#brenth

A few unfinished things I’ve been sitting on for the last couple months. 

Brenth being his usual jerk self. He’s always fun to draw, I'm not sure why I don’t do it more. He’s that manipulative character who will pick at your insecurities until your nerves are left raw.  There’s a segment of story with him fending off his sister on a Cyurian rooftop, and that’s what I pulled from here. Path will butt heads verbally with just about everyone she encounters if they’re stubborn enough, but her resentment toward her brother runs a bit deeper than trivial disagreements. He’s crossed her one too many times and clearly enjoys seeing her twitch. 

Yeisinderin is best known for being the Windcat’s close friend and advisor. He takes the best interest of Kirn and his bff’s well being quite seriously. So it’s quite obvious that when Path comes back in the picture to jeopardize what they’ve worked to accomplish over decades of truce with Cyurn, things get a biiit tense. He’s a strong ally to have however, he speaks is mind, and pragmatic as he may be, once you earn his respect it takes a lot to lose it. Hurt Arron though and you’re on his hitlist. Yei’s another fun character to figure out. Though I wish I could go back and fix a few things here, but it’s time to move on. 

HA then we have Tanuth. Not too happy with how unfinished this is but oh well, I didn’t wanna post the other two without him, SO... 

Brenth gets his own post~ 

It's time I gave him a proper introduction, or just colored any drawing I've made of him in general. Brenth here is the Oriancarus cipher to the Light element, but something isn't quite right with his perception of reality. He gets a gross gratification out of manipulating and abusing other individuals emotionally and physically. He's the total opposite of a great guy, and not a character who's actions I enjoy justifying (so sorry if I get rather blunt describing him). I don't feel I ever depict him nearly as crazy as I should. He keeps a pretentious level of composure to him most of the time, but there are moments when he enjoys himself. I just don't draw them.There were plenty of signs he was messed up as a child but they went ignored by neglectful parental figures.

He's an usurper, forcefully inheriting his title as a young adult when the opportunity presented itself. He had intended to take out his competition for Cyurn as well, making a statement. But unfortunately for him Path survived, and he's now worried about finishing the job/ making her life a living hell so she'll come "running back" to him. And then he'd kill her too. Of course.

Be it through his seizure of Cyurn and surrounding regions from their former Oriancari, mass murder, an affinity for torture and mind games, or the running of a full scale authoritarian regime as he lead their continent to war, much of what he does is full of spoilers!  And that's no fun to give away! The only character who really knows how to play into his game is Chelgro. He actually enjoys her sass and open cynicism but even she has to know when to back off  at times.

Oh that’s a good one! (SORRY IF I RAMBLE IN THIS I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD EXPLAIN SOME THINGS) (aand I rushed and I only just now noticed like fifty typos oops, lemme fix that)

I need to piece together a some of the major tensions that occured throughout Vyrundal prior to the last fifty years of story. Many of the regions were under a technical truce, but there were breif instances of uprisings and fall outs between Oriancari and other creatures through the gap in generation.

I can imagine Brenth’s first encounter with Chelgro would have gone interestingly. Chelgro herself would have been the victim of one of those conflicts that would cause her to lose her territory to the Oriancari who preceded him and Path, so she was not on good terms with Cyurn. Though I don’t think Brenth would have let it  escalate into an all out skirmish, she would have kept him on the defensive. Chelgro is known for being hotheaded and forthright, so he probably would have had to thwart a few blows before catching her interest. As much trouble as he’s been causing recently, Brenth is one of the younger Oriancari, so while he might have grown up during brief periods of tension he wouldn’t have been physically present in any notable wars or conflicts prior to the one he caused. After they become aligned, Brenth would have been the brains, and Chelgro a more experienced advisor/ muscle power in a mutually lead operation. She is every much at fault for the state of East Vyrundal as Brenth is.

Kargia is the second youngest Oriancarus. As Ashtearul’s heir, she would have been shielded from much of present conflict until her brother’s capturing caused her to react without the knowledge of her superiors (except Mae, but he doesn’t count). She convinced Path to let her tag along with them, and her first real violent confrontation (outside of sparring) would have been in Xainrei, where their reception by Zenith and his men was not too pretty. I mean if you like fire and explosions it was pretty cool, but if you are Yei, no. No it was not fun.

(SORRY I STARTED RAMBLING HERE OOPS)

