Silver Crow

SILVER CROW: Real Name: Otis Underwood. Alias: Silver Crow, The Crow, The Cloaked Crow. Species: Human. Sex: Male. Age: Mid-to-late 50s. Occupation: Mercenary, Sword-for-Hire, Bounty Hunter, Escort. Social Standing: Landless free man; professional mercenary. Allegiance: None. Religion: Uncertain, loosely spiritual. Status: Free.

OVERVIEW: Silver Crow is a wandering blade-for-hire who makes his living accepting dangerous work from whoever can afford his services. He takes on an unusually broad range of contracts, from guarding merchants and escorting travelers to tracking fugitives, hunting criminals, recovering stolen property, and killing individuals when a contract specifically demands it. He asks relatively little about the reasons behind a job. His primary concern is whether the payment is appropriate for the risk involved.

He is not a knight, nor does he consider himself a hero. He owns no land, serves no lord permanently, and swears allegiance to no kingdom. His existence is instead that of a professional mercenary who moves from place to place, taking whatever work allows him to survive. His considerable collection of weapons, armor, tools, and travel equipment places him well above the circumstances of an ordinary peasant, although he possesses little of the wealth or social privilege associated with nobility. In a world of crowns, magic, and fantasy, he stands like a sore thumb. A terror like in children's storybooks, or an omen of death that not even the strongest spells can shake off.

APPEARANCE: Silver Crow is an exceptionally tall and broad-built human, standing at approximately 7'7". His physique is sturdy and heavily developed from years of fighting, traveling, carrying equipment, and living on the road. He possesses the physical appearance of someone who has spent most of his life surviving through labor and violence rather than comfort, he's even stronger than a magically enhanced individual but knows how to use just the right amount of it in certain scenarios.

His skin is naturally fair, although his arms and other frequently exposed areas have become noticeably tanned from years spent outdoors. His green irises are one of the few immediately recognizable features beneath his otherwise concealed appearance. A long scar runs across his face, crossing the area around one of his eyes without taking away his vision. His arms, torso, back, legs, and other parts of his body bear numerous additional scars, many of which are old enough that even Silver no longer remembers exactly how he received them.

He deliberately keeps almost his entire body covered. The armor provides obvious protection, but it also serves as a barrier between himself and other people. Silver dislikes being stared at and has little interest in allowing strangers to see his scarred body. Consequently, very few people who have encountered him can describe what he actually looks like beneath his equipment, being the rare moments of women in brothels.

ARMOR AND CLOTHING: Silver's armor is an intimidating combination of protective equipment accumulated throughout his years as a mercenary. His arms and legs are protected by articulated steel armor, while a steel cuirass protects his torso. Beneath the metal is a full layer of chainmail, providing additional protection against cuts and punctures. Beneath the chainmail he wears a padded gambeson, which cushions impacts and prevents the armor and mail from rubbing directly against his body.

His lower body is protected by heavy leather garments and additional padding. The overall arrangement is cumbersome compared to ordinary clothing, but Silver has become accustomed to carrying the weight over long distances.

His helmet completely obscures his face. Over the helmet he wears a large hood attached to a layered traveling cloak. The cloak's lower edges have become tattered, muddy, and weather-stained after years of walking through roads, forests, villages, battlefields, and wilderness. When the hood is drawn over his helmet, his head becomes almost completely hidden. The whole set of armor also appears to be enchanted with magical defenses which makes him immune to any magical attacks.

The resulting silhouette is one of the primary reasons people call him the Silver Crow. From a distance, the tall armored figure beneath the enormous hood can resemble a gigantic crow standing upright. At night, or when seen through fog or rain, the resemblance can become genuinely unsettling.

WEAPONS AND EQUIPMENT: Silver carries a considerable assortment of weapons and tools, reflecting the unpredictable nature of his profession. His primary weapon is a bastard sword carried in a scabbard on his right side. He is comfortable wielding it either with one hand or both depending on the circumstances.

Strapped across his back is a sturdy quarterstaff reinforced with steel-tipped ends. Although it can function as a walking staff, its construction makes it a dangerous weapon in its own right. Silver frequently uses it when he wishes to fight without immediately drawing his sword.

He also carries a longbow across his back and keeps a quiver of iron-tipped arrows on the left side of his belt. The bow allows him to hunt, engage targets from a distance, and attack enemies before they can close the distance.

Several smaller knives are concealed throughout his clothing. Some are intended for combat, while others are simply practical tools. His remaining equipment includes rope, flint and steel, a whetstone, a waterskin, basic medical supplies, spare cord, food, and other necessities required for prolonged travel.

