Gillean

Gillean is a once-human immortal given his immortality out of a particular God's spite.

Appearance
Tall and lanky, Gillean himself doesn't cut a terribly imposing figure. His preferred form has an almost boyish charm to it, with full, soft, fluffy brown hair and grey-green eyes. His state of dress varies largely based on the area of the world he's in, but almost always includes a silver chain with a feather-shaped charm.

Personality
Gillean was, at one time, a fairly decent person. There are moments of clarity that show this even now, but for the most part, the sharp-tongued, well-meaning youth he once was has been buried under millenia of bitterness and vitriol.

Even now, most people don't see the depth of rot in Gillean - Lethe's - personality. Over the years, he's adopted a successful false personality. It's easy to mistake his easy-going smiles and youthful flair as genuine, and few could be blamed for it. After all, he's had a long time to cultivate that mask.

Under it, Lethe is bitter, envious, and possessive. The lattermost he avoids letting people see, but when he's not tricking people into doing what he wants, he's very frank with his words and openly covetous of what others have. Possessiveness is something that drives him despite his best efforts to separate himself from it, and to stem it before it becomes a problem Lethe will shove aside anything he feels he's getting too close to.

In his worst moods, Lethe is also violent and quick-tempered. He - rather under any number of his former names - has been said to commit murder in any number of vile ways should his temper flare too hot. Humans, to him, don't deserve any kind of gentleness if they're going to risk their lives irritating immortals. (He's also a hypocrite.)

Everybody Starts Somewhere
If you were to ask what Gillean's life was like as a human, the answer would be "uneventful." He grew up a rambunctious child in a middle-class home during a time when that gave him just enough leeway to cause a little trouble, but not enough to really get away with everything he might have liked to. Most of the time, whether he was spending too much time with a farmer's daughter or a noble's precious progeny, his quick tongue and charming face got him out of trouble.

Eventually, he settled down from his carnal appetites and took to a pretty young thing strongly enough that even he, in all of his naivete, couldn't deny that he had fallen in love. It wasn't unusual, and all things considered, he was pretty happy with the turn of events.

An Unfortunate Slip of the Tongue
He wasn't the only one interested in that pretty young thing, though. As it turned out, there were much more powerful men who felt the same way - far beyond nobles, even. When Gillean met a God for the first time, it was in a conversation that ended in a 'request' for her. That request, of course, wasn't really a request at all.

Gillean responded predictably for a young man who was too cock-sure for his own livelihood - sharply and with no uncertain terms that he had no intention of giving her up. He didn't know he was speaking to a God, at that time, but that hardly mattered. Gods - most of them anyway - are spiteful creatures in his world, and this one didn't take kindly to being treated like the common folk. He didn't take his spite out immediately, either.

Pieces of You
No, it wasn't for a few years that Gillean learned what the God had done. In those times, wars between classes, raids, and all sorts of violence were commonplace. They'd missed Gillean himself for the most part, because he deliberately chose to live in a home that made him seem like he had nothing of value. Not everyone was fooled, though. The God who had 'blessed' him may have had something to do with it - even Gillean doesn't know.

He doesn't remember much of the attack. All he remembers now is the thunderous crack of his door when it was broken open, trying to get his then-wife to safety only to find himself split in half by way of someone's sword. It was a peculiar feeling, and he felt then that it was strange that he would still be conscious, watching the rest of what happened. It wasn't pretty, nor was it quick. His wife was an attractive woman, and that made her good entertainment in the eyes of those marauders.

They didn't rape her - maybe that God wouldn't let them, it's hard to say - but they took great delight in removing her beauty before they killed her. Gillean's healing was slow then, as he had no idea he had it. His mind was so numb he didn't even realise his body had knitted itself together until, on instinct, he shoved himself to his feet and ran to his wife's corpse to cradle it. He thought to question it just in time for that very same God to show himself and gleefully explain what had happened. If he couldn't have her, he'd explained, no one could. Oh, and enjoy immortality.

