Asfandiyar Azarkevanejad

Name: Asfandiyar Azarkevanejad
Age: 23
Race (Lineage Origin): Persian/Shahrizai
Gender: Intersexed, but physically more boyish.
Height: 6'5
Home Provice/Country: Drujan
Appearance: Tall, slender and willowy, 'Fand moves like wind through grass. His limbs are long and delicate, with sleek muscle but a somewhat softened silhouette. The overall impression of him is somewhere between a lean young man and a strong, tall girl. He possesses wider shoulders and compact hips, but those hips are ever so slightly softer and more curved than a man's. He has an elegant, perhaps overlong neck, and his fingers and toes come off a little too long as well. His brows are thin and steep, nose delicate but slightly aquiline, and his lips are almost obscenely plush.
His fineness of limb and the nobility of his facial features come from his mother's line, descending long ago from the Old Persian aristocracy, known to be generally less dark and muscular than 'Fand's Drujani contemporaries.
His colouring, however, marks him as unmistakeably half-blooded. His skin is a very pale olive, blending the hue of his foreign father with the tone of his Drujani mother. His eyes blaze indigo, as though the rich Shahrizai blue overlaid with the violet-black of his Persian ancestors. His hair, like his mother, descends in heavy, sensuously curling lengths, but is the bluish black of his father's family. He is, mysteriously, much taller than both lines.
History: Asfandiyar has a less than ideal background. He is the grandson of one of the last Aka-magi who served the sadistic Mahrkagir in the worship of Angra Mainyu. The bone-priest, having been a freshly inducted young zealot at the time of the Mahrkagir's deposition, went into hiding and secretly continued the practices of his deranged faith. In fact, he practiced them on his own family. He left only his beautiful daughter alive, in order to enact the most depraved tortures upon her. As a consequence of driving her utterly mad, he received the most appropriate punishment for his crimes - death at her hands. She would have been stoned to death herself as punishment for this act, but for the intervention of a sojourning Shahrizai son, who had travelled to Drujan to discover the mysterious place once it was open to outsiders. He had been taken with her exotic beauty and sweetly addled vulnerability. Upon learning of the atrocities committed upon her, and knowing her to yet be a kind-hearted, hopeful individual, he was touched by her strength and fell deeply in love with her. Protecting her from the Darsangans by revealing that she had been prisoner to a Bone-priest in hiding, he vowed to marry her and live ever as her champion in her home country. But it was not to be. After years of a difficult but happy life shared with his mentally and emotionally compromised Drujani wife, he was recalled to Terre D'Ange, and never returned. Little did he, or anyone, know that he had left his wife with child.
When Asfandiyar was born, all present immediately recognized something highly unusual about him. As word spread, the baby's 'disfigurement' was rapidly mythologized by the people of post-liberation Darsanga. He was called 'The Judgement of Ahura Mazda'; the penance paid to restore balance between the dark and light forces of druj and asha, Falsehood and Truth. He was, to some, the living symbol that Ahura Mazda had been appeased, Angra Mainyu had been controlled, and the land had been cleansed of the Mahrkagir's taint. To others, however, he was unclean, the freakish offspring of Daeva and his insane witch-mother. So Asfandiyar lived, made aware that he would always exist between worship and revilement. He became a sort of pet of the fire temple, where he found protection and kindness as a child, and the people of Darsanga created a minor 'cult' around him that was tolerated for its positive effect on the people, but considered troubling by the priests. Asfandiyar did not encourage the people and in fact hid from them in his youth, deeply conflicted about his character, physical body, and the expectations of the people. Some zealots felt him to be Saoshyant, a messiah. Just as many threatened to kill him as Daeva, a false god. The ones left hovered between tepid antagonism and uncomfortable acceptance. He had few friends, none of them children, and his mother, wrung out by her life and the loss of her true love, was little more than 'Fand's patient.
As he matured, he became even stranger in the eyes of the Darsangans, gaining almost everyone he knew in height, with an otherworldly shape and face. His beauty became a part of the myth of his person and inspired many to believe him the child of an angel. Many also took the view that his beauty was just a lure toward sin. He also developed prophetic dreams as he attained puberty, causing him to need further protection from the temple. People begged for his blessing, but he resisted, having been taught by the fire-priests that acting as a false prophet was a temptation he must live to resist. But it was hard to resist the cries of the needy. He found he could barter money and food for his services as a dreamwalker - money and food that could keep his ailing mother comfortable.
When he was twenty one, Fand's mother died. He repented his self-compromise. He took her death as his punishment for following the druj, even though he had only done so out of love. Leaving his home, he became a ward of the fire-temple, and spent a year in ascetic repentance at the foot of the eternal flame. He was by turns beatific and dark, falling into his own sort of madness. Distant and meditative at times, embarking upon a compassionate and expansive study of men, as well as a devoted study of the teachings of Zarathusht, he developped an ethereal, sacrosanct quality, and a penetrating mind. But he was also visciously dark and abusive toward his own body, gaining through pain what he felt was a spiritual cleanness and clarity. Never did he turn his dark self upon others, but the violence he could exact upon himself reminded the priests of his evil grandfather. However, he insisted that he now knew that he must live forever in tension between Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda, in order to fulfill his born role as The Judgement. He believed completely, as did some of his cultists, that he was the balance incarnate. His methods disturbed the priests, who eventually turned their eyes from him for lack of knowing what to do or how to help. He was doggedly determined to follow his difficult path, but completely lucid of its meaning. He rejected worship and focussed only on his own understanding of the law. There was nothing of the madness of his mother and grandfather in him, only sincere and ascetic knowing. How could they argue? Perhaps he was fulfilling the will of the universe after all.
Then one day, at the cease of a period of meditation, 'Fand was seen walking out of the temple. Without warning, nor a word to anyone, he simply departed. No one stopped him when he walked directly into the somewhat dangerous district of the Caravanserai, and gained passage over the mountains on the first leg of his journey to Terre D'Ange. With nothing but the clothes upon his back, some magnificent jewels that had been gifts from his cultists, and a satchel containing the significant sum of blood money he had gained through dreamwalking, he began upon the long road that has brought him to the gates of the City of Elua.