Andrew Hayes is one of the most enduring and politically troublesome figures in Atlanian history, a common-born soldier of mixed Atlanian and Nmerian blood who rose from obscurity to become protector of princes, servant of kings, guardian of House Duron, and eventually one of the most feared immortal retainers in the realm. He first came to prominence during the Okose border wars, serving in the retinue of Crown Prince Albert Dùghlas Mardrein. After Albert’s death at Akas, Hayes returned the prince’s body to Atlanian lines, an act that tied him forever to Albert’s memory and the peace that followed. Over the centuries that came after, Hayes became a drake slayer, bandit hunter, scholar, traveler, lord knight, and royal agent, serving the Talakar, LeTreis, and Duron lines while making himself a persistent obstacle to every noble faction he considered foolish, corrupt, or dangerous.

Hayes is immortal in a cursed and unpleasant sense: he can be killed, but he does not remain dead. Each death eventually returns him to his feet, leaving him trapped in the body of a man who appears to be somewhere around thirty while the world around him ages, collapses, rebuilds, and forgets. This condition has made him legendary, but not serene. He is angry, rude, short-tempered, and deeply undiplomatic, yet also fair, loyal, learned, and almost impossible to intimidate. His long life has given him countless skills and titles, but it has not softened his contempt for arrogant lords, reckless heirs, or anyone who treats common lives as expendable.

Politically, Hayes rarely claims a grand ideology of his own. He tends to follow the lines of obligation established by the LeTreis, Duron, and Talakar houses, while gleefully ruining the plans of other Atlanian lords whenever he believes they deserve it. His loyalty is personal, historical, and oath-bound rather than polite or theoretical. He serves kings, but he is not easily ruled by them; he honors noble houses, but he has no patience for noble vanity. This makes him both invaluable and deeply uncomfortable to the Atlanian elite, especially because he remembers too much, has survived too many regimes, and has very little fear of rank.

By the later ages, Hayes has become a living relic of the Fourth Age and one of the hidden foundations beneath modern Atlanian history. He is bound to House Duron through old service, tied to the Talakar crown through ancient loyalty, linked to the Halafin through his marriage to Melidia, and connected to Nmerian bloodlines through his own ancestry and later influence over figures such as Liam Ardenthal. To friends and heirs, he can be a guardian, teacher, rescuer, and relentless source of hard-earned knowledge. To enemies, he is the Drake Slayer, Bandits’ Bane, Gate Opener, Butcher of Akas, and Cursed Immortal: a man who may fall, but never stays buried long enough for his enemies to feel safe.

Protectorate of Prince Albert, Servant of the King, Guardian of House Duran, Master of the Death Guard, Drake Slayer, Bandits Bane, Traveler of the Lost Roads, Seeker of Knowledge, Gate Opener, Half Blooded, Butcher of Akas, Cursed Immortal

Lord Knight of Dunecrest and House Duron

~1600 or so years old appears to be 30

Male

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Andrew keeps his hair a bit long, but maintained, usually worn in a practical, swept-back style that stays out of his eyes without looking overly polished. It often falls around the ears and nape of the neck, giving him the appearance of someone who cares enough not to look sloppy but has little interest in courtly fashion. His hair suits his nature as an adventurer, soldier, and immortal retainer: controlled enough for duty, rough enough for travel, and plain enough that it does not draw attention away from his sharp expression and unsettling eyes. When on campaign or moving through dangerous places, he may tie it back or keep it tucked beneath gear, but he generally favors simple practicality over ornament.

Andrew’s hair is a very dark brown, nearly black at first glance, reflecting a blend between deep Nmerian black hair and the muddier brown tones common among Atlanians. In shadow or under torchlight it can appear almost fully black, but in strong sun it reveals a warmer brown cast, like dark walnut, wet earth, or old polished wood. The color suits him better than a lighter brown, giving him a sharper and more grounded appearance while still keeping him visibly connected to both sides of his heritage. Against his dark tan-olive skin and green eyes marked by a red ring around the pupil, his near-black brown hair helps make his face feel intense, compact, and difficult to forget.

