Ambient sounds courtesy of tosha73 and EminYILDIRIM
Greetings to those below. I am Death, though you may call me Azrael. Chabaal is who I will discuss today, but what can I tell you about him that has not already been said? Throughout his life, Chabaal made sure everything was said about him. He didn’t like the idea of being forgotten, which is perhaps why he founded The Fisherhook Gang. He liked to call himself a rebel leader, but I got to know him quite well during his lifetime, if only because he kept me so busy. You see, he was actually known as a notorious murderer throughout the majority of Vānima the Veldriss’s reign, famous for the brutal way in which he would kill.
Both the stomach and brains of his victims would be ripped open and destroyed. The mangled corpses would then be left out in public places during the night so they could be discovered the next morning. It was theorized he used a combination of knives and his powerful psionic abilities to achieve this particular signature. I can confirm this was true thanks to some of my more mangled collections. After dozens of repeated killings all performed in the same manner, Chabaal came to be known as “The Fisherman”, which was both a reference to his humble origins and his tendency to “gut his victims like a fish”.
Special Abilities
Psionics
Psionics is the catch-all term referring to the powers of the mind, specifically telepathy and telekinesis. All Sithuwaye have these abilities, but the extent of these abilities depends on genetic factors. Sithuwaye belonging to the royal bloodline Anastil have been famously more powerful than the average Sithuwaye, most likely because they are descended from Desmon Anastil, the most powerful Sithuwaye in history. Of course, were you one of Chabaal’s victims, I imagine this detail wouldn’t have mattered to you very much seeing as how Chabaal was more than powerful enough to burst open your skull. And yes, to those of you below who are tallying abilities, you are correct to assume that if Chabaal could do all of that and still be considered merely “above average”, then Desmon Anastil was . . . terrifying.
Sithu
Being a Sithuwaye, Chabaal was unfortunately blessed with
sithu, the white fire burning on top of Sithuwaye blood. This made him very hard to kill.
Sithu is the source of Sithuwaye immortality, you see, in the sense that they will never age. Pointy things can still hurt them, of course, as can a well-aimed rock if you are feeling determined enough; but,
sithu also protects against illness and heals non-mortal wounds. And while the fire is not normally hot, it can be weaponized if the Sithuwaye wills it. Put all this together, and you can see how Chabaal managed to dodge me so many times. If subjected to a state of extreme isolation or loneliness, a Sithuwaye’s
sithu can start to fade, and eventually, they can die. A sense of connection is as vital as water to the Sithuwaye people. Of course, Chabaal seemed to be the exception to this rule, though. Up until the end, I never so much as saw his
sithu flicker, let alone begin to fade. He enjoyed taunting me like that; although, I admit, his resilience had less to do with him than it did his
araya liseté.
Little Augrem
by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
here is at least one nice thing I can say about Chabaal. Because fading
sithu was something he was at least in theory vulnerable to, like all Sithuwaye, he required an
araya liseté to stay mentally and physically healthy. Well . . . Chabaal’s version of mentally “healthy”. He was given one by his parents at the age of seven per Sithuwaye tradition. It was a topaz gemstone fashioned into an earring that took on the simulated form of a rat. Chabaal named the little creature Augrem.
As Chabaal’s notoriety grew, Augrem famously became known as “The Fisherman’s Rat”. He was often an assassination target, the thought being that if he was destroyed, Chabaal’s health would deteriorate and make him an easier target. Aware of this, Chabaal protected Augrem above all others, ensuring no Sicarius assassin ever got close. It was almost sweet how he would dote on Augrem. I wonder if he was the one thing Chabaal ever truly connected with. Then again, perhaps I should be somewhat less hard on Chabaal. His violent nature is not entirely his fault, you see. Allow me to explain.
Personal History
Early Life
“It was different in those days. No one knew what was brewing in the west, or if they did, they couldn’t have known how bad it would get. But I knew. I knew because I was there when it happened the first time. That’s something you don’t forget.”
