I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING—
- Age
- 26
- Gender
- Male
- Eyes
- Brown
- Height
- 6'2ft
If one were to encounter Yufenhagen on the street, they may mistake him for a ‘normal’ person.
Yu is, by all accounts, very open. He laughs and he jokes without a care in the world, easily acclimating to even the most bitter of people. Nothing seems to phase this man as he saunters through streets and scrounges up a meager living as a sword (glaive, rather) for hire. When engaging in a passing chat with him in a bar, where the energy is friendly and jaunty, it’s easy to believe the glossy sheen glazing his twisted heart.
That’s assuming it’s still even there, of course. If he ever had one at all.
Things change when Yufenhagen enters combat. Although he maintains his high energy, when he channels that aspect of himself into fighting, it deforms into something frenetic and wild. It lights up the air around him, a wildfire incapable of being contained in a single person. It flickers and it burns and when you look into those huge, empty eyes, you might start to think that the flames are him. That when they’re made manifest, they leave behind a broken, battered lantern that simply goes through the motions of violence. A vessel drained of oil and bleeding more with every person he kills.
But then he laughs, and you realize he isn’t absent at all. No. He’s completely present for every bloody moment that occurs at his own hands, and he revels in it.
To call Yufenhagen a person would be a mistake. He is more like a caricature of a person played by a doll trying its best to imitate one. At one moment the imitation is perfect, so much so that even he can believe it, but then he falters and the smiles from the crowd fades or twists into grimaces and he is simply another toy, discarded and broken and burning.
It may come as a surprise, but Yufenhagen was young once. Rather, he was innocent, once. It was a short time, somewhere between him hatching and him growing used to the feeling of whips against his bare, unfeathered skin, but there was a time when Yufen was a child. A child forced to learn the bite of punishment, to learn his place as property, to never realize he was meant to have somewhere warm and welcoming to ease him into becoming an adult.
When he was spirited away by the band of strangers who’d happened upon the dwarven mining operation and managed to take it down, it was his first taste of freedom. He was only 6.
The strangers hadn’t named him yet. To them, he was just a neat trophy. Another reward on top of the already hefty bounty from the dwarf running a rival mining operation whose name they never bothered to remember. He was almost like a pet.
“What about Owly?” the half-orc suggested, her calloused and oil-slicked hands rubbing his head like one would a wild dog. He didn’t mind.
“We’re not naming him ‘Owly,’” snapped the halfling. “We shouldn’t even be considering ‘keeping’ him at all. What if he had a family, what if—”
“We should just put him back,” the human grumbled. He adjusted so he was leaning against his mace, heavy armor clinking. “We can’t keep a brat around when we’ve got jobs to do.”
“Aw, don’t say that!” the half-orc whined. She picked up the small Owlin boy by the armpits and squeezed. The boy felt something crack. “We haven’t even heard from Khourtir!”
All eyes turned to the charcoal dwarf lurking in the corner of the bar. The duergar was silent, simply thumbing his casting implement as he listened to the three bicker. When his name was mentioned, he turned his gaze up. It just so happened to meet with the Owlin boy’s. The kid’s eyes were wide and unblinking while they stared at each other in silence.
“... Yufenhagen, perhaps,” the duergar murmured. “That would be a nice name.”
“Nope,” the human immediately responded.
The rest of the afternoon was spent bickering over what to name the party’s new pet.
Yufenhagen stuck, eventually.
It was alongside this band of mercenaries that Yufenhagen grew up with. Schell, the human, treated him like a nuisance at best. Any attempt that Yu made to reach out was reacted to with withdrawal and a cruel sneer. He never quite got what that expression meant.
Gauze, the halfling, was kinder albeit just as distant. The man would pull away whenever left alone with the Owlin, citing his reasons for doing so as scouting and sharpening his knives. Whenever he turned away, Yufenhagen could catch just the smallest of frowns tugging at his mouth.
Jashtar, the half-orc, and Khourtir were the only two who seemed to like Yufen.
Jashtar adored him, often buying him outfits and bringing back little knick-knacks for him to keep. She would pick him up like a doll, perch him on her shoulder and feed him from her hand like he really was just a wild animal. He never minded, finding he liked receiving attention– however demeaning it was.
