Rurik of Nadezhda

"I excuse a great deal because I recognize the trauma and the loss our nation has suffered. But my patience isn't limitless... unlike my authority."
-Rurik of Nadezhda
== History ==
Once a soldier from the northern mage wars, Rurik was an early experiment in the creation of sentient constructs. After the collapse of his kindgom, Rurik would gather together a band of soldiers, becoming the army of a charismatic warlord named Slava Vasilev. With the help of ancient, barely-understood artifice, Vasilev and Rurik would create slave collars that could be placed upon the north's surviving mages, and activated by him to kill their wearers upon his whim. Thus would the nation of Nadezhda - hope - be founded, with Slava Vasilev as the First Minister and Rurik as the Marshal. After Vasilev's death, Rurik would seize the master collar and the position of First Minister, becoming the unquestioned ruler of Nadezhda. In merging the positions thus, he would unknowingly set the precedent for Abi Eodauga to do the same thing fifty years later. 
Rurik would be overthrown after half a century in power by the mage Abi Eodauga. He would not live long enough to see Eodauga become the first mage to rule a northern kingdom since the catastrophic wars over a century ago. 
== Personality ==
Arrogant, warlike, self-obsessed. Rurik believed that that mastery over the mages proved the might of the Nadezhdans, and that himself, a warforged, was a god among men. In truth, Rurik, a creation of magic, feared and misunderstood the arcane. His desire to bend mages to his will was a sort of validation, and a misguided one at that. 
During his life, Rurik liked to speak of himself as transhuman, justifying his absolute rule over Nadezhda on the basis of that. And yet, in rare moments of self-reflection, he would let slip the idea that a perfect world had no place for something like him. He kept the mages of Nadezhda alive because to kill them, as Franz Forrawyn did in the Reich Nördlich, would be an admission that he too should be destroyed. It did not help that Forrawyn was known to have privately let slip that if he had his way, Rurik and the other Warforged would be killed. Rurik was much as a slave as his own collared mages, and he wore the master collar as a reminder of that. He was the eternal, immortal ruler of Nadezhda, bound to guide and protect his people whether he liked it or not. The one thing he truly wanted, to be human, was beyond his grasp. All he could settle for was to crush and enslave the mages, to prove his superiority - a superiority that in his his metallic heart of hearts, he knew to be false. Category:Monarchs
Category:Warforged
Category:Nadezhda
Category:Dead
Category:Snowball Earth
Category:Construct
Category:Marshal of Nadezhda
Category:Lawful Evil