—The Hood
by J. L. Gryphon via Artbreeder
am Death. As such, the beginnings of a person’s life so often elude me, but what I can tell you is Chabaal was born in the eastern territories of Rhyastil near the edges of The Morsus Swamp in what was then a small river village named Koledin. Despite being born the same year Vänima the Veldriss began her genocidal crusade to eliminate all Sithuwaye from the island of Rhye, Chabaal’s early childhood was, as far as I could tell, marked by happiness and peace. He spent his days playing in the rainforest that bordered his village and helping his parents—both fishermen—catch fish along the marshy edges of The River of Rhye.
While there were rumors in those days of Sithuwaye being attacked by assassins, it was not yet understood what the Sithuwaye Wars would become; and so most people, especially those in the east who remained relatively removed from the rest of society, went on about their lives largely ignoring the turmoil building in the west. I, unfortunately, was unable to ignore it. It was quite an annoying time period for me, frankly. But this suspended peace lasted only so long, and when Chabaal was seven years old, the Sithuwaye Wars finally came to his home. I finally came to his home.
The Deranged Sithuwaye
“Someone has to remember!”
—A deranged Sithuwaye elf
by Prettysleepy from Pixabay
his next part I can tell you about in detail. I was there, you see. Out playing in the rainforest bordering his village, seven-year-old Chabaal encountered an injured Sithuwaye woman fleeing an assassin host. She was mortally wounded, reduced to crawling by the time she spotted Chabaal. Chabaal moved to help her, but the deranged Sithuwaye instead snatched the boy’s head and frantically said, “Someone has to remember!” Her psionic power blasted inside Chabaal’s mind, drowning his own consciousness with her own. Chabaal screamed at the intense pain, and the assassins came racing toward the sound. The Sithuwaye was shot in the back with a crossbow, but too late to save Chabaal. Chabaal could barely think through the roar of psionic energy burning through his mind, swiftly becoming consumed under the weight of images, events, flashbacks, and memories that had defined the Sithuwaye’s life. His head splitting with the agony of it, Chabaal barely escaped the assassin host who turned their attentions to him next. He fled back to his village, informed his parents that Sicarius assassins had finally come to the east, and together they, along with many other Sithuwaye villagers, fled deeper into the rainforest Chabaal knew so well.
I admit I followed them. I just wanted to watch. I wanted to know what would become of the boy. The Sithuwaye eventually settled in the darkest reaches of the rainforest next to a smaller river near the base of the Eastern Horns, and for a time, they were successful in evading The Veldriss and her assassins. Normal life resumed, if a bit more cautiously, but not for Chabaal. His parents remained unaware of what had happened to their son, as Chabaal was able to maintain a somewhat normal demeanor. However, every night he went to bed, the memories the Sithuwaye woman had violently forced inside his head screamed at him with no end, and Chabaal grew increasingly more haggard as time went on. In constant pain, it was too much for Chabaal’s mind to contain. His parents became concerned for him, observing how their once happy child stayed locked in his room all hours of the day simply staring at the wall. They assumed it was trauma over the Wars and did their best to help him, but Chabaal continued to deteriorate, attacked by severe psionic headaches that left him screaming long through the night. Amidst all of this came the never-ending refrain pounding like a drum in his thoughts: “Someone has to remember.”
It wasn’t until another year had passed that Chabaal, desperate to avoid going completely insane, finally discovered a way to traverse through the noise. “Someone has to remember.” Through all the mental screaming, those words had always remained at the forefront of his mind, and Chabaal discovered if he latched onto those words, it created a mental road he could travel down. If he could process each of the memories and find a place inside his mind where each of them could fit, then all that was fractured would be made whole again. Chabaal began incorporating the deranged Sithuwaye’s memories deep inside his own psyche, until eventually, one by one, the screams of the past began to settle, and the headaches eased until they barely bothered him at all. But doing this, while it freed him from the pain, had far more damaging consequences.