Andrew stands around 5’4”, making him noticeably short by Atlanian standards, especially among noble warriors and battlefield commanders who often expect height to carry authority. His stature reflects the influence of his Nmerian mother more than his Atlanian blood, giving him a build that can seem unimposing at first glance. This has often caused others to underestimate him, a mistake Andrew has spent centuries punishing. Despite his height, he carries himself with hard confidence, moving like someone long accustomed to surviving among larger enemies, arrogant lords, and monsters that assumed size meant advantage.

130 lbs

N/A

Andrew has a short, lean, tightly muscled build, shaped more by endurance, speed, and violence than by size or brute strength. At around 5’4” and 130 pounds, he is compact rather than imposing, with the wiry strength of someone who has spent centuries fighting, traveling, climbing, surviving ambushes, and killing larger opponents at close range. His body shows the influence of both his Nmerian and Atlanian heritage: smaller and slighter than most Atlanians, but still tough, athletic, and difficult to break. He does not look like a grand battlefield champion at first glance; he looks like a dangerous veteran who has learned exactly how much force is needed and where to put the knife.

Andrew has has darkly tanned-olive skin, with a warm, sun-browned depth common among darker Atlanian and Nmerian complexions. His coloring has a natural olive-brown foundation that can look golden, bronze, or earthier depending on the light, especially against his brown hair and sharp green eyes. The tone gives him a weathered, well-traveled appearance, suited to someone shaped by open roads, sea air, mountain passes, battlefields, and long years spent moving between mortal lands and stranger places. His darker complexion also makes the red ring around his pupils stand out more distinctly, giving his gaze an unsettling intensity even before people understand who he is.

Nmerian, Atlanian

Andrew Hayes has green eyes with a distinct ring of red around the pupil, a striking combination that reflects both his Atlanian birth and his Nmerian heritage. The green is not flat or ordinary, but carries the faint iridescent quality common among those born on the Atlanian peninsula, catching light in a way that can seem almost arcane. Around each pupil sits a narrow red ring, giving his gaze a sharper and more unsettling quality than most Atlanians possess. The effect is subtle at a distance, but memorable up close: green eyes touched by old magic, marked at the center by the blood-red sign of Nmerian ancestry.

Andrew Hayes does not trust Valarnans, hates gnolls, and has a deep contempt for nobles of almost every stripe. His distrust of Valarnans comes from long memory and bitter experience, especially given the devastation their wars brought to Atlania. His hatred of gnolls is rooted in the disastrous Atlanian attempt to invade the Movai from the sea during the demon plague, when Hayes was ordered to lead one of the assaults meant to secure a landing and a more reliable source of iron. With little support from other Atlanian forces, Hayes and his men were overwhelmed and slaughtered by the wild Tarkibi in the region, leaving him with a bitter hatred born from betrayal, failure, and massacre. His contempt for nobles is broader but no less intense: Hayes will serve a worthy lord, prince, or king with absolute loyalty, but rank alone means nothing to him, and arrogant lords who waste common lives quickly earn his lasting ire.

Andrew Hayes is cursed with a form of immortality that prevents him from staying dead. He can be wounded, killed, and broken like any other man, but sooner or later he returns to his feet, restored enough to continue living while still carrying the memory and consequences of every death. This has left him physically appearing somewhere in his late twenties to early thirties despite being roughly sixteen centuries old, but it has not made him ageless in spirit. Hayes has watched kingdoms change, friends die, bloodlines fade, wars repeat, and old mistakes return under new names. His immortality is less a blessing than a sentence: useful to the houses and kings he serves, terrifying to his enemies, and deeply isolating for the man forced to endure it.

Andrew Hayes is angry, rude, and blunt, but rarely unfair. He speaks with the impatience of a man who has watched generations of nobles make the same mistakes and no longer feels obligated to soften his words for rank or comfort. Hayes tends to watch people closely, especially their hands, exits, weapons, and posture, and he often carries himself like someone expecting betrayal, ambush, or stupidity at any moment. He is quick to insult arrogance, quicker to shut down boasting, and deeply uncomfortable in polished courtly settings unless he is there to ruin someone’s day. Despite his temper, Hayes has a strong sense of justice: he may be harsh, but he is usually honest, and those who prove loyal, competent, or vulnerable under his protection often find him far more dependable than pleasant.

