Dastan Vertoik

Dastan World-breaker

The Si'ylan Empire was built on blood.
That, historically speaking, is well known. In three generations the Si'yl grew from a small empire to one that spanned the entire world, crushing underfoot all who opposed them. Even those who surrendered were not spared, for there was only room for two types of people within the Empire: true Si'ylans and slaves. 
Dastan Vertoik was born of slaves and earned his freedom with his quick mind and boundless creativity. While his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been content to work at hard labor for meager pay, shelter, and food handed down by their masters, Dastan dreamed of becoming Si'yl. As a child, he studied any book he could borrow or steal in any time he could snatch away from lessons in warfare training him to serve as a frontline troop and ablate the danger to the true Si'yl as they fought their wars of conquest. By the time he reached his age of majority, he had been accepted into a college and spared his place on the constant warfronts that the Si'ylan Empire fought to claim every corner of the world. 
Dastan quickly earned the grudging respect of his Si'ylan peers with his work ethic and creativity, even if he paled compared to their raw power and knowledge. The young man knew he couldn't compete with his peers directly, so he became an expert in Si'yltech and made use of magitech to cover for his weaknesses. In time, Dastan married and started a family. His ambition cooled and he remained one of the premier engineers of the era, but the hopes of his peers that he would join the ranks of true Si'yl seemed to dim every year Dastan grew older.
The Godswar began in flame and fury. Tywynisglair was obliterated in skyfire as the Militant attacked, killing millions and, among them, Dastan's wife and children. The engineer himself was only spared because he was away from the city on business at the time and so fell into a dark despair that he had been unable to protect his family and unable to even die with them. When the Empire came to recruit him for a project to create weapons to slay gods, they found a broken man consumed by his rage and despair. Dastan threw himself into the work, building ever greater and more dangerous weapons to arm the soldiers who fought for the Empire. Finally, Dastan worked on Project Godhammer and was part of the team that created the weapons that allowed them to kill the first of the gods to fall. He became friends with the Seven and One, the heroes who slew the first god and would carry on to bring down the entire pantheon. Their shared sorrows would be the only respite the aging man had during the Godswar.
The golden era following the Godswar saw Dastan and his younger brother rewarded with extended lives and important positions within the new hierarchy being built around the Seven and One as they took control of the Empire. Dastan locked away the weapons he had built and tried to redevote his life to repairing the damage of the Godswar, but he could not blind himself forever to the decay of his friends. The final spite of the dead gods, the Godcurse, was consuming the Seven and One... but before Dastan could do anything about it, he was enthralled by the Captivator and forced to serve his bidding. In the Ascendancy War that followed, Dastan's name became as hated and cursed as those of the Seven and One as weapons he had made to slay gods were turned on armies of mortals, their homes, and even the world itself.
By the time the Godhunter saved Dastan from the Captivator's influence, he was a broken, bitter man, known to the world not as a hero who had fought for the empire, but as Dastan Worldbreaker, the man who had given monsters the tools they needed to destroy the empire and nearly drive the mortal races to extinction. 
Dastan hid himself away with what few Ascended he could take captive in a mountaintop fortress and continued his lonely work searching for a way to fix what he had done, even putting his soul into an animated suit of armor to grant himself immortality, but his spirit had been broken. Never again would Dastan Worldbreaker create.

Mental characteristics

Personal history

Dastan was born shortly before the Godwar and, like most of the Si'yl, was affected by it. His wife was killed in the first cataclysm, and his daughter died when a settlement was razed by the Militant. Bereft, Dastan joined the war effort in earnest, throwing himself into it with a suicidal zeal. He made a name for himself by developing weapons that had great effect on the gods and their followers, and later by being part of the secretive project to arm the adventurers who would be known as the Seven and One as Si'yla's last hope to defeat the gods. 
Dastan World-Breaker succeeded in making weapons that could kill the divine. Along with the friends he made among the Seven and One, he was one of the foremost artificers who created Si'yla's salvation. After the Godwar, his weapons were stored away, nearly forgotten, but kept ready in case the mortal races ever had need of them again. 
To Dastan's horror, Ascendancy came first to the Seven and One. As greed and lust for power overcame his friends, they took up their discarded weapons and turned tools of destruction made to save Si'yla on its people. Millions died and Dastan could do nothing but watch as his former friends wreaked greater havoc on the world than the gods ever had. The breaking point game when Dastan's own brother Ascended and followed the Captivator into battle, warring for dominance and power, heedless of the blood that ran in rivers in their wake. 
Dastan captured as many Ascended as he could and imprisoned them in his fortress, locking himself away from the world to wait out eternity, never letting their Ascendancies free to plague the world again. You met him as a broken old man, ageless through the work of his artifice, holding tightly to the Ascendancies out of fear of what would happen if they were released. No matter how you tried to reach to him, his fear had made him unable to see a future beyond his dark corner of the world.

Current Status

Dead

Current Location

Mountaintop Fortress Ruins

Species

Human

Ethnicity

Si'ylan

Gender

male