by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay
When Chabaal was thirteen, people began to notice he was looking healthier again, but they also noticed some changes in the boy that, as time went on, became more and more eerie. Even I, who I guess you would also find eerie, would have to agree. I hope that conveys to you just how wrong it all was. His eyes, once a deep charcoal gray, had turned pale and empty, resembling the color of shadowed ice. There was something off about his smile now, as if he had forgotten how to do it properly and was instead just mimicking what had used to come naturally. He kept mostly to himself, barely interacting with anyone other than his parents. But even his parents began to notice that, while he still helped them with the fishing, he seemed to take a more specific pleasure in gutting the fish after they were dead. He started carrying around a skinning knife, and often people would observe him standing near the river’s edge flipping the blade again and again while he stared out at the water, apparently deep in thought about . . . something. One day, as if on a whim, he shaved his head with that same skinning knife, and there was not a day that went by where he ever allowed his hair to grow again. By the time he was fifteen, the once joyful boy was mostly avoided by the rest of the villagers. He hadn’t done anything wrong specifically, but there was just . . . something . . . that made people’s hair stand on end whenever he would look at them. Chabaal’s parents were concerned, but whenever they would ask him what he was always thinking about, he would just give a distant smile and say, “Someone has to remember.” And when they would ask him what they were meant to be remembering, all he would ever say was, “The world as it was.” No one could ever get him to explain beyond that.
Chabaal and Miri
“She was useful. And I thought after our liensa formed that at least I would only have to deal with her for eighty years or so. Well worth it for what I needed to do. Fortunately, though, the whole plan became irrelevant, and I discovered I couldn’t bond with anyone. Hmph. I left her alive for that. Call it a ‘thank you’ for that particular revelation.”
—Chabaal “The Fisherman” Hassa
by sir5life0 from Pixabay
uring their initial escape from the river village, there was one human girl named Miri who had traveled with Chabaal’s parents and some of the other villagers. She was small, shy, and timid, but even the most unobservant villager knew she had long been fascinated with Chabaal. A few had tried to caution her about him, but Chabaal, almost seventeen by this point, was growing up to be quite handsome. A few other girls had begun whispering about him, as well, saying that for all his strangeness, there was something mysterious about him that captured their fantasies. Miri agreed with the other girls, but was too shy to ever say so. Still, like a curious mouse trailing after a cat, she would often follow Chabaal on his journeys to the edge of the river, blushing as he would toss the skinning knife up and down. At first, Chabaal ignored her despite knowing she was there, until one day when she suddenly seemed to catch his eye. Entirely opposite of his normally distant demeanor, he began to pursue her with an intense, obsessive passion that both intimidated and thrilled her. Chabaal’s parents were skeptical of this, and they cautioned Chabaal about a Sithuwaye’s ability to form a
liensa, warning him that if he slept with her, he would be taking on the responsibility of his and her souls being telepathically bound to each other for the rest of her life. Chabaal swore he was willing to commit to this, saying, “She’s a human. It would only be for eighty years or so. What’s that in the face of immortality?” Hearing this, his parents became alarmed and forbade Chabaal from pursuing the girl anymore, recognizing how little Chabaal seemed to care for the girl’s life, but Chabaal didn’t listen. He seduced Miri, sleeping with her near the river where she had always watched him. However, at the end of the act, to Chabaal’s own surprise, he did not form a
liensa with Miri. It was at this moment he discovered that the Sithuwaye’s attack on his mind had broken his ability to form a
liensa with anyone. Miri, realizing a bond had not formed between them, asked Chabaal if there was something wrong. But all Chabaal did was smile and say, “Nothing at all. Thank you, in fact. I learned what I needed to learn.” After that, Chabaal never spoke to Miri again, as if his obsessive pursuit of her had never happened at all. Heartbroken, Miri left the village a few months later and was never seen again except by me years later.