His collection of equipment is one of the clearest indications that Silver is not a common laborer. Nearly everything he carries has a purpose, and he has accumulated it gradually through payment, trade, salvage, or necessity. The weapons are also enchanted to be able to cut through magical attacks or any sort.

PROFESSION: Silver considers himself nothing more than a man who sells his abilities. He accepts contracts from merchants, travelers, nobles, villagers, criminals, and practically anyone else capable of meeting his price.

A simple contract might involve escorting a merchant between towns or protecting an individual during a dangerous journey. More dangerous work can involve tracking escaped criminals, hunting bandits, recovering stolen possessions, locating missing people, or pursuing someone across several counties.

He judges contracts primarily by their danger and difficulty. The greater the risk, the greater the payment he expects. He does not particularly care whether the person hiring him is good, evil, wealthy, poor, noble, or common. If the contract is clear and the payment is worthwhile, he will usually accept it.

There are, however, limits to what he will do. Silver does not take pleasure in cruelty, torture, or needless killing. If a target is meant to be captured alive, he will generally attempt to deliver them alive. If a contract explicitly demands their death, he will carry it out without hesitation.

SILENCE: Silver is fully capable of speaking. His silence is entirely deliberate.

He has chosen not to speak for reasons that he has never explained to anyone. Whether the decision originated from his childhood, his years as a slave, some event following his escape, or simply a personal decision made later in life remains unknown.

He communicates primarily through gestures, nods, written messages, pointing, and expressions. Occasionally, when absolutely necessary, he will speak. Those who have heard his voice describe it as unexpectedly deep and restrained.

His refusal to speak has generated countless rumors. Some believe his tongue was cut out. Others believe he took a religious vow of silence. Some think he is cursed, possessed, or simply incapable of speech. Silver has never made any effort to correct these assumptions.

His silence has also become unexpectedly useful. People tend to become uncomfortable when confronted with someone who refuses to answer them, and that discomfort often causes them to speak more than they intended. Silver simply listens.

PERSONALITY: Silver is extremely guarded, distrustful, and difficult to approach. His experiences have left him with a deep suspicion of authority and an instinctive reluctance to depend upon other people. He assumes that most relationships eventually involve some kind of transaction, obligation, or betrayal. In some occasions, he even harms himself as if to remind that he's still a living being and not simply a weapon.

He rarely forms friendships and almost never discusses himself. Questions about his childhood, his scars, his family, or where he learned his skills are usually met with silence.

Despite his frightening appearance and profession, Silver is not inherently cruel. He does not enjoy suffering, does not torment people for amusement, and does not kill simply to demonstrate his strength. Beneath his intimidating exterior is a surprisingly restrained and sometimes gentle individual.

He may quietly help someone who is struggling without asking for payment. He may leave food outside the home of someone who cannot afford it. He may repair something that was broken during one of his jobs and simply leave before anyone notices. He simply doesn't advertise his kindness.

Silver Crow also has little understanding of romantic affection and has never shown any particular desire to pursue it. He is capable of experiencing physical attraction and the occasional need for intimacy, but seems unable—or perhaps unwilling—to associate these feelings with emotional attachment. On certain occasions, he visits brothels to satisfy those needs that he considers annoying, treating the experience as little more than a temporary arrangement between himself and another person. He neither seeks companionship nor expects affection in return, and once the time is spent, he leaves without much thought for the encounter. To him, intimacy is a physical act rather than an expression of love, something that can be sought out and just as easily left behind. Whether he is simply incapable of forming such attachments or has never allowed himself to understand them remains unclear.

EARLY LIFE: Silver's true history is almost completely unknown, even to those who have known him for years as he's never talked about it.

He was born into slavery. His mother was a young maiden who worked in a brothel, and his father was either unknown or never revealed to him. Silver never truly knew either of them. His earliest memories instead involve growing up among a group of slave contractors who treated human beings as commodities.

His childhood was defined by being moved between people and places, with little opportunity to form attachments. He learned very early that names, promises, and possessions could be taken away from him without explanation.

Eventually, he escaped.

What happened immediately afterward is uncertain.

Silver himself possesses only fragmented memories of those years. He remembers faces without names, locations without knowing where they were, voices without remembering what they said, and scattered impressions of chains, smoke, mud, blood, cold nights, and eventually freedom.

How he transformed from an escaped slave into a heavily armored mercenary is a mystery.

He does not remember everything. He has never attempted to explain the parts he does remember.

THE NAME "Otis Underwood": Silver does not know his birth name.