Arron, I know he had been an active ally of Gairain’s, up until Brenth came along and fucked everything up. Since his territory takes up the majority of the Kirn mountain range, which acts as a central divide between the other four regions, he would have had a history of border disputes to quell (among more minor internal problems). But other than that, Kirn tended to be one of the quieter territories prior to Brenth. However, the first major conflict I can think of with him was when Path showed up in the central city for the first time in forty something years. Aside from Kirn being a prime location in the east for Cyurn to occupy, as all forms of trade pass through the region, Arron had sheltered Path for a few years, and when Brenth found out his sister wasn’t deceased, that may have been what threw him under the Light Oriancarus’s radar from the beginning. Anyway Path shows up after half a century and Arron, having chased her out to begin with was a bit irate to say the least. You know that feeling when you sacrifice a lot of time and energy for something/someone, finally get to a point where you feel secure, and then suddenly something else comes along that makes all of that effort utterly pointless, placing everything back in jeopardy again? Even though some would argue it was his past coming back to bite him, Arron felt threatened when Path resurfaced. As much as it sucked, he did what he had to do to protect both his people and ensure she remained out of Brenth’s line of sight and in spite of that she ruins everything by returning to Kirn after so long and endangering the city once more AND she’s asking for his help. Again. He was justifiably pissed. Had Path not known just what to say to guilt him into helping, he would have chased her off permanently (it was kind of an “I told you so” moment). That honestly would have been the first and only real skirmish between those two, but it was earnest. They both hate each other in their own ways at this point and they bicker and argue a good bit after that. I don’t have them in a clingy relationship, they were well past expired/complicated by the time the story begins and all they do really is mend ties in their own way. :’D At that moment, Path doesn’t need Arron as emotional support, she just needs him for his connection to Gairain (as far as she she makes clear) and Arron is only helping her out of a sense of pride and obligation, but even then he’s pretty conflicted in taking the risk, he has the most to lose in the situation.  The feelings they used to hold for one another are still there, but it’s all hidden beneath a ton of disappointment.

and I kind of had a double take moment and peered over at what I drew the other week

OK BRENNY WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU IN SIX MONTHS

It's even stranger because he's always been one of the harder characters of mine to get down personality wise and that second sketch really didn't take me all that long to do. I was really proud of the top one too when I drew it and looking back LOL HE LOOKED SO BORING?

Trying to nail down a good look for Brenth. I don't know if it's working but it's better than what I had. Especially with his Oriancarus form, that has always been in real need of a revamp and I'm going to keep working on it.

Well you’re right in guessing that Brenth is my main antagonist currently, though I’m sure this will change as the plot evolves. He is not alone in his spite; he is just louder than anyone before him. The issue surrounding Brenth is something that I have been developing over the years, because I do not want his character to be something simple, not to say I want to be able to relate to every decision he makes, but I do not want him to simply be the bad guy. To sum him up, he’s greedy, he’s fucked up, he’s mean, he’s selfish, and egotistical, but he’s also been molded to be that way. And damn, I don’t know where to begin with him, prepare for a bit of a character bio.

In the past I’ve made it clear his situation with his sister, but things were not always a sibling rivalry gone wrong, Path and Brenth actually got along quite well growing up in Cyurn. Their father was the one with somewhat of a chaotic disposition (one that  I’ve explained before here) which Brenth took the brunt of in his adolescent years and Path, not Ia, was normally the one to console him when things got out of hand. However, when they neared the age where an heir would begin to take over control of one element, something would cause Brenth to snap. Before then he had simply been dealing with the constant pressure of life as an Oriancarus, he had his disagreements on how things should be taught, and how the city should be run, and preached them to either Path or Ia when he could, but I think it was also about this time when he had first met Chelgro, who had been holed up within the many coves along the coast.

Now Chelgro is an interesting individual in her own right. She actually quite bitter toward Ia for taking her home out from under her. So when Ia’s heir stumbles upon her cove, she is not going to be the friendliest of neighbors. Over the course of weeks, Chelgro tried to manipulate him. It was from her that Brenth first heard of an inheritance in Ia’s past life that she had given up to another Oriancarus. It was something of great power, respect, and great secrecy and something she had intentionally withheld from him in her teachings. Whatever his feelings on the matter, as Chelgro had intended, it bothered him enough to do his own research through Cyurn’s archives, and it was in this way he learned a minor use of glyphs and taboo casts in his own time, which he would use against his sister in the coming years.

So yeah, eventually Brenth would take this information, relate it to his predecessors and the overall order amongst the Oriancari, and he would let his entitlement (encouraged by Chelgro’s wrath) drive him to turn on his family, all in the hopes of regaining some semblance of self. And by turn, I mean he would wait till they were at their most vulnerable point and strike them down. Like you need to understand, he’s been growing up literally fending for himself against his tyrant of a father and the neglect of his mother and he has come to the point where he wants to put all of that behind him, to just bottle it up, throw it over his shoulder, and walk away. He wants to put his initial life in Cyurn in the past so that he can forge ahead into his own future. Now whether I would call attempting to murder his family something of retribution on his part, but c’est la vie, the asshole does it anyway.

 He would come away with it by taking what is now the old Cyurn under his wing, alongside Chelgro, who would actually submit to him as well in time, and over the next half century they would raise up an army with the sole purpose of legitimately corrupting the eastern region of Vyrundal. He would drive Gairain into isolation, attempt to take back what was (to him) rightfully his in Orinacria (by murdering the Molten and Lightening Oriancari), and even Arron, in Kirn, would have to resign his authority over his territory to the inevitable threat Brenth will come to wield.

I think that just about sums him up just fine up until this point. He’s kind of a never ending project for me, he’s a bit hard to crack sometimes but of all my characters he frightens me the most, because he’ll do anything within his ability to get what he wants. And he has a fucking arsenal behind him. Since he’s the channel to Light, he tends to have this way about him that makes him the perfect fucking being and it pisses me off because he always heads straight for what will hurt the most with any individual and he uses his element to manipulate the hell out of everyone in his way.