Khourtir was the one who’d taught him to speak properly and read not just Common, but Dwarvish. A duergar of few words, his unflinching expression would twitch into a small smile whenever Yufen managed a full sentence on his own or succeeded at something on one of their missions. He was probably Yufen’s favorite.
Sometimes, others would join the adventuring party as well. People came and went. Some treated him sweetly, others found every opportunity to mock him as ‘the party pet,’ while many more simply ignored him. Quiet and passive, he could almost be thought of as a background character. Someone to be forgotten. Remembered only when he was supposed to be fed.
For the longest time, he considered that the closest thing he had to being happy.
There was a moment, however, when he’d been given the chance to ‘upgrade’ from his position.
At that point, he was just about 13, and his unorthodox family had been whittled down to two. Schell had left them long ago. He’d grown sick and tired of ‘slumming it,’ as he put it so succinctly, leaving to return to his Paladin Order. Jashtar, the half-orc, had died in a cave-in during one of their more tumultuous missions. Every other party member had left them.
It’d been left to the weakest two, Gauze and Khourtir, to try and reassemble their adventuring party into something feasibly operable. The two of them had sat at a pub with Yufen looming awkwardly behind Khourtir’s chair. The party couldn’t even afford a separate meal for each of them, a single bowl of rice sat sadly in the center of their table.
When the silence got unbearable, Gauze was the first to speak up.
“What if we put the kid to work?” the halfling mumbled into his glass of well water, shrugging at Khourtir’s responding stare. “Not like he’s doing anything else useful.”
Khourtir had frowned at that. It was an unfamiliar sight on the normally calm duergar, and it made something in Yufen’s gut wriggle uncomfortably. “We can’t.”
“Well, what else are we supposed to do, Tir?!” Gauze slammed his glass down. “Let him go?! It’s not like he’ll survive on his own! We’re the ones who made sure of that, remember?” The halfling gestured furiously at Yufen, the owl merely cocking his head with an empty stare. “You and Jash pampered him and now he’s an idiot who waits at doors to be let in like a fucking stray!”
It wasn’t often that Yufenhagen picked up on moments where he was being insulted, but the bitterness lacing the halfling’s voice made him flinch. Khourtir seemed to pick up on this, placing his hand lightly over the Owlin’s.
“We didn’t pamper him,” responded the duergar with ease.
Gauze groaned, gripping his head in his hands. For a moment it almost looked as though he was going to scream, but no sound escaped his throat. Nothing but a long, tired sigh.
“I can work,” the boy managed to squeak out.
Two pairs of eyes turned to him. One was hopeful, the other apprehensive. “Really?” They spoke in unison.
“Really,” Yufenhagen confirmed. “Khourtir already taught me to read and write and Schell sometimes made me carry his mace. I could learn how to fight. I could help you guys on missions.”
Khourtir squeezed the boy’s hand, brow furrowing and mouth pursed into a tight line. “Yufenhagen, are you certain? You will need to do a lot of… unsavory things.”
The sudden seriousness in which he was addressed made the Owlin pause. He’d spoken without really thinking, but—
But Gauze was looking at him like he was going to save them.
He wanted him to keep looking at him like that.
“I’m sure.”
It was far easier to train him than he thinks any of them ever thought.
Fighting was far simpler for Yufen to do in the moment, especially when he thought about Gauze’s eyes sparkling with hope and Khourtir’s slow, proud smile. The smell of blood wasn’t so bad. His hands even stopped shaking after a while.
When he became a real member of the party, it was like a seal had broken. Yufen was turned into a ball of sunshine seemingly overnight, becoming the one contributing all of the energy into conversations. He was excited to speak and contribute his ideas to planning, even if Gauze always turned him down. It didn’t matter, because he’d still been allowed to speak.
There was a tipping point, though.
It must’ve been when he was 20-ish years old, while the group was in the middle of its groove as a successful adventuring party. They had money, they had new members, they had just traveled to a new desert region, he was being valued. So what had gone so wrong?
Maybe it’d been when he laughed as he split someone’s head on his axe’s blade.
