Indus Fortesque

Indus Fortesque is the mortal name of the First Age swordsman who would eventually become the Material demigod of hopeful monsters, repentant beasts and "ghosts in the shell" known as The Skull Knight.

History

Our hero's is a long and storied history, spanning worlds, dimensions and existences.

Mortal Life

Indus was born to the minor Rozsan noble family of Fortesque, in a territory of what is now the Middish province of Inverness-Upon-Andra, on the Coreward shore of the Sea of Sarenom. He was a knight of passing skill and a veteran of several wars, mainly between the New Rozsan Empire and the forces of the Insurgent Gods. His heroism in the Liberation of Mossmantle alongside the Ghosts of the Fourteenth is especially well-noted in surviving texts, though he seems to have lacked the charisma to maintain any celebrity, and instead retired as a swordsmanship tutor for the family until his death.

Death

Apocrypha from the church of The Skull Knight now takes over, though events are backed up by observations in the Umbral Encyclopediæ of the Knight-Sages of Tallarax. An elderly Indus Fortesque would later die, bathed in dragonfire, defending his family during the First Dragon Wars. The texts are now quoted verbatim.

The Knight would awake to the sound of screaming. He found himself in a subtly surreal realm of odd angles and inappropriate, twilight colours. The sky was a great cracked thing, the cracks revealing what appeared to be a landscape of sorts, leaving an unsettling feeling of looking downward rather than upward.

Most disturbing were his comrades: some appeared only as vague images, replaying the same few seconds over and over. Some, still alight with blue dragonfire, ran screaming from spot to spot, whereupon the horrifying sight repeated itself, an endless loop of panicked suffering. Others sat on the inappropriately-coloured ground, catatonic. Only after considerable effort and no small amount of patience was The Knight able to calm his fellow ghosts into some level of lucidity and free them from their disturbing repetitions. Having regained some of their senses, the lost souls would depart to seek their fortunes in this new land of shadows, dreams and death.

The Pale Vigil

Church texts variably detail the adventures the deceased Fortesques then led in the Duskscape, stories best told in detail for another time. All agree they were eventually rescued by a Valkyrie of Overshepherd Rom. As some heroic souls do, Indus decided to stay on with his rescuers, joining the ranks of the Pale Vigil: a ghostly army dedicated to the protection of lost and wandering souls.

The Gladiatorial Pits of Dis

But while Indus Fortesque was many things, he was never lucky: after some decades of fighting for the Vigil, his troops experienced a devastating loss at the hands of the demons of Dis, notorious soul-slavers who then put the ghostly knight to work fighting in the gladiatorial pits of the towering hive-cities. There he fought—and fought, and fought—for another unknown stretch of time. The holy texts grow vague and mournful here, perhaps unwilling to guess as to the psyche of our hero. To this day there is still a hint of Disian flavour to his divine essence.

The Skull Knight

But misfortune comes and goes, and after some time the wars between Rom and Dis reached close enough to The Knight's demonic prison that he was able to organize an escape among the captive souls and rejoin his old comrades among the Pale Vigil.

A joyous reunion this was not: after an unknowable number of decades of hopeless violence, the creature that emerged was no longer Indus Fortesque, but The Skull Knight. This twisted, vengeful but still distantly compassionate entity did not rejoin the forces of Rom and its Valkyries, but has instead gone rogue, forming around him a like-minded group of "hopeful monsters" and once-caged beasts, the Unwelcome Order. They now fight on behalf of other victims of demonic and necromantic whims.

INDUS FORTESQUE

Divinity
Ascendant, Material demigod (The Skull Knight)

Birth Date
Unknown; Middle First Age

Birthplace
New Rozsan Empire; modern day Inverness-Upon-Andra

Death
~1215 I.M. (First Dragon Wars)

Ascent
Unknown (gladiatorial arenas of Dis)

Children

Profile: The crest of house Fortesque, portraying a fortified town, two cemeteries and a crowned hill beneath red & white checkers.
Illus. Hugo Gerard Ströhl (1851-1919)