It also wasn’t until years later that this treatment of Miri gained an explanation. In a rare open conversation Chabaal had with The Hood, Chabaal revealed that his obsessive pursuit of Miri occurred because, during his time incorporating the deranged Sithuwaye’s memories into his psyche, he reached a point where some of the memories were sexual in nature, and he determined he would have to experience sex for himself in order to properly process them. He explained to the Hood that he chose Miri because he hadn’t known at the time he was incapable of forming a
liensa, and if in pursuit of this goal to free himself from the Sithuwaye’s assault on his mind he was going to
have to be psionically bound to someone, better it be someone who wouldn’t live very long so he could be rid of the bond sooner rather than later. He then explained it made things a whole lot easier when he discovered forming a
liensa wasn’t something he had to worry about after all, and in fact, it was the one “help” the deranged Sithuwaye ever gave him in the task she had burdened him with.
Founding the Fisherhook Gang
“Tonight is the beginning of it. We will cleanse this blight from the world and restore it to the way it was! Tonight, we cease to hide any longer. Tonight, and all the nights to come, we fight!”
—Chabaal “The Fisherman” Hassa
by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
n Chabaal’s exploration of the Sithuwaye’s memories, he had discovered she was a remnant of the world as it had been before The Battle of the Royals Dead, meaning she was one of the rare few who had been missed in the culling of everyone over the age of fifteen. Through her memories, Chabaal was able to see the grand utopia that had been destroyed, and after years of untangling the chaos of her garbled message, Chabaal finally understood what the Sithuwaye had meant by, “Someone has to remember.” Someone did indeed have to remember. It was such a world too beautiful to be forgotten. But the more Chabaal reflected on the utopia that had been lost, the more he came to believe that remembering wasn’t enough. The world needed to be restored to the way it had been before, and Chabaal decided that was exactly what he was going to do.
By this point, I had become tired of Chabaal, but I was forced to follow him thanks to what he did next. When he was twenty-three, he left his parents behind and journeyed the world, traveling to the much more dangerous settlements in the west where The Sithuwaye Wars were raging at their fullest. He left because finally, he was ready to begin the task the deranged Sithuwaye had given him. It was in the town of Oleva where he met The Hood; and he soon discovering that not only was The Hood a Sithuwaye like himself, but even more, The Hood was like the Sithuwaye woman who had attacked him all those years ago. The Hood was also someone who had been missed. Chabaal spoke more to The Hood than he had to anyone in years, peppering him with questions about the past. The Hood disagreed with Chabaal that the world before had been a utopia, but a world without The Veldriss definitely sounded like a preferable one. Hearing this, Chabaal invited The Hood to join him in his restoration effort, and The Hood agreed.
by by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
That night, I drifted in the shadows, watching, as Chabaal and The Hood gathered a group of hiding Sithuwaye and attacked a small patrol of assassins. Chabaal took his skinning knife and stabbed into their stomachs, gutting them like the fish he had helped his parents haul in from the river time and time again. As the assassins lay dying, Chabaal seized their faces, looked deep into their eyes, and lashed out with his psionics in a single, violent punch that split their heads open like what had almost happened to him. The Hood and the other Sithuwaye were disturbed by this, but in looking at the assassins lying dead in the street, they all realized it was the first time anyone had stood in defiance of The Veldriss. Chabaal, covered in blood, turned to them and said, “Tonight is the beginning of it. We will cleanse this blight from the world and restore it to the way it was! Tonight, we cease to hide any longer. Tonight, and all the nights to come, we fight!”
That night, history was made, and Chabaal won himself the means to finally begin his work. As his influence spread, he became known as “The Fisherman” for his signature style of killing. In response, his growing number of followers began calling themselves “The Hooks of the Fisherman”—or just “Fisherhooks” for short—a branding that would eventually give the gang its name. Chabaal stood as the leader of The Fisherhook Gang, growing increasingly more obsessed and violent. That is until, finally, I came for him.
Later Life and Death
“Chabaal Hassa will die by my hand. But this hunt is not my choice. It is his. He chose his end the moment he killed her.”
