12 KiB
Ernchait Seawail was born in Harborcrown, on the flat world of Vaardland, the son of an unremarkable middle-class family. His father was a minor officer in the King's army; his mother kept the household in which Ernchait spent much of his childhood. He was neither born to greatness nor raised with any expectation of becoming a hero. As a boy, he divided his time between household chores and study at the local temple to Tyr, god of justice.
His faith became something more than childhood instruction on the night that defined the rest of his life.
Returning home with his mother from a holy celebration, the two were attacked in the streets of Waterdeep. His mother was gravely wounded. Ernchait, seized less by fear than by outrage at the injustice before him, struck one attacker in the head with a stone and felled him. Taking up the fallen man's weapon, he drove the second assailant away.
Then he returned to his mother.
She lay dying on the cobbles. Ernchait did the only thing he could think to do: he prayed as he had watched the elder clergy pray.
And his mother lived.
Ernchait never regarded this as chance. Tyr had answered him. Courage, righteousness, action, and faith had together produced justice where there should instead have been tragedy. Ernchait entered Tyr's service and carried that conviction with him for the rest of his life.
It also left him with one of his most enduring habits: Ernchait sees omens everywhere. The gods are speaking, he believes. The difficulty is getting mortals to listen.
The Road to Phandalin
Years later, Ernchait's life as a temple cleric gave way to the considerably less orderly existence of an adventurer. By then he was not merely a priest but a capable warrior, comfortable behind a shield and heavy armor and quite willing to enforce divine judgment with a warhammer when words proved insufficient.
It was in Northern Nook, amid the bustle of a traveling market, that Ernchait first fell in with the companions who would define the great adventuring period of his life.
Their earliest adventures did not immediately suggest that cosmic events awaited them.
Indeed, one of Ernchait's first memorable accomplishments was breaking the heart of a rather Rubenesque wood elf.
It would not be the last occasion on which Ernchait's romantic ambitions became part of the party's history. In time, he would discover that divine favor and personal charm were not necessarily distributed in equal measure.
Yet the party soon became something more than a collection of travelers and troublemakers. Together they returned to Waterdeep, the city of Ernchait's birth, where one of their first encounters with authority nearly went disastrously wrong.
Trouble with the Watch
One of Ernchait's companions managed to attract the attention of the Waterdeep City Watch.
What began as trouble became violence. Damage was done on both sides, and for a dangerous moment the adventurers risked becoming enemies of the very city Ernchait considered home.
For Ernchait, that distinction mattered.
The Watch was not some band of brigands to be defeated and forgotten. Whatever misunderstanding, bad judgment, or hot blood had brought the two sides into conflict, the injured watchman was a servant of Waterdeep. Ernchait had no desire to make an enemy of him—or of the city.
So Ernchait healed him.
It was a small act compared with some of the miracles that would later surround the party, but perhaps one of the more revealing acts of Ernchait's life. He did not demand that the Watch first admit fault. He did not allow the party's pride to turn an unfortunate confrontation into a blood feud. He simply used Tyr's gift to repair some of the harm that had been done.
The gesture proved what Ernchait intended it to prove:
They meant no ill will toward the Watch or toward Harborcrown.
The encounter also demonstrated something fundamental about Ernchait's understanding of justice. Justice was not merely identifying an offender and punishing him. Sometimes justice meant preventing a bad situation from becoming worse. Sometimes it meant accepting responsibility for the consequences of one's own side's actions.
And sometimes the best way to win a confrontation was to heal the man with whom you had just been fighting.
Truth in Waterdeep
The party's subsequent adventures in Waterdeep carried Ernchait into establishments somewhat removed from the temples and respectable middle-class streets of his youth.
An investigation led the companions into a brothel and opium den, where they encountered corruption within the city's own institutions.
This time, Ernchait's divine magic served a different purpose.
He invoked a Zone of Truth.
Within its influence deception became considerably more difficult, and a crooked member of the guard was exposed.
The two encounters with Waterdeep's authorities revealed the two sides of Ernchait particularly well.
When a watchman was injured in a conflict with his friends, Ernchait healed him and sought reconciliation.
When another proved corrupt, Ernchait dragged the truth into the light.
To Ernchait there was no contradiction. He respected lawful authority deeply, perhaps sometimes too deeply, but the authority itself was not sacred. Justice was.
Beyond the Edge of the World
What followed dwarfed even Harborcrown.
The party became entangled with a particularly hoity-toity elf whose path ultimately led them farther than Ernchait could reasonably have imagined when he first entered Tyr's temple.
They went off the great disc of Vaardland itself.
For most inhabitants of Vaardland, the edge of the world was the boundary of everything imaginable.
Ernchait crossed it.
Beyond the familiar world, the party encountered Grubnigrab, a creature capable of broadcasting to the entirety of the universe.