Andrew Hayes is driven by service to his prince, his lord, and his king, in that strict order, bound not only by loyalty but by magical oath. This order matters deeply: his first and most personal devotion was to Prince Albert, then to the lordly house he swore himself to, and only then to the crown as an institution. Hayes can serve kings with absolute effectiveness, but his obedience is never empty submission. His oath binds him to old duties, old bloodlines, and old promises, forcing him to answer when those claims are invoked, even centuries later. Much of his long life is shaped by this hierarchy of obligation, making him less a free immortal adventurer than a man chained to service by love, honor, guilt, and magic.

Andrew Hayes’s greatest flaws are his short temper, rudeness, and almost complete lack of diplomacy. He is fair, but he is rarely gentle, and centuries of watching kings, lords, and heirs repeat the same mistakes have left him with very little patience for pride, ceremony, or excuses. Hayes often says exactly what he thinks, even when silence would serve him better, and he has a particular talent for turning powerful people into enemies by refusing to flatter them. His magical oaths also make him rigid in ways he cannot always control; once duty is invoked, he may be forced to act even when the situation is morally complicated or personally devastating. He is loyal to the point of self-destruction, bitter from too many losses, and often better at protecting people than allowing himself to be protected in return.

Andrew Hayes has accumulated a vast range of talents over his long life, most of them learned through war, travel, service, and hard necessity rather than formal study alone. He is an experienced soldier, scout, duelist, commander, bodyguard, and ruin-delver, with particular skill in close-quarters fighting, daggers, ambush survival, fortress defense, and recognizing danger before others do. Centuries of service have also made him deeply knowledgeable in history, noble lineages, old treaties, forgotten roads, ancient ruins, and the practical weaknesses of Atlanian politics. Hayes is not a graceful courtier, but he is a skilled teacher, investigator, and problem-solver when patience allows, especially with students who are humble enough to learn. His greatest talent may be endurance: not simply surviving death, but continuing to gather knowledge, adapt to new ages, and remain useful no matter how many times the world changes around him.

Andrew Hayes enjoys reading historical texts, exploring ruins, maintaining the fortress of Duncrest, and making the other lords of Atlania deeply uncomfortable. His love of history is not purely academic; he has lived through enough of it to know how much later records distort, forget, or politely bury. Ruins interest him for similar reasons, offering physical proof of older truths that noble histories often ignore. At Duncrest, he takes a practical satisfaction in upkeep, defenses, hidden stores, old armories, and the small details that keep a fortress alive. His least polite hobby is needling Atlanian lords, especially arrogant ones, by remembering inconvenient facts, exposing hypocrisy, refusing courtly flattery, and generally reminding them that rank does not make them wise.

Andrew Hayes is blunt, bitter, loyal, sharp-minded, and deeply difficult to impress. He is not warm in the ordinary sense, and he often comes across as angry, rude, or deliberately unpleasant, especially around nobles, braggarts, and anyone who treats duty like a game. Beneath that harsh exterior, however, Hayes is fundamentally fair and fiercely protective of those he accepts as his responsibility. He is a soldier, guardian, scholar, and survivor shaped by too much history, too many deaths, and too many broken promises. At his core, Hayes is an oath-bound immortal with the temperament of a common soldier: suspicious of power, contemptuous of vanity, loyal past reason, and far kinder in action than he is in speech.

Turkey legs, a treat his mother would often get him

cats

Daggers

An old knife his mother gave him

Dark blue

Andrew Hayes is an adventurer, lord, soldier, royal agent, and oath-bound retainer whose duties have changed repeatedly across his unnaturally long life. He has served as a common soldier, prince’s protector, king’s servant, lord knight of Duncrest, guardian of House Duron, ruin-delver, monster-slayer, tutor, and political irritant to the Atlanian nobility. His occupation is difficult to define in one title because Hayes tends to become whatever the age, oath, or crisis requires of him. In practice, he is one of Atlania’s most enduring problem-solvers: the man sent, summoned, or reluctantly dragged into situations too dangerous, old, embarrassing, or politically delicate for ordinary nobles to handle.

