First Impressions

Mortal

It’s hard to imagine Maelduine as having a mortal side, but he does, and its name is Sevastian.  Despite the rather presumptuous name, he’s not rich, and he’s not important.  He shares a small house and very little else with two roommates on the outskirts of the city.  Gray-eyed, dark-haired, muscular and brooding, he seems to spend most of his time away.  When he is home, he tinkers with his motorcycle and occasionally races it.  He dresses predominantly in somber tones: grays, black, whites, rarely any colors.  Though he appears around nineteen years old, he seems at once more mature and more isolated that the average late-teenager.

Fae

In his fae mien, Sevastian is slightly…different.  His hair is solidly black with bluish highlights, and sometimes seems to defy gravity.  His eyes shift between hues, sometimes silvery, sometimes gold, sometimes jet black, sometimes almost colorless.  His name, as the fae know it, is Maelduine Brevalaer, Sir Knight of House Ailil – but almost as widespread as that knowledge is the knowledge that he’s anything but your average knight in shining armor.  Arrogant and darkly temperamental, he owes allegiance to a politically formidable Countess.  He fights his share of duels for her honor, and he wins them.  Most people think he’s her personal guard, as she’s rarely seen in public without him shadowing at her side, hand on the hilt of the great sword Arc’hantael.  Most people are wrong.

He’s something of a mercenary to her, and something of an assassin as well.  She owes her quick climb through the hierarchy partly to her political acumen – and partly to a few well-placed, decisive strikes by Maelduine.  He has spilled more blood by far in the darkness than he has in honorable duels.  Sometimes he does what he does at her bidding.  Oftentimes, he makes the decisions himself, watching for threats and quicker routes to her power both with hawklike vigilance.  In the end, his loyalty is always and unswervingly hers.  He has blackmailed, backstabbed, bribed, maimed, and killed for her, and all so that her hands remain clean.  An exceedingly small circle of people know of this, and to them, he is Schattenwolf, the Black Wolf, unscrupulously loyal to the last.