Hamashor the Legend of the Battlefield

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Role

Chapter 1

By the time Hamashor was near the middle of his life, his bones were
beginning to creak. His strength and speed weren't what they used to
be, but he could still swing his axes well enough. He woke up
coughing in the middle of the night sometimes, shrugging it off as a
mere annoyance... but somewhere in his tiny mind he began to wonder
about his fading health, sitting in the cold and wet. His losses were
taking their toll. What could he do? Nothing. Get back up, keep the
axes swinging, and wait for the next great battle. Nothing else
mattered.

And yet even the brawls he continually threw himself into began to
lose their allure. A good, even fight... even a thrashing at the
hands of a better warrior... had become a rare event to be treasured.
His goal, to prove that a well-honed and highly-trained body could
match one enhanced by magical means, to rage and spit and howl in fury
and send his opponents fleeing in terror, had somehow become secondary
to his unspoken desire to rediscover the joy of combat for himself.
Hamashor had become numb. Was it old age, creeping in and forcing him
to think against his will?

No matter. Hold your weapons firmly, hurl them at your foe. Skin him
and wear him as a trophy, or suffer a defeat. All that mattered was
the fighting. Hamashor would find joy in it once more, he knew.

Then the unthinkable: his own commander, the leader of his village,
calling his desire to stand and fight into question. Hamashor had
been set upon by many enemies. He'd been knocked into submission,
bound and gagged, blindfolded and made deaf by the almost-mystical
workings of a bard. When he was awoken and attacked, completely
insensible but able to keep his feet, he gritted his teeth and stood
his ground. Flight never entered his mind.

Later on, when both had been shamefully defeated, his commander told
him that it had in fact been HE who had awoken Hamashor, and that he
was angry Hamashor had not fled. "I would have hoped, against so
many, your first instinct would have been to get away." The berserker
was humbled, belittled, bewildered, and horrified. The mighty warrior
Jinroh was sitting next to him, at a shrine to the gods of battle,
telling him in no uncertain terms that he was wrong to fight, that he
was wrong NOT to think, to flee.

This left Hamashor badly shaken, affecting him more deeply than any
defeat ever had. Was thought itself truly a sickness, as he'd
suspected? Had the commander been afflicted? Or was Hamashor a fool
to live the life of a truly unyielding berserker?

Role

Chapter 2

In the weeks following Hamashor's induction as a berserker, he made
many enemies. Others within the village were even perturbed at times,
angered by his ability to bring them to grievous harm through
unthinking action. Scouts, mostly, though the giant quickly found he
didn't much care for most of them, either. The scouts were all far
smarter than him, and flaunted it shamelessly, using "tactics" and
"strategy" as if they were anything but words. Could he be blamed for
blundering into a fight none were prepared for? For flying into a
rage and bearing his opponents into the ground while one of his
brethren quailed in a corner, bleeding profusely? At first, some
tried patiently explaining things to Hamashor, but as his wide,
frightened eyes began to dart, seeking escape, they'd throw their
hands up in exasperation. He took quickly to new combat skills, but
these concepts were far beyond him.

Hamashor did not despise them, naturally; his mind is too small to
hold spite for very long. When others harbor a grudge against him, it
only serves to confuse him. He does his best to mend perilously
strained friendships, because even Hamashor knows the importance of
cohesion. Though he thinks of it as "stickin' close."

Even given the occasional pitfall, Hamashor has made great personal
strides since joining the village. His guildmaster noted his talent
with axes had reached a peak, and offered to teach him a new weapon's
intricacies. The giant hadn't even considered anything other than
axes, so he cautiously asked what sort of skills he'd need to master.
The learned warrior thrust a polearm at him and put him in the center
of the training grounds with a lean half-elf, telling them to spar.
After much cursing and battering of fingers at the hands of the cruel,
cruel halfbreed, Hamashor had reached a certain compromise with his
weapon. He wielded it like an extremely long sword, swatting blows
aside and lunging in to attack with his free hand, finding the
weapon's length too unwieldy for precise strikes. The benefits of
this very length were, predictably, lost on him, and eventually the
dismayed guildmaster plucked the polearm away from Hamashor, telling
him they'd concentrate on unarmed fighting for a time. Hamashor
beamed, thinking he'd passed a test of some sort. What sort, he
wasn't certain, but he beamed anyway, rubbing his swelling knuckles.

Whether because of a series of blows to his head or particular weather
conditions, Hamashor has also had some of his memories resurface
recently. Fuzzily at first, due to one of the aforementioned blows
to the head ("Bloody Hamsah gates bloody closin' all de bloody time"),
the giant's senses were awash with colors and sounds which coalesced
and became a vision of glorious green-and-white ice-capped mountains.
He was running, tripping, falling, laughing, chasing... who? He
couldn't tell, but it brought him great joy. No matter, then.

Role

Chapter 3

Hamashor has a rough time keeping up with people around him on an
intellectual level, but he doesn't like to consider himself simple.
Instead, he's convinced himself he merely dislikes thinking, owing to
the massive headaches it usually brings on. In fact, he's taken his
own disdain for excessive brainwork to a wholly unnecessary level,
accusing those around him of "thinkin' too bloody much" when he
catches them hesitating to enter the fray, pondering one loaf of bread
versus two, or even standing around *looking* thoughtful. No... that
string of drool on his chin isn't indicative of a child's mind in a
giant's body; it means Hamashor is at peace with the world and beyond
such earthly concerns as dribble or rusting armor.

His mother taught him to curse a blue thunderhead, but he only
remembers one swear word. He enthusiastically uses it whenever he
thinks it fits (always), and in as many different situations as he
can, as if to demonstrate the word's flexibility and range.
Remembering little else of his parents (nothing, in fact, of his
father) or upbringing, Hamashor clings to the few morsels of brittle,
crumbling memory he has left. He loves his family fiercely, or
imagines he would if he could recall them.

The earliest thing Hamashor *does* remember clearly is entering the
Warriors' Guild in Galadon for the first time. He was only a young
boy (though he dwarfed most of the grown men there) and his doubly
impressionable mind was instantly swayed. These men knew what they
were doing, and they were willing to teach him. Hamashor greedily
lapped up their knowledge (sometimes three or four times), slowly
accepting it like a very, very small sponge... until he was ready to
go out and work. Brief stints as a bodyguard and bouncer, a short but
happy career as a scarecrow, and an ill-fated jaunt as a cityguard
later, the cloud giant had developed a taste for three things: large
axes, "crow juice," and leaping about getting into fights he had no
business being in.

Every now and then, Hamashor would suspect his own stupidity. He
would see mages and priests (and worse, other warriors) standing on
the fringes of a battle, looking worried, and his own impulse (to dart
past them and draw his weapons, naturally) seemed, momentarily, to be
possibly an incorrect one. This greatly angers Hamashor; both the
propensity of others to THINK rather than ACT and the fact that it
could make even *him* pause, if only for a moment. Privately, he's
begun to suspect that thought itself might be a sort of disease,
transferring itself from host to host like a plague in this fashion.
Hamashor equates excessive thought with self-doubt, and regards
fighting as the only good way to clear your mind and measure your own
worth.

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