Andrew Hayes avoids claiming a political ideology of his own, preferring to follow the obligations laid on him by oath, history, and service to the LeTreis, Duron, and Talakar lines. In practice, this makes him loyal to legitimate rule, but deeply hostile to the vanity and scheming of individual nobles. Hayes will support a king, prince, or lord he believes has the proper claim and the sense to rule, yet he has no reverence for rank by itself and delights in obstructing other lords whenever their plans are foolish, selfish, or dangerous to the realm. His politics are therefore oath-bound, conservative in loyalty, and violently anti-aristocratic in temperament: he protects the structure of Atlania while constantly making life miserable for the people most likely to abuse it.

Atlanian Mysticism and Nmerian ancestor worship he learned from his mother

Andrew Hayes’s practical job is to serve as lord knight and guardian of Duncrest, maintaining the fortress, protecting the interests of House Duron and House Hayes, and answering the old magical oaths that still bind him to prince, lord, and king. Depending on the era, this may make him a bodyguard, commander, tutor, investigator, military adviser, or battlefield asset, but his central function remains the same: Hayes protects the houses and bloodlines he is sworn to, whether they want his help or not.

sometime right before the rainy season

Andrew Hayes was born in Massius to a common family of mixed Atlanian and Nmerian heritage. His life changed when he was twelve years old, when spirit creatures calling themselves the Smoke Raiders attacked his village and slaughtered nearly everyone there. Hayes’s mother fought fiercely and killed many of them, but was eventually slain by their leader. In the chaos, Hayes took the knife his mother had given him and stabbed the creature that killed her, striking it in the gut and bringing it down. Before dying, the creature cursed him in a final act of spite, placing a doom upon Hayes that he would not fully understand until much later in life. With his village destroyed and no family left to claim him, Hayes became a ward of the Lord of Massius and was trained as a soldier.

When the Okose border war intensified, the Lord of Massius and his men were called to the front, where they fought alongside Prince Albert Dùghlas Mardrein and the prince’s army. After the Lord of Massius fell in battle, his surviving soldiers were absorbed into Prince Albert’s forces. Hayes distinguished himself through courage, stubbornness, and practical skill, eventually earning a place in Albert’s personal retinue. He became one of the prince’s most trusted protectors, serving him during the desperate campaign that led to Akas. After Albert defeated an Okose chieftain in single combat and earned safe passage for his men, another chieftain unknowingly violated that agreement by ambushing the retreat. Albert was mortally wounded and died two weeks from friendly lines. Hayes was the retainer who brought the prince’s body back to Atlanian hands, an act that tied him forever to Albert’s memory and later became twisted by his enemies into the title “Butcher of Akas.”

After peace was finally achieved with the Okose, Hayes and the remaining members of Albert’s retinue took a binding oath to continue guarding their prince. Because Albert was dead, they became one of the rare Death Guard: royal protectors sworn not to a living lord, but to the remains, legacy, and bloodline of the prince they had failed to save. Hayes and the Death Guard helped Albert’s brother, King Duncan, stabilize the kingdom and carry out as much of Albert’s vision as the age would allow. In time, the surviving Death Guard became knights errant, wandering in search of worthy service until death claimed them. Hayes, however, did not die as other men did.

In the years that followed, Hayes fought bandit lords, monsters, raiders, and border threats across Atlania. His reputation grew until he came to the attention of the Breithan of House Duron, whose lands were threatened by what was believed to be a wyrm. The creature was in truth Slusla Wyrm Mother, a legendary Great Drake once raised by the old emperor and remembered in the records of the Atlanian Drake Slayers. Hayes did not initially possess a weapon capable of killing such a creature, but among the dead he found Rig Bas, a legendary maul from the Third Age. Though too heavy for an ordinary man to wield, Hayes’s Nmerian strength allowed him to raise it for its intended purpose, and with it he bludgeoned the Drake to death. This feat won him the patronage of House Duron and earned him the village of Duncrest, a mostly abandoned holding along the Okose border.