Suddenly, the group weren’t looking at him with awe and pride, but with genuine fear. A freak of nature, someone who’d gone too far, a weirdo with an obsession with murder. Even Khourtir had pulled away from Yufen’s attempt at hugging him, fear in his pale eyes.
Wasn’t he helping them? Why were they looking at him like that?
All of the hurt he felt from them withdrawing paled in comparison to when they sold him off without even telling him they were going to do so.
In a single day, he’d been put back into shackles and made into someone else’s slave, this time as a gladiator instead of a miner. He’d watched them trade him off at the back of a sandstone stadium, Gauze pocketing the gold without so much as even a glance at the boy he’d betrayed. The rest of the party had kept to the shadows.
The last thing Yufenhagen saw outside of the stadium was Khourtir’s eyes laced with regret.
Perhaps, as the party left the boy they’d taken in as their own behind, they believed it a kindness. Gauze certainly did, thinking that Yufenhagen would at least learn to thrive on his own without needing their approval. Khourtir agreed, yet that could not soothe the ache in his heart as he’d watched the Owlin’s eyes well with tears. The three new members, unfamiliar with the intricacies of the party’s relationships, were simply glad to part ways with that violent freak.
But no matter what they believed, none of them were going to survive the approaching storm.
Yufenhagen got out eventually. A combination of good luck and brute strength had let him break out of his prison under the concealment of a riot in the underbelly of the stadium, his new masters too busy trying to return the peace for them to notice the owl squirming through one of the windows which led to the world aboveground.
Now, sporting a few hundred more scars underneath his feathers, the bedraggled owl dragged himself through the desert town until he reached the outskirts. There, he yanked off his collar, a sign of ownership for the new group of bastards he’d been given to as meat-fodder. The runes glimmered even at night, metal catching on the light of the rising moon.
Eulenblut.
Owlblood.
He hung the collar over his wrist. A symbol of his freedom, of how he was able to release himself from his shackles this time around. A way to show his independence.
But this was just the first step. He’d still been betrayed by his family, his home. The people he’d trusted the most, the people he’d worked himself to the bone for, the people he’d wanted to love him so badly—
He intended to adorn himself with their skulls. Maybe then, he could finally earn true freedom.
Yu is, by all accounts, very open. He laughs and he jokes without a care in the world, easily acclimating to even the most bitter of people. Nothing seems to phase this man as he saunters through streets and scrounges up a meager living as a sword (glaive, rather) for hire. When engaging in a passing chat with him in a bar, where the energy is friendly and jaunty, it’s easy to believe the glossy sheen glazing his twisted heart.
That’s assuming it’s still even there, of course. If he ever had one at all.
Things change when Yufenhagen enters combat. Although he maintains his high energy, when he channels that aspect of himself into fighting, it deforms into something frenetic and wild. It lights up the air around him, a wildfire incapable of being contained in a single person. It flickers and it burns and when you look into those huge, empty eyes, you might start to think that the flames are him. That when they’re made manifest, they leave behind a broken, battered lantern that simply goes through the motions of violence. A vessel drained of oil and bleeding more with every person he kills.
But then he laughs, and you realize he isn’t absent at all. No. He’s completely present for every bloody moment that occurs at his own hands, and he revels in it.
To call Yufenhagen a person would be a mistake. He is more like a caricature of a person played by a doll trying its best to imitate one. At one moment the imitation is perfect, so much so that even he can believe it, but then he falters and the smiles from the crowd fades or twists into grimaces and he is simply another toy, discarded and broken and burning.
It may come as a surprise, but Yufenhagen was young once. Rather, he was innocent, once. It was a short time, somewhere between him hatching and him growing used to the feeling of whips against his bare, unfeathered skin, but there was a time when Yufen was a child. A child forced to learn the bite of punishment, to learn his place as property, to never realize he was meant to have somewhere warm and welcoming to ease him into becoming an adult.
When he was spirited away by the band of strangers who’d happened upon the dwarven mining operation and managed to take it down, it was his first taste of freedom. He was only 6.
The strangers hadn’t named him yet. To them, he was just a neat trophy. Another reward on top of the already hefty bounty from the dwarf running a rival mining operation whose name they never bothered to remember. He was almost like a pet.