For a man who had spent his life convinced that unseen powers were constantly communicating through signs and omens, meeting a being that could quite literally address the cosmos was an encounter of almost absurd appropriateness.
Ernchait had begun life listening for whispers from the gods.
He eventually traveled somewhere from which a voice could reach the universe.
On the return journey, however, Ernchait encountered someone memorable for reasons having nothing to do with gods or cosmic mysteries.
She was a shining and disciplined warrior of ebony complexion, close-cropped of hair and possessed of the unmistakable bearing of a professional soldier. She was formidable, composed, and striking enough to attract Ernchait's attention immediately.
Ernchait attempted to attract hers.
He did not succeed.
For a man who had crossed the edge of the world, confronted things beyond ordinary mortal experience, and enjoyed the demonstrable favor of Tyr, this proved an unexpectedly insurmountable challenge.
Apparently divine favor had its limits.
The Return to Vaardland
Returning to the disc did not mean returning to an ordinary life.
On their way back toward Phandalin, Ernchait and his companions became embroiled in conflicts whose consequences were considerably greater than their earlier exploits.
They thwarted the designs of a powerful drow noble, preventing a dangerous scheme from reaching fruition.
Later, they intervened when the Redbrands threatened to seize control of a small town. The party stopped them.
For Ernchait, these struggles brought his life strangely close to where it had begun.
As a young man, he had seen violence descend upon an innocent person and acted because no one else was there to prevent it. He had struck down one man, driven away another, and then knelt beside his dying mother and prayed for her life.
Years later, after traveling beyond the edge of Vaardland and confronting powers his younger self could scarcely have imagined, he was still fundamentally doing the same thing:
standing between those who would abuse power and those unable to resist them.
That, more than any miracle, was what Tyr had taught him.
Father Ernchait
Yet Ernchait's greatest legacy may not be any enemy he defeated.
During the latter part of his adventuring career, he gathered around himself an unusual congregation: warforged devotees who came to follow his teachings and recognize his spiritual authority.
From them grew a new church founded by Ernchait himself.
The adventuring cleric who had once been merely another acolyte of Tyr became a religious leader in his own right. His warforged followers formed the nucleus of a community, and Ernchait's deeds, teachings, and reputation eventually made him a revered figure within the city.
There is an irony in this that Ernchait himself might not entirely recognize.
As a younger man, he possessed an almost dangerous faith in those who wielded authority within his temple. He believed hierarchy, properly ordered, was an instrument through which righteousness could operate.
By the end of his adventures, he had become the authority.
The boy who once watched the elder priests and imitated their prayers now had devotees watching him.
Perhaps the injured watchman in Harborcrown had been an early sign of the man Ernchait would become. Long before anyone revered him, Ernchait had learned that possessing power was not the same thing as being entitled to use it against everyone who opposed you. A servant of justice sometimes had to strike. Sometimes he had to expose a liar.
And sometimes he had to be the first person willing to put things right.
Ernchait Near the End
Ernchait Seawail approaches the end of his adventuring career as a very different man from the boy who knelt beside his mother on the cobbles of Waterdeep—but not because his fundamental beliefs have changed.
If anything, the astonishing events of his life have reinforced them.
He has crossed Vaardland. He has fought beside friends who occasionally brought the City Watch down upon themselves. He has healed those same watchmen rather than turn them into enemies. He has entered an opium den and exposed corruption through divine truth. He has fought criminals and nobles. He has journeyed beyond the edge of the disc itself and encountered a being whose voice could reach across the universe.
He has protected towns from conquest.
He has pursued romance with rather less success than he has pursued justice.
He has founded a church.
And he has acquired followers who now look to him for the certainty he once sought from others.
Through all of it, Ernchait has remained convinced that events possess meaning.
A fortunate blow is an omen. A timely meeting is an omen. A narrow escape is an omen. Perhaps even an unreciprocated attraction is an omen, although Ernchait might prefer not to inquire too deeply into what Tyr intended by that particular lesson.
He is a priest, soldier, healer, founder, occasionally unsuccessful suitor, and servant of Tyr.
He believes in law, but not passivity. He respects authority, but has learned that authority without justice deserves to be challenged. He believes in truth, but is perfectly willing to use divine magic to drag it out of someone. He carries a warhammer, but some of the most consequential things he has ever done were accomplished with an open hand rather than a clenched fist.
Sometimes justice happens in a temple.
Sometimes it happens on a bloodied street.
Sometimes it happens in an opium den.
Sometimes it requires a prayer.
Sometimes it requires a warhammer.
And sometimes, after everyone has done something they regret, justice begins by healing the other fellow's wounds.
After everything Ernchait Seawail has seen, he remains certain of one thing:
The gods are always speaking. One merely has to recognize the signs.