A Certain Absence of Conscience
Gillean lost his sense of time after that. He was a haunted shell of a man, often seen skulking around the bars demanding more beer than any one person should be able to consume without killing themselves. It seemed, alongside his immortality, Gillean had also lost his ability to alter his mind with any kind of drug.

That wasn't to say his mind was complete, though. He couldn't count the number of times he tried to commit suicide via drunken brawl and angry guard. Every time, no matter how violently they tore him up, his body knitted itself back together.

When he bored of that style of attempt some thousand years later, he moved on to other pursuits. If he was going to have to live on his own, he figured he might as well enjoy it. He didn't much care who or what he slept with, and people proved easy to charm when you cleaned up and acted kind. It helped that he hadn't changed much in a thousand years, physically.

Eventually, that bored him too. It was fun making the occasional husband or wife angry enough to smack him around, but it got predictable after a while. So he turned to something else - something predictable, but much less favourable for the average man: war. Gillean wasn't much of a strategist, but when your body would never die, you didn't need to be. It helped that the more he did die, the stronger his control of his ability to heal became. Over the next five or six thousand years, he helped men win wars - whatever side he felt like helping that day, and sometimes he switched sides at random. People weren't much of a concern at that point.

Dabbling in Uncertainty
During his stint slaughtering people for conquest's sake, Gillean began to wonder just what the limits of his immortality were. He couldn't die, so by extension he supposed his body would just heal from whatever he did to it, too.

Warped thinking like that can cause your whole body's composition to change, though. He didn't learn about that until it was too late - the more he started to take hold of his own form, shifting it to create a blade in the place of a hand or razor-sharp claws in place of fingernails, for example, the more his body changed when he tried to put it 'right'. That's what happens when you forget what you were supposed to look like.

After the first ten thousand years or so, history deigned to repeat itself. Still Gillean, still clinging to the man he once was, he met a man. He was attractive, strong-willed, and perhaps most of all, unafraid of Gillean even with the changes he'd made to his body. They got along. He started to feel human again, even knowing his immortality would make his new lover grow old without him.

A Thousand Shards
Fate didn't seem to have that in store for him, though. His second love wasn't as lucky as his first - there was nothing stopping these men from doing whatever they wanted. It was the last time Gillean met the God that had put him in this position, but that's probably for the better.

It was also his first experience in being skinned alive. Not a recommended way to die, and it makes your body go into panic mode trying to pull itself back together. Just long enough that Gillean couldn't do anything to save his love, of course. And to make everything last, the God made him watch while He personally took his lover apart - leaving just enough missing that even the greatest necromancer couldn't do anything with the body. He left with those pieces.

The men didn't leave. To this day, in that old, rotting house, their bones are still there, cracked and crumbled in places by impossibly strong jaws. After all, you can only experience so much vitriolic retribution before you forget who - and what - you were. Gillean was more animal than man then, and more monster than animal. There was, for a long time, not a single semblance of conscious thought in him. That form became his now-true form that day.

In Memoriam
Eventually, he grabbed hold of his mind again and recalled a humanoid form. The first one he took happened to be that of his first wife, which was a bit of a problem but reminded him that he had few limitations anymore. Once he got over the mourning from some fifteen thousand years prior, he began to plot out more of his life. He had a lot of it left to live, and all.

Names came and went, as did his alternate lust and bloodlust. They were easy things to feed in a society still founded on violence and greed. It was less easy to persuade women, at first, but that would come in time. He returned to his warring days, as well, until times changed and an uneasy peace started to circulate in the world.

Cage the Beast
Without war, his rage had no real outlet. With no outlet, it turned to jealousy - as he began to really watch people (after all, one could hardly act as human without watching them and learning how they acted), he began to covet their relationships. So he started to follow in that God's footsteps.

Most of the time, he could change shape and change names before they caught on to what was going on.

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