“What about Owly?” the half-orc suggested, her calloused and oil-slicked hands rubbing his head like one would a wild dog. He didn’t mind.
“We’re not naming him ‘Owly,’” snapped the halfling. “We shouldn’t even be considering ‘keeping’ him at all. What if he had a family, what if—”
“We should just put him back,” the human grumbled. He adjusted so he was leaning against his mace, heavy armor clinking. “We can’t keep a brat around when we’ve got jobs to do.”
“Aw, don’t say that!” the half-orc whined. She picked up the small Owlin boy by the armpits and squeezed. The boy felt something crack. “We haven’t even heard from Khourtir!”
All eyes turned to the charcoal dwarf lurking in the corner of the bar. The duergar was silent, simply thumbing his casting implement as he listened to the three bicker. When his name was mentioned, he turned his gaze up. It just so happened to meet with the Owlin boy’s. The kid’s eyes were wide and unblinking while they stared at each other in silence.
“... Yufenhagen, perhaps,” the duergar murmured. “That would be a nice name.”
“Nope,” the human immediately responded.
The rest of the afternoon was spent bickering over what to name the party’s new pet.
Yufenhagen stuck, eventually.
It was alongside this band of mercenaries that Yufenhagen grew up with. Schell, the human, treated him like a nuisance at best. Any attempt that Yu made to reach out was reacted to with withdrawal and a cruel sneer. He never quite got what that expression meant.
Gauze, the halfling, was kinder albeit just as distant. The man would pull away whenever left alone with the Owlin, citing his reasons for doing so as scouting and sharpening his knives. Whenever he turned away, Yufenhagen could catch just the smallest of frowns tugging at his mouth.
Jashtar, the half-orc, and Khourtir were the only two who seemed to like Yufen.
Jashtar adored him, often buying him outfits and bringing back little knick-knacks for him to keep. She would pick him up like a doll, perch him on her shoulder and feed him from her hand like he really was just a wild animal. He never minded, finding he liked receiving attention– however demeaning it was.
Khourtir was the one who’d taught him to speak properly and read not just Common, but Dwarvish. A duergar of few words, his unflinching expression would twitch into a small smile whenever Yufen managed a full sentence on his own or succeeded at something on one of their missions. He was probably Yufen’s favorite.
Sometimes, others would join the adventuring party as well. People came and went. Some treated him sweetly, others found every opportunity to mock him as ‘the party pet,’ while many more simply ignored him. Quiet and passive, he could almost be thought of as a background character. Someone to be forgotten. Remembered only when he was supposed to be fed.
For the longest time, he considered that the closest thing he had to being happy.
There was a moment, however, when he’d been given the chance to ‘upgrade’ from his position.
At that point, he was just about 13, and his unorthodox family had been whittled down to two. Schell had left them long ago. He’d grown sick and tired of ‘slumming it,’ as he put it so succinctly, leaving to return to his Paladin Order. Jashtar, the half-orc, had died in a cave-in during one of their more tumultuous missions. Every other party member had left them.
It’d been left to the weakest two, Gauze and Khourtir, to try and reassemble their adventuring party into something feasibly operable. The two of them had sat at a pub with Yufen looming awkwardly behind Khourtir’s chair. The party couldn’t even afford a separate meal for each of them, a single bowl of rice sat sadly in the center of their table.
When the silence got unbearable, Gauze was the first to speak up.
“What if we put the kid to work?” the halfling mumbled into his glass of well water, shrugging at Khourtir’s responding stare. “Not like he’s doing anything else useful.”
Khourtir had frowned at that. It was an unfamiliar sight on the normally calm duergar, and it made something in Yufen’s gut wriggle uncomfortably. “We can’t.”
“Well, what else are we supposed to do, Tir?!” Gauze slammed his glass down. “Let him go?! It’s not like he’ll survive on his own! We’re the ones who made sure of that, remember?” The halfling gestured furiously at Yufen, the owl merely cocking his head with an empty stare. “You and Jash pampered him and now he’s an idiot who waits at doors to be let in like a fucking stray!”
It wasn’t often that Yufenhagen picked up on moments where he was being insulted, but the bitterness lacing the halfling’s voice made him flinch. Khourtir seemed to pick up on this, placing his hand lightly over the Owlin’s.
