A fellow warrior monk alongside his comrades Leto and Shayoon, Osten joined the Archangel’s Heroes to defend his homeland. Osten was a practitioner of the Way of the Eclipsed Leash, but was set apart from his fellow Houndmasters of Laaprue because of his shadow minion: Blobito Kurai.
Biography
Osten was a shadowmantic Southern Monk who grew up in Con Tuan. He was born in 303 DHT and entered entered the Southern Monastery at a very young age. His talent and passion for the Hands of Laaprue had him begin down the path of the Way of the Eclipsed Leash as soon as he happened to have a dream that whisked him into the halls of the Shadowkeep.
While he successfully donned the mantle of a shadowmancer and joined the Houndmasters of Laaprue, he aspired to greater things. During one of his nights in the Shadowkeep, Osten stumbled upon the Shadow of Shadows, an elusive creature that was legendary as it was rare. It bolted, but Osten chased after it and somehow managed to keep pace. Eventually, the chase led Osten to an uncharacteristically1 decrepit, crumbling pathway that had previously not been there. The floor of the path was full of holes into the vast emptiness beyond the Shadowkeep. Osten found quickly that falling into the abyss resulted in immediately waking up and suffering from insomnia for the next several hours. This inability to sleep not only took a toll on Osten’s mental and physical health, but truncated the amount of dark favour he could regenerate overnight. This impacted his training, putting him further and further behind his peers in the Southern Monastery.
But Osten never relented. For months, Osten pushed himself to try and catch the elusive Shadow of Shadows. Just as he was on the brink of being kicked out of the monastery, Osten succeeded. He arrived in the den of the Shadow of Shadows, and the creature didn’t flee. It revealed it could speak, and it began to bond with Osten, almost like a child enraptured by a hero.
During their meeting, Osten bestowed the name of Blobito Kurai to it, an Umyana approximation of “formless shade”—an accurate description of Kurai’s amorphous figure.
As Osten’s bond with the creature grew, Kurai would eventually grant Osten his own dark favour, allowing Osten to draw on shadowmancy where Kurai was the benefactor and not the Shadeking. Shockwaves erupted through the community of Houndmasters of Laaprue as Osten began to summon Kurai during training. Some saw the use of Kurai in the Way of the Eclipsed Leash as heretical. Others saw it as legal, since Kurai was still only a single creature.
Regardless of their stance, the Houndmasters managed to keep the news of this to themselves, not spreading the word to shadowmancers outside of the monastery. An easy task, as the Houndmasters kept to themselves already.
Eventually, a committee of Oluwa moved to allow Osten to continue training as a Houndmaster, and he managed to catch up to his fellow monks after lagging behind for so long. The legitimacy of his status as a Southern Monk was only solidified after the Archangel Michael descended upon the Monastery in 330 DHT. The Archangel convened with the Oluwa, revealing three names to them; Osten, Shayoon, and Leto. The Oluwa named them The Great Three, and they were directed to join the Archangel’s Heroes to establish connections outside of Endala in preparation for the war that was on the distant horizon.
Skills
Athleticism & Hand-to-Hand Combat
Osten was a formidable athlete, displaying an aptitude especially for speed and agility. His stamina and energy allowed him to outlast most in intense physical exertion.
Being a Southern Monk and a member of the Great Three2, Osten had a powerful command of his own body as a living weapon. Few could best him in hand-to-hand combat. Of the Great Three, Osten was unequivocally the most adept at such fighting.
Swordsmanship
Osten preferred to wield a weapon in fights—namely an Endalan blade known as an elili seme (Umyana), or in Tradespeak a shadowfang sword. The elili seme was a straight, single-edged sword, made popular by a group of assassins before the year of the Amaranthine Reaping.
Way of the Eclipsed Leash & Shadowmancy
As a Houndmaster of Laaprue, Osten was a shadowmancer and trained to fight harmoniously alongside a single living shadow minion. While other Houndmasters of Laaprue used vicious dogs as their summons, Osten bonded with a peculiar creature during his formative days in the Shadowkeep.
This creature, named Kurai by Osten, granted him an additional edge in fights, since its ability to change shape allowed it to adapt to different situations. By changing itself into the form of other creatures, Kurai could assist Osten in overcoming a wide variety of different obstacles.
Unlike other living shadow minions, Kurai had a unique ability—perhaps the reason for its special bond with Osten. Kurai could envelope Osten in its own body, acting like a giant avatar that granted Osten strength far beyond what he could obtain through physical training. This fusion between man and shadow was taxing however, with the mental bond between the two entities needing to be in perfect synchrony; this rapidly depleted Osten’s dark favour.
While Osten initially bowed to the Shadeking to gain is shadowmantic powers, his bond with Kurai allowed him to tap into an entirely different source of shadowmantic power. Kurai was independent of the Shadeking, circumventing His Darkness’ domination entirely. While this didn’t bother the Shadeking himself, when the Dark Mage Zak usurped the throne of the Shadeking and turned the Shadowkeep against all shadowmancers who opposed him, Kurai resisted this as well. This set Osten up as the sole shadowmancer who did not swear fealty to Zak during his reign as the umbramantic king of darkness.
Footnotes
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Uncharacteristic for the Shadowkeep, that is. ↩