—Lord Jezryn of First Chosen House Sulissurn, superior-class Sicarius assassin
by J. L. Gryphon via Artbreeder
Chabaal commanded The Fisherhook Gang for a hundred years. Before I came for him, much of Chabaal’s later life was unknown or exaggerated, with some of the most terrifying rumors being spread by Chabaal himself. The legend of “Chabaal the Fisherman” outgrew the man himself in many ways, but to those who knew him personally, it was a well-known fact that Chabaal was never someone to relax around. It was The Hood who finally learned what had happened to him all those years ago, eventually coming to understand that the boy Chabaal had been had never stood a chance. The Sithuwaye who had attacked Chabaal truly had been insane, and by incorporating the Sithuwaye’s memories into his head, her madness had become his own. The memories that had so captivated her, enough so that she had been compelled to violently attack a helpless boy, were, at the end of the day, meaningless. Each gleaming fantasy she had “gifted” Chabaal were nothing more than the products of a deranged mind. The world Chabaal had fought so hard to restore had never existed in the first place. In learning all this, The Hood wondered if Chabaal knew for himself that it was all fake, but either refused to admit it or was unable to admit it, and so plowed ever on with “the task he had been burdened with”. The Hood surmised that even if Chabaal did know, it didn’t matter. There was no coming back from what that deranged Sithuwaye had done to him. The vision, however false it had been, had become too much a part of him. Chabaal had been forced to make it a part of him. So was the tragedy of Chabaal as The Hood came to discover it, and while The Hood remained close to Chabaal up until the day I finally got my wish, upon finding his corpse, The Hood couldn’t deny the small part of himself that felt . . . relief. For my own part, I understand the tragedy. I would have even felt sorry for it, but in the end, he did something I can never forgive.
Say what you will about Vänima the Veldriss, but for all the pain she has also caused, I did hope she would achieve at least one good thing and catch him. She attempted to kill him numerous times. I would follow her assassins, waiting for the chance to collect him, but he would always slip from my grasp more times than I care to remember. With each escape, Chabaal’s name increased in fame. My master told me there was purpose to Chabaal’s life, just like any other life, so of course there was a determined time I was supposed to collect him. I knew that. But I hoped I might be able to collect him early, if only because I didn’t like Chabaal’s ending. That’s because, up until then, I hadn’t known who his ending would involve. I hadn’t known who he would hurt. I admit, I broke the rules when I found out. I appeared to Chabaal, a shadow of wrath I hoped he would fear. “Don’t hurt Jezryn,” I tried to say. “The boy’s been through enough.” Alas, what I feared would happen ultimately did. Chabaal succeeded in dodging me until his appointed time, until he made the fatal mistake I had hoped to avoid.
Jorn Etziah, a young assassin woman and Jezryn’s lover, became Chabaal’s latest victim. That was his mistake. His days were numbered now, but at what cost? When I came to collect her, I remember how she hesitated. She looked at me, concern welling up in those sea-green eyes, and all she asked was what was going to happen to Jezryn if I took her. He needed her, she tried to explain, but her voice was too garbled. Poor thing. I still regret not being able to answer her. Jezryn, even now, is . . . complicated. After all, he is the son of my greatest fan . . . for better or worse. I will tell you more about Jezryn when I can find the words; but for now, I will say that in response to Jorn’s death, Jezryn methodically hunted Chabaal down over a period of six years until he finally caught up with him, fought him, and dragged him to me kicking and screaming after a long and grueling battle. Chabaal was one of my more satisfying collections, but it was a hollow victory. As for Jezryn . . . ah dear. I’m sorry, Jezryn. I really did try to help.
Signed your regretful narrator,
Azrael the Star of Death
Book Information
To learn more, hop on over to the books page OR hop on over to the teaser and get a sneak peek of Chapter 1! For more articles like this one, have a peek at my Worldbuilding Journal and explore Orosta.
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