Anaik
"A legend does not need a face. Only iron. And the will to stand between what is precious and what would see it destroyed."
Lineage: The Shadow of Birch
Every dragonborn carries the weight of lineage. Anaik carries his like armor, deliberately, and heavier than most would choose.
His ancestor, Birch, was a White Dragonborn Barbarian of considerable renown, not the kind earned through diplomacy or cunning, but through the straightforward and deeply physical act of being impossible to stop. Birch understood the world as a series of problems, and problems as a shortage of applied muscle. If the door would not open, there was not enough force. If the enemy would not fall, there were not enough strikes. If the mountain would not yield; Birch had not yet hit it hard enough. It was a simple philosophy, and by all accounts, it worked.
The frost of Birch's white lineage and whatever black-blooded ancestor ran further back in the family tree produced, generations later, Anaik, who inherited the strength and very little else. The acid breath. The dark scales. And a fundamental disagreement with his forefather about what a warrior is supposed to be.
The Iron Creed
Anaik is not modest. He does not lack confidence, nor does he shy away from consequence. What he has decided, with a deliberateness that borders on philosophical obsession, is that his face is irrelevant to the work.
Where Birch's legacy was written in scars and spectacle, Anaik's creed is built on erasure. He does not need you to know his expression when he charges into a line of soldiers. He does not need you to remember his eyes. He needs you, if you survive, to remember that something in iron stood in the gap, and held. A legend, he believes, is not a man. It is what a man does when no one can see his face.
To this end, he clads himself in the heaviest plate he can find, not for the protection it affords (though it affords quite a lot), but because armor is the ultimate argument against personality. Beneath it, Anaik could be anyone. Beneath it, it does not matter if he is afraid. And as a result of spending so much of his life learning to live inside steel, he has become something rarer than either Birch's raw power or a common soldier's trained endurance: a master of armament, his body so fluent in the language of heavy plate that it no longer slows him; it simply is him.
The Blood Beneath the Iron
He has decided, with considerable deliberateness, to be something different from Birch. This is not in question. What is also not in question is that Birch's blood is inside him, and it does not always wait for a decision.
The clearest evidence of this is the door. A locked door presents itself. Nero moves toward it with his lockpicks, already calculating the mechanism, already running through the approach. What he does not know, and discovers a moment later, is that Anaik has already started swinging. The door is open. The lock has been, by any functional measure, picked. Nero does not always find this as resolved as Anaik does.
This is not a failure of the creed. The iron holds, more often than not. Anaik does not swing at everything. He holds the weight of what he is capable of with a discipline that would be more visible if the occasions when it slips were not so total. But they are there, these moments when Birch surfaces through the plate before the philosophy has time to weigh in, and something gets handled the direct way, and Anaik has to decide after the fact whether he intended that or simply did it. The distinction, in outcome, is rarely significant.
What Moves Him
He is often the calmest presence in the room. This is accurate and it is also, the party has learned, incomplete information. Anaik operates at an even register for long stretches, then something trips a wire that is entirely his own and entirely non-transferable, and the register changes with no transition and no warning visible to outside observers.
The dislike arrives fully formed. He will look at a person, someone the party may have just met, someone who has done nothing documentable, and arrive at a total conviction. "I hate this guy. Can I kill him with a hammer." It is delivered in the same tone as a weather observation. The party has not always been able to establish what prompted it. It is possible Anaik has read something real that everyone else missed. It is also possible that whatever he read is available only to him. "This performative ass bitch needs to go. I'm afraid." He is not, generally, afraid. This appears to be a figure of speech.
The admiration works the same way: no announcement, no transition, simply the full weight of it, directed at something no one else has paused to consider. Someone doing their laundry, working through it with the focused attention of a person who has decided this task is worth doing properly, will stop Anaik entirely. He will watch. He will mean it when he says, "Oh, if not for this, what else am I trying to strive for." This is not sarcasm. It is, in fact, the most direct window into what Anaik actually values: full commitment to whatever you are, without performance, without an audience. The laundryman who does it right is doing something Anaik considers genuinely aspirational. The person who earned his instant dislike has, in all probability, done something that registered to him as false. Only Anaik holds the criteria.
The Anaik-Traxex Problem
Anaik talks about killing people with a frequency that suggests it functions, for him, as a form of editorial commentary. A remark about a person in the vicinity, something muttered under his breath or stated plainly to no one in particular, is more often than not exactly that: a remark. He holds back. The iron holds. What he says and what he does are, the majority of the time, two separate things, and the party has generally come to understand this.
Traxex has not always operated on this distinction.
There have been instances where Anaik made a passing remark about someone nearby, and that person subsequently required medical attention, and Traxex was in the area, and Anaik had not, in any meaningful sense, issued an instruction. The party has noted the pattern. Anaik's response to these incidents appears to involve a combination of mild surprise and the slow recognition that the ranger walking beside him processes casual commentary as a considerably more operational document than he intended. He has not stopped making the remarks. Traxex has not started asking for clarification before acting on them. The pattern continues.
Known Traits
- Fighter
- Black Dragonborn
- Heavy Armor Master
- Acid Breath
- Action Surge
- Second Wind
- Indomitable
- Descendant of Birch
- Door Opener (Unscheduled)
- Connoisseur of Earnestness
- Criteria Undisclosed
The Question This Chapter Must Answer
His chapter has only just begun. The iron is chosen. The creed is set. But a warrior who hides his being behind steel must eventually reckon with what that steel is for, and who, in the end, he is willing to stand in front of. Can Anaik protect his companions with the armor he chose not for them, but for himself? Will the iron that erases his face be the same iron that saves theirs?
Notable Moments
Entries will be added as the chronicle unfolds. Record the deeds that should not be forgotten.
Bonds & Relationships
[Record Anaik's relationships as the story unfolds. Note especially: his transactional arrangement with Nero, the ongoing Traxex incident log, and whether anyone in the party has figured out his trigger criteria yet.]