Veteran Vampire Hunter - Dane

model designed by DM Stash, unpainted, unassembled

A man of Brightstone with a mysterious ailment. One that sees him constantly donning a haunting mask. The truth of his affliction is seldom shared, those who have travelled with him have noted he constantly rebandages himself twice a day, hiding a grimace of agony beneath his mask. Despite the extreme pain, he is a formidable fighter and an expert vampire hunter, one of the best in Tharador.

Born in a small village in the shadow of Brightstone’s Havel Range, Dane’s childhood was mostly remarkable. His father was a miner, who would spend weeks at a time in the mines of the mountains, whilst his mother was a potter. This life was the norm for as long as he could remember until a fateful day when his father returned from the mines. That night as his parents lay in bed, Dane heard his mother scream in agony, rushing into the room he witnessed his father sinking his fangs into her neck, draining her dry completely. As he begged his son to understand, Dane sprang into action by throwing a handful of silver coins at his father, driving him away as he screamed for help. His life was shattered in an instant, he was an orphan now, and the spawn of a vampire at that.

The village had no place for him. No orphanages were there, and he was given the choice to be sent to Flussende as an orphan, or to Zwilling Zwei where he would be inducted into the Hex Hunters. With what little he knew of the Hex Hunters, Dane chose them, for he believed it would give him the skills to find, hunt and kill his father. Though right with this belief, he would quickly learn the training and initiation of Hex Hunters was a gruelling process, and finalised with the imbuing of arcane crystals into ones skin to give them superhuman abilities. Though many perished from this, and after five years of training, fighting and bleeding it was his time to complete his initiation with the crystal imbuement. Though the first seemed to work fine, giving him heightened reflexes and speed, the second crystal which intended to give him command of Minera’s Breath went awry.

As it was placed in his skin, he was engulfed in flame, his skin melting away as agony overwhelmed him. The flames were doused, and the boy was tended to by a cleric who pronounced he would die within a few hours, lest a miracle were to save him. Yet it seemed perhaps not a miracle, yet vampiric blood that dwelt within him, as small as it might be. He began to slowly regenerate, yet it seemed for only enough to keep him alive. His skin constantly peeled back every few days, a constant process of decay and regeneration he was now trapped in. For this, and all other evils in his life, Dane blamed his father.

Thus he left the Hex Hunters, donning a haunting mask to hide his ghastly condition and ensuring he was always fully covered from head to toe. Few were able to see what was beneath the mask and live, and often those that did were vampires. Any he spoke to as a means to interrogate his father would see his charred, horrible visage as he spoke to them, commanding them to tell him what they knew of his father Aidan, looking for a morsel of a clue to put him on his journey. Quickly he earned a reputation across Tharador’s occult circles as a proficient vampire hunter, and this reputation drove Tharia Moonshadow to reach out to him whilst he was in the city of Varekan, asking him to join her expedition to a vampire coven in the Katarn Sea. He had never set foot in a whole coven before, and gladly chose to take the opportunity. One of them would be bound to know something of his father’s whereabouts, and he would slowly torture every single one of them until he got his answer.