“We didn’t pamper him,” responded the duergar with ease.
Gauze groaned, gripping his head in his hands. For a moment it almost looked as though he was going to scream, but no sound escaped his throat. Nothing but a long, tired sigh.
“I can work,” the boy managed to squeak out.
Two pairs of eyes turned to him. One was hopeful, the other apprehensive. “Really?” They spoke in unison.
“Really,” Yufenhagen confirmed. “Khourtir already taught me to read and write and Schell sometimes made me carry his mace. I could learn how to fight. I could help you guys on missions.”
Khourtir squeezed the boy’s hand, brow furrowing and mouth pursed into a tight line. “Yufenhagen, are you certain? You will need to do a lot of… unsavory things.”
The sudden seriousness in which he was addressed made the Owlin pause. He’d spoken without really thinking, but—
But Gauze was looking at him like he was going to save them.
He wanted him to keep looking at him like that.
“I’m sure.”
—
It was far easier to train him than he thinks any of them ever thought.
Fighting was far simpler for Yufen to do in the moment, especially when he thought about Gauze’s eyes sparkling with hope and Khourtir’s slow, proud smile. The smell of blood wasn’t so bad. His hands even stopped shaking after a while.
When he became a real member of the party, it was like a seal had broken. Yufen was turned into a ball of sunshine seemingly overnight, becoming the one contributing all of the energy into conversations. He was excited to speak and contribute his ideas to planning, even if Gauze always turned him down. It didn’t matter, because he’d still been allowed to speak.
There was a tipping point, though.
It must’ve been when he was 20-ish years old, while the group was in the middle of its groove as a successful adventuring party. They had money, they had new members, they had just traveled to a new desert region, he was being valued. So what had gone so wrong?
Maybe it’d been when he laughed as he split someone’s head on his axe’s blade.
Suddenly, the group weren’t looking at him with awe and pride, but with genuine fear. A freak of nature, someone who’d gone too far, a weirdo with an obsession with murder. Even Khourtir had pulled away from Yufen’s attempt at hugging him, fear in his pale eyes.
Wasn’t he helping them? Why were they looking at him like that?
All of the hurt he felt from them withdrawing paled in comparison to when they sold him off without even telling him they were going to do so.
In a single day, he’d been put back into shackles and made into someone else’s slave, this time as a gladiator instead of a miner. He’d watched them trade him off at the back of a sandstone stadium, Gauze pocketing the gold without so much as even a glance at the boy he’d betrayed. The rest of the party had kept to the shadows.
The last thing Yufenhagen saw outside of the stadium was Khourtir’s eyes laced with regret.
Perhaps, as the party left the boy they’d taken in as their own behind, they believed it a kindness. Gauze certainly did, thinking that Yufenhagen would at least learn to thrive on his own without needing their approval. Khourtir agreed, yet that could not soothe the ache in his heart as he’d watched the Owlin’s eyes well with tears. The three new members, unfamiliar with the intricacies of the party’s relationships, were simply glad to part ways with that violent freak.
But no matter what they believed, none of them were going to survive the approaching storm.
Yufenhagen got out eventually. A combination of good luck and brute strength had let him break out of his prison under the concealment of a riot in the underbelly of the stadium, his new masters too busy trying to return the peace for them to notice the owl squirming through one of the windows which led to the world aboveground.
Now, sporting a few hundred more scars underneath his feathers, the bedraggled owl dragged himself through the desert town until he reached the outskirts. There, he yanked off his collar, a sign of ownership for the new group of bastards he’d been given to as meat-fodder. The runes glimmered even at night, metal catching on the light of the rising moon.
Eulenblut.
Owlblood.
He hung the collar over his wrist. A symbol of his freedom, of how he was able to release himself from his shackles this time around. A way to show his independence.
But this was just the first step. He’d still been betrayed by his family, his home. The people he’d trusted the most, the people he’d worked himself to the bone for, the people he’d wanted to love him so badly—
He intended to adorn himself with their skulls. Maybe then, he could finally earn true freedom.
Appearance
Mentality
Personality
The major events and journals in Yufenhagen's history, from the beginning to today.
The list of amazing people following the adventures of Yufenhagen.
Social