Hayes rebuilt Duncrest into a fortified and living settlement, turning it from a neglected border holding into one of the key places tied to his name. His service to House Duron and the crown continued until the Grand Duke of the Halafin, Zukneere, brought his court out of hiding and attempted to reclaim his old holdings on Sol Saris, beginning with Atlania. Through trickery, gall, and careful wording, Hayes thwarted the Grand Duke and earned a boon from him. As a final insult, Hayes asked for the hand of Melidia, Zukneere’s favorite daughter, ensuring that he would remain a thorn in the Grand Duke’s side for all time. After ninety years of service, and after the last of his fellow Death Guard had died, Hayes formally retired from royal service and withdrew to Armon-Kal with Melidia.

Hayes remained away from Atlania for much of the Crown Wars, the centuries-long conflict that followed the death of King Duncan as his sons and their descendants fought for the throne. He returned to Atlanian history when Lord Lisbith Duron, besieged at Duncrest with the young Prince Samuel Talakar Mardrein III and the surviving royal loyalists, prayed in desperation at a Duron shrine. That shrine still held a connection to the Gray Wood and to Hayes, who had become an ancient family guardian to House Duron in all but legend. Bound by his oaths to House Duron and the Talakar bloodline, Hayes answered. He marshaled his forces and armory from Armon-Kal, helped break the siege, killed an influential rebel leader, and joined Lisbith’s campaign to restore order. With Hayes’s aid, the loyalists defeated the rebels, Samuel III was crowned king of Atlania, and the Talakar line became the dominant royal bloodline under the Mardrein household. Samuel later reformed the Death Guard as a force sworn to serve and secure the royal bloodline, giving institutional shape to the oath Hayes had carried since Albert’s death.

Hayes remained in Atlania for a time after Samuel’s restoration, continuing to serve the kingdom and House Duron until Lisbith eventually chose to leave the mortal world and reside in Armon-Kal. He returned again before the Valarnan conflict and fought through many of its battles. During the destruction of Salain, Hayes was on the front lines when the Arcanium bomb detonated. He later described the blast as the single most painful experience of his long life, as waves of arcane force tore his flesh away layer by layer while his cursed immortality restored him at the same time. Even for a man who had died countless times, Salain left a scar in memory deeper than most wounds could leave in flesh.

After recovering from the Valarnan war, Hayes became involved in the education of later royal heirs, including Robert LeTreis and James Talakar Mardrein. Blaine Talakar asked Hayes to train both young men in swordsmanship, but Hayes and James quickly clashed; Hayes could be patient with ignorance, but not with arrogance and bragging. He eventually refused to continue training James and turned his attention more fully to Robert, while helping arrange another sword master for James. At some point Hayes revealed to Robert that Robert had a claim to the throne and that, if asked, Hayes would help put him on it. Robert refused and asked that they never speak of it again. Years later, when James’s erratic behavior was revealed to be the work of the long-thought-destroyed Grand Emperor, now returned as an undead lich, Atlania was pulled into civil war. The conflict ended with the lich’s assumed destruction and Robert LeTreis crowned king after Blaine abdicated.

Hayes served under Robert until the king’s death, then returned once more to Armon-Kal, though he continued to visit Atlania periodically to check on the kingdom, its royal bloodlines, and the houses bound to his oaths. Across sixteen centuries, Hayes became a soldier, prince’s protector, Death Guard, drake slayer, lord knight, royal tutor, guardian of House Duron, husband of Melidia, and one of the most uncomfortable living memories in Atlanian politics. He began life as a common boy who survived a massacre with his mother’s knife in hand, and became a cursed immortal whose service, grudges, and oaths shaped the history of Atlania long after every mortal who first knew him had died.

Well educated

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