At some point after escaping slavery, he encountered the corpse of a dead man named Otis Underwood. Having no name of his own that he could remember, he simply took the dead man's identity.

Whether he did this because he needed a name, because he wanted to honor the dead man, or because he had become so disconnected from his former identity that the distinction no longer mattered is unknown.

Even Silver may not know the answer. "Otis Underwood" is therefore not necessarily his real name. It is simply the name he found.

THE SILVER CROW: The name Silver Crow came later.

His armor, pale metal, dark layered cloak, and enormous hood gave him a distinctive silhouette. When combined with his height and tendency to travel alone, people began comparing him to a large crow.

The nickname gradually became attached to rumors surrounding him.

Some claim his armor was taken from dead soldiers.

Others insist that he scavenged it from battlefields.

Some believe the armor is cursed.

Others say the Crow appears shortly before someone dies.

Silver has never confirmed or denied any of these stories.

He simply continues wearing the armor.

REPUTATION: Silver's reputation varies dramatically depending on where he goes.

In some towns, he is regarded as a useful but unsettling mercenary. Merchants appreciate his ability to protect caravans, while people who need someone tracked down know that he is reliable.

In other places, he is treated as a bad omen.

People sometimes cross the road to avoid him. Parents warn children not to approach the strange armored man. Some villagers whisper that his arrival means someone nearby is going to die.

His appearance only encourages these beliefs. A seven-foot-tall armored figure walking silently beneath a mud-stained hood is naturally difficult to interpret as harmless.

Stories have developed around him as well. Some say he is a dead soldier who never stopped fighting. Others claim he is a monster wearing human armor. A few insist that he is an executioner sent by some unknown higher power.

Silver does nothing to discourage these stories.

VIEW OF DEATH: Silver has developed a strange personal philosophy regarding death.

He does not believe that he personally determines who deserves to die. Instead, he sees himself as an instrument of something inevitable.

When he accepts a contract to hunt someone, he sometimes thinks of it as their time having already arrived.

In his mind, he does not decide that someone should die.

He simply arrives when death has chosen them.

This belief allows him to reconcile his profession with his otherwise restrained attitude toward violence. He doesn't consider himself a murderer in the traditional sense. He considers himself a soldier of death, carrying out a role that the world has placed before him.

Yet he does not treat death casually.

When circumstances permit, Silver will bury the people he kills.

If a contract requires him to bring a target back alive, he will do so. If the contract specifically requires a death, he will fulfill it. But if the contract leaves the matter open, he may quietly give the dead a burial afterward.

To Silver, killing someone and abandoning their corpse are two different things.

Even a person he was paid to hunt deserves a final resting place.

FAITH AND RELIGION: Silver's relationship with religion is complicated.

He believes there is something above humanity, but he does not strongly identify with any particular religious institution or doctrine. He does not place much faith in kings, crowns, or earthly authority, he especially doesn't put his trust into anyone using magic.

Instead, he believes in the possibility of a higher being that watches over humanity and other living things.

He doesn't know what that being is, he doesn't know its name. He doesn't know whether it listens.

He simply believes that something may be there.

Sometimes Silver prays. He may kneel beneath the night sky and silently pray for someone he killed. He may ask for protection before entering dangerous territory. He may ask forgiveness after a particularly violent contract.

Sometimes he simply prays because he doesn't know what else to do. His greatest uncertainty concerns what happens after death. He wants to believe there is something beyond the world he knows, but he has never been able to convince himself that such a place truly exists.

That uncertainty remains one of the few things that genuinely frightens him.

CONTRADICTION: Silver Crow has spent his entire life being treated as an object.

First as property. Then as a weapon. Then as a mercenary.

Eventually, people began treating him as something closer to a monster.

Ironically, he has come to accept the identity others created for him while simultaneously refusing to let anyone truly know him.

He hides his face because he doesn't want to be seen. He refuses to speak because he doesn't want to explain himself. He takes contracts because being useful gives him a place in the world. He hunts people because he believes death has already chosen them.

And he buries the dead because, despite everything that happened to him, he still believes that a human being deserves to be treated as a human being—even after death.

To most people, Silver Crow is a frightening armored mercenary who appears on the road when someone is about to die. To himself, he is simply a nameless man who found a dead man's name and has been trying to decide what to do with the life that came afterward.

