WILLEM ZIZEK, warrior

[attr="class","qty"]"on the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth"

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Mistake. His first definition did not evaporate with time. In fact, it festered and soon blossomed into beautiful irony.

Willem first knew a family of quaint piety and honest trade. His education on that matter was through the dealings of outsiders with his father and grandfather. They were well-respected men in Lothering who acted as community developers in many cases. All the townspeople seemed to show him similar respect – a prefatory veneration for deeds that would match his elders. It was all a façade he soon learned. They all knew the truth. A reality telling the whereabouts of his absent mother.

Sabina Zizek loved an apostate. Together they bore Willem. The two paramours unknowingly conceived the most forbidden bastard imaginable. Their love was discovered by Willem’s father three months into the pregnancy. Unbeknownst to him, he was as impotent as they come. Just as they finished making love, the boy’s father burst into the room and stabbed the mage above his wife. The woman was forced to the river to bathe off the blood of her son’s father. When Willem was born, she stood outside the Chantry before the weekly service, cursed the town, and lit herself aflame.

The town yeller found her journal detailing the truth of Willem’s father beside her burnt corpse. He then yelled about it – before being permanently silenced by the Zizek family. Everyone knew.

It was the collective secret of the village. No one dared to tell the boy of his origin; his grandfather even capitalized by instilling a hatred of sorcery in the boy. This one prejudice branched into others, and quite soon, the boy was the most insufferable miscreant in town. He tattle-told while concocting his own villainies. The children despised him but the adults adored him. The Zizek family reincarnated paragons with each generation, they said. They were right in a way. For the Zizek men routinely spoke ill behind the backs of those they helped.

In teenhood, the local Mother referred him to the Order. His communal works and reputation were admirable. His unknown story damn near required the sympathy of those who heard it. No magehood symptoms, but a potential sensitivity to lyrium (gifted to him from his true father). The recommendation went straight to his head which caused him to act quite vile amid his mates. One complained loudly to his father, the old yeller of the town, who told him a little story. The next day: that one boy recounted his true history. That one boy was nearly beaten to death.

Willem was sent to the Mother for his misdeeds who both sympathized and confirmed the story. His father feared what the townspeople would do to his boy who many thought was a ticking time-bomb. Mothers prayed that the boy did not stumble amid their children’s beds one day and breathe fire upon them. Outdoors, ideal. Indoors, threat. It had always been that way. The Mother sent him off to the Order’s refuges wherein he lived a monastic life for the rest of his adolescence. There, he became a kind, reflective lyrium junkie. Studying the Chantry’s words and the histories of the Inquisition, Willem became truly spiritual and sought to clear his learned malevolence.

This was primarily because the voices in his head told him too.

Often, the boy skipped his lyrium dosages and fell into the resulting hallucination. He managed to hide his secret habit up until the day before his commencement, wherein he was caught nude in the stables. Later, a lucid Willem convinced his uppers that it was a nervous sleep-walking episode.

For three years afterwards, Willem oversaw the Harrowing and patrolled the Circle. He became sexually acquainted with one of the mages but their secret died, with her, during her botched Harrowing. After slaying his lover, he sobbed in the barracks for hours.

All his peers considered him both the most competent and oddest. His ponderings bordered on insubordination at times, but his actions spoke compliance and diligence. He’s killed three non-Circle mages – his uncles and aunts. The Ferelden Knight-Commander has him set aside others as potential trump cards in the effervescing conflict between mages, the chantry, and the Templars.


COMBAT STYLE: Willem Zizek dual-wields with the steel longsword and a grey-iron dagger. He's a cognizant swordsman who bases his talent on Templar Vanguards of olde.

LIST OF TALENTS: Righteous Strike, Dual Weapon Training, Dual Weapon Finesse, Twin Strikes

LIST OF SKILLS: Combat Training, Coercion, Vitality, Clarity 

SPECIALIZATION: Templar