams of roaring as a
lion, sovereign of the land, or soaring as an eagle, sentinel of the skies.
His yearning was to witness the world through a kaleidoscope of eyes, to
drink in the diversity of existence with a voraciousness that bordered on the
sacred.

But with each transformation he conjured in the sanctuary of his mind, a seed
of resentment towards his father took root and flourished in the fertile soil
of his discontent. The pragmatic shackles of duty and the relentless drills
that were meant to forge him in the image of his progenitor only served to
fan the flames of his rebellion. Yet, entwined with the bitterness was a
filament of love, complex and unyielding, it was the kind of love that could
only be born of fundamental differencea love that both tethered him and
propelled him towards his inevitable flight.