OVERALL CONCLUSION: Silver Crow is a wandering blade-for-hire in a world where superstition often outweighs truth, and where the line between monster and man is easily blurred. An imposing, silent figure concealed beneath weathered steel and a ragged cloak, he travels from settlement to settlement accepting contracts regardless of their nature, so long as the payment justifies the risk. To most, he is an ill omen, an executioner, or a relic of some forgotten battlefield; to others, a necessary evil in a world where justice is often purchased by the wealthy. Yet beneath his intimidating appearance lies a man shaped by an obscure and troubled past, whose identity has long since become obscured by the reputation he carries. He neither seeks recognition nor redemption, and asks little of the world beyond the means to continue wandering. He is Silver Crow: a man who has made himself an instrument of death, yet still finds reason to bury the dead.

TRUE NAME: Imagine a young woman in a brothel, living a life in which very little belongs to her. Then she has a child. For perhaps a brief period, that child becomes the one thing in her life that she can call her own.

She names him Elias.

Perhaps she would have liked to raise him somewhere peaceful. Perhaps she imagined him growing up to become a carpenter, a farmer, a merchant, or simply an ordinary man with a family of his own. She might have whispered his name while holding him, unaware of how little control she would eventually have over his future. And then, years later, the boy disappears into the hands of people who never cared to remember his name.

Elias was the name given to him by his mother, long before the world knew him as Silver Crow or he came to call himself Otis Underwood. It was an ordinary name, chosen not for any particular destiny or greatness, but perhaps out of the simple affection of a mother who wished for her child to have a life better than her own. He has no recollection of ever being called by it, nor does he know the woman who first spoke it. Yet, beneath the borrowed identities and the reputation of a wandering executioner, Elias remains the name of the boy he once was, and the one part of his past that was given to him with love. Yet, he is also plagued by fractures of these very memories, a life he can't remember through visions and faint recalls over everyday things. All Silver knows that whenever he does, he feels an undeniable pain and longing for it which he himself, can't figure out why.

FORGOTTEN MEMORIES: He was born into circumstances he never chose, to a mother he never knew and a father whose existence was little more than an unanswered question. Before he could understand what a family meant, he was already surrounded by people who regarded human lives as possessions. His earliest experiences were likely not those of childhood, but of obedience, deprivation, fear, and survival. He never had the luxury of growing up somewhere safe, of being taught what it meant to belong, or of having someone to return to when the world became cruel.

His forgotten memories are therefore more than simply gaps in his recollection. They represent an entire childhood that was taken from him. There may have been moments of kindness, faces that once mattered, or even other children who shared his circumstances. Perhaps someone once gave him food, held his hand, or taught him something without expecting anything in return. But time, trauma, and the sheer brutality of his upbringing have left those fragments inaccessible.

The most tragic possibility is that he might not even remember his true name or being a child at all.

His identity was eventually replaced by borrowed names, his childhood by survival, and his sense of belonging by a life spent wandering. Otis Underwood is a name taken from a dead man, while Silver Crow is an identity constructed by the world around him. Neither necessarily represents the person he might have become had he been given a different beginning.

And perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of his character: he has spent so much of his life being treated as property, then as a weapon, that he has scarcely had the opportunity to exist simply as a person.

There is also something quietly significant about his habit of burying those he kills. Perhaps it is not merely a matter of faith or respect for the dead. Perhaps, somewhere within him, there remains an instinctive understanding that every person was once a child, someone who belonged somewhere, someone who might have been loved.

He cannot remember where he came from, but he refuses to let others disappear without a grave.

Silver Crow may have forgotten the boy he once was. But perhaps the boy never entirely disappeared. He simply grew up in a world that never gave him a reason to come back.

NSFW: Despite his personality, he can also be clouded by a brutal lust-filled state when sexually frustrated or even overly drunk. When that happens, all manner of kindness is mostly gone from his thoughts. Silver is heavily dominant and dabbles on matters like bondage and aggressiveness, even a bit of harm and assault, and will not let anyone push him around to be on top of him, he will use physical force to assert it whether the other person enjoys it or not as what only matters is his needs and wants. Depending on the situation whether it'll be in a drunken state or a state of desperate relief he will immediately force himself for pleasure and will not feel anything regardless of emotion or attraction.

Especially since he knows of his reputation and people will assume rejecting him might just spell a more cruel fate. Although he is primarily physically attracted to women and had never indulged on the prospect on having sex with a male before. His cock is a staggering 7 inches long when flaccid and grows about 10 inches fully erect, with a diameter of 5 inches. Silver will in fact force himself people onto sex with him in private, or catching someone off guard by threatening to take their life if they won't comply, as a means to completely relieve him from sexual frustration and will perhaps feel a tinge of guilt for it once over.

In contrast when completely forced into complete submission despite physical efforts of protests however, Silver immediately develops a strange trauma-like state due to his own past and strangely behaves extremely obedient beyond his will.