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Kelyn

Lolth-sworn(ish) Drow

Assassin/Bard

Daddy's Favorite Murder Prince (until he's not)

Desperately struggling to be chaotic good, at least he has the "chaotic" part down

Menzoberranzan

Once upon a time in Menzoberranzan a bit over a century ago, the matron of House Zauvirr--a small but ambitious noble house--fell spontaneously pregnant. She thought nothing of it, having not been a particularly chaste woman, and in time gave birth to a boy by the name of Kelyn.

From birth, Kelyn was marked as unusual, having naturally black hair and vitiligo; normally such defects would be the end of any boy-child's story in Menzoberranzan, but Kelyn's mother was keen to keep as many people for her house as possible, and since Kelyn was her second-born son and might yet prove useful despite his flaws, she allowed him to live...for now.

Kelyn was given to his older sister, Alythara, to raise, which she struggled to do as she was constantly fighting her own innately kind nature vs. what was expected of her. Despite having to be harsher than she'd like (to keep Kelyn from being taken from her and given to a "better" guardian, likely one of their more vicious older sisters), the two developed a bond, as Kelyn himself was a sweet boy when allowed to be. From the moment he could manage it he was taught Disguise Self for the purposes of "fixing" his coloration to hide his vitiligo and natural hair color, and had it literally beaten into him to never let it slip.

When Kelyn was seven, he was separated from Alythara and caught alone by a would-be assassin. Contrary to what everyone expected, Kelyn killed the man himself--and furthermore, was entirely unbothered by the event, and in fact found a great deal of pleasure in the whole thing. Nobody knows who hired the assassin--though the scant evidence pointed to a potential rival house...or possibly Kelyn's own matron, as some manner of test.

Either way, the event caught the attention of everyone in House Zauvirr, and it was quickly decided that they should capitalize on the boy's apparent talent for murder and train him as an assassin. He was taken from Alythara's care, and for a time she saw little of him.

Kelyn excelled at the training, though he was impatient to put it to use, now that he'd tasted blood. His first job as a newly-trained assassin was in his early teens, to eliminate a member of a rival house. It was emphasized that if he botched any part of it, he would have to kill everyone--this was intended to impress on him the need for perfection, and to emphasize that if he got into trouble, he was alone and hopelessly outnumbered.

He instead took it as a suggestion.

When he did make a minor slip, he then proceeded to do as he'd been told: to kill everyone. By the time he left, the house had been reduced to flayed bodies and strung-up viscera and little else, and Kelyn was positively beaming.

So was his mother, once she got over the shock of how the job had gone.

Kelyn spent the next seventy or so years as his house's pet assassin, building a reputation for both himself and House Zauvirr: nobody knew his exact identity because nobody who saw him working ever survived, and word got around about House Zauvirr's viciously efficient and brutal new killer.

It was when he was around eighty that he discovered his skill for music, entirely by accident. As it turned out, Kelyn's talent for murder was only matched by his talent for music, particularly strings, and most especially violin...and in using music as a means to manipulate magic. This, too, was quickly encouraged, as use of a bard's magic and skills would only be a boon to his assassination work.

The problem, however, is that music had another affect on him: it quieted the urges that bade him to kill.

With something finally quieting the Urge ever since it had arose in him, Kelyn could finally look back on his past with a clear head...and he was horrified by the things he'd done, and worse, taken joy in doing. But now he was at an impasse: if he didn't continue to perform as he had, he would become dead weight to his house and thus be culled. So, for a time, he tried to manage: to do what he had been raised for, and to try not to let it tear him apart in the process.

Alythara found him again one day when he'd retreated to a hiding place to have a mental breakdown, and in that moment, the two reconnected: she recognized the baby brother she'd thought she'd lost in him and that he, like her, hated Menzoberranzan and what it had turned him into, and Kelyn found someone like him so he wasn't entirely alone. The two quickly became each other's confidants and only friends, and occasionally floated the idea of escaping together, though neither was willing to risk it.

Until one day Kelyn disappeared after a job. It was unlikely he was dead: his body wasn't found, and while it was possible he had been fatally injured and made sure to die elsewhere so as not to implicate his house, his skill made it unlikely. Alythara searched every place she knew he might go, only to find a few of his things missing, and a note left for her.

All it said was "I'm sorry".

The Surface and Baldur's Gate

Kelyn fled to the surface after snapping under the pressure of his innate nature vs. the things he was forced to do. There, he immediately set to reinventing himself: he leaned fully into his actual passion, music, and got by as a bard with an uncommon skill with knives. He spent a few years aggressively and selflessly doing good wherever possible and surrounding himself with art and music, in part as an attempt to make up for his blood-soaked past, and in part to suppress the Urge, since now that he knew what it would make him do, he needed to suppress it at all costs.

One day, he met a tiefling girl of about five. Her name was Yurissa, and she couldn't tell him much more than that: she was an orphan, and too young to recall the exact circumstances around her orphaning. She quickly took a liking to Kelyn and refused to leave his side, and before long he was forced to accept that she'd adopted him.

It wasn't long after that that the Bhaalists found him, with Sceleritas Fel in their midst. He had, in fact, already avoided them multiple times, having mistaken them from agents from Menzoberranzan intent on dragging him back: instead, they were keen to tell him their actual plan: to bring him home to Baldur's Gate and the Temple of Bhaal, because he was a Bhaalspawn. He was, in fact, the Bhaalspawn: his father's greatest creation, molded from his own dead flesh to enact his will.

Kelyn would have refused, if not for Yurissa. Life was hard for a drow thrust suddenly into the surface world, much less one who had suddenly found himself with a young girl to raise and no clue how to do that; the Temple offered him a chance to provide a more stable life for her, at the cost of his morals and sanity. More to the point, the Urge gnawed at him constantly, and it often targeted Yurissa: perhaps if he fed it with other victims, it would be content to leave her unharmed.

So he and Yurissa moved to Baldur's Gate, and he took up the mantle as Bhaal's Chosen.

To the public eye (and Yurissa) Kelyn was simply a friendly, social bard, trying to get by (and managing decently enough) and raising his adopted daughter. Behind the scenes, he fell back on the profession he knew, assassination, and led Bhaal's cult of murder, losing pieces of himself with every kill. He still fought the Urge when he could, surrounding himself in art and music even in the Temple itself, but less and less as Bhaal's will slowly ground the fight out of him.

A couple years later, he got an invitation from one Enver Gortash, who wished to meet Bhaal's scion and see if they could strike up a partnership that suited both of their interests. Intrigued, Kelyn agreed, and before long the two were fast friends, despite their opposing gods and strictly-business relationship. It was impossible to deny the physical attraction between them, which quickly gave way to an intellectual attraction and deep respect as they proved themselves to one another. Eventually, one night, it came to a head and they ended up in bed together: the two of them emerged from it bloodied, dazed, and thoroughly unrepentant.

The exact nature of Kelyn and Gortash's relationship wasn't clear to anyone who knew them, but it became common to see them together. In private, the two wouldn't have called themselves a couple, but they were also the only constant in each other's lives: Gortash originally wanted largely to possess Bhaal's Chosen and prove his dominance over him, only to be caught off guard by how much he genuinely respected and admired the man for himself. Some part of him recognized the monster in Kelyn and loved it, and was almost as eager to encourage it as he was to hold the monster's leash.

Kelyn, for his part, found a certain safety he'd never known before in someone who knew what he was, accepted it whole-heartedly, and even loved him for it. And if a monster was all he would ever be, then why not at least find someone who loved the monster? Beyond that: if someone could hold his leash, maybe then he wouldn't have to worry about who he might hurt. If Enver wanted it, he was willing to hand it over; he didn't trust any other hand to hold tightly enough. Besides, sex was another thing that helped quiet the Urge for a time, and since it was now on offer from someone he could trust might be able to protect themselves from him...why not?

A decade or so passed, and during that decade, Kelyn's blood-sister Orin seethed. She already hated her brother for many reasons, primarily his weakness, his love for Yurissa that was most unbecoming of a Bhaalspawn, and his ineffective, stubborn attempts to resist their father's call. Nonetheless, Kelyn was his father's son, and too powerful for her to simply kill: he refused to recognize an official challenge from her, and the closest she ever got to provoking him was when she once threatened Yurissa's life a bit too openly and he nearly carved her up right there in the Temple.

And now he was cavorting about with a Banite, of all things, and getting weak for him as well as the girl.

When Kelyn went to Moonrise Towers one day to check on the progress there, Orin followed and ambushed her brother. She chiseled his skull open, stuffed a mindflayer tadpole into the crack, and left him to die or be enthralled; she took his dagger and left him with just his violin, so all he had left to him was the symbol of his weakness.

#Swan sings #Kelyn #words #oc lore #this is probably part one of ???#because my wrists hurt and also it's big enough as it is and this is just the pre-game backstory

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