Name: Anastasio Malignansi
Gender: Male
Origin: Sersik, Ombenji, Cairhien.
Age: 17
Nationality: Cairhien
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 121lbs
Hair: Pale Blonde; long and flowing
Eyes: Soft Blue; almond shaped
Complexion: Fair
Build: Sleight
Theme Music: Succession of Witches by Nobuo Uematsu
Personality:
An often strange and eccentric young man. Anastasio can be described as ambivalent and ambiguous in regards to his feelings on many things. Mostly he is an enigma who has yet to discover himself. Anastasio besides being generally weird is also childlike in a lot of ways, and he has a certain amount of innocence to him. There is a mountain of emotional torture locked away in Anastasio's mind and past; if the Creator is at all kind it will stay that way. Anastasio has a fully justified hatred for Nobility and this is about the only thing besides his past that can bring some vehemence to the surface. Anastasio has an incredible aptitude for the arts in all forms, having a natural talent therein, but is terrible with his numbers. He is bright, but can be dour or apathetic. Anastisio will be random, odd, or melodramatic for effect and entertainment, more than any real designs or enmity inherent therein.
Strengths: Surgeons' hands. Not afraid of death. Unorthodox. Attractive.
Weaknesses: Peculiarity. Not afraid of death. Unconventional. Innocent.
Current strength: 23
Base strength: 22
Age when started to channel: 16
Current Age: 17
Flow Affinity
Water: 9
Air: 6
Earth: 7
Fire: 9
Spirit: 6
Block: Can only channel with dead present. Like in a morgue or in a graveyard.
Talents:
Age of Legends Healing
Keeping
Delving
History:
The story of Anastasio starts back two generations, we begin the tale with his maternal grandfather. Ullian Umbrego was an independent adventurist as he called himself, which was just a fancy way of saying he was homeless. A traveler and a grifter, a life of wandering on one's own did bring many adventures. However the story of Ullian's life is irrelevant beyond the point that he was old, and could not be an independent adventurist forever. Ullian had to find a profession, and see it through to the end, lest his current occupation catch up with him at last. After several trial positions in a variety of fields, Ullian settled into the life of an Undertaker. As Ullian has often told his grandson when he spoke of his past, "I needed a stable job, and there are only two consistencies in life: death and taxes. I failed as a Tax Collector, so Undertaking was all that was left." Ulllian also told the story of how he had met his wife, Anastasio's grandmother, Anyette. The princess of Kandor was to be wed to an evil Noble of the House of Blood, the Bekkar Family. The story was long and convoluted, involving Ullian having to do many heroic feats to convince the King of Kandor to give Ullian his daughter. Among them was killing the evil Trolloc King, and riding the fearsome Jumara. The validity of the tale is also irrelevant, save that Anyette was quite beautiful. Ullian and Anyette were wed, and Ullian worked as an Undertaker, that is what matters to Anasatsio's own story.
Anastasio was born in the village of Sersik in Northern Cairhien. His father was Jon Malignansi and his mother was Anastasia Umbrego. Anastasia was the daughter of Ullian and Anyette, and Jon was a grave digger working for Ullian. The Funeral Parlour was in the village of Sersik, and was the sole such establishment for the area. Anastasio grew up with a happy carefree childhood, playing like normal kids and being loved by his parents and grandparent like normal kids. Anastasio never knew his maternal grandmother, she had lived a good life and died years earlier to wasting sickness. Paternally, Anastasio's grandparents had died like many, for no good reason, life just happened and people moved on; or at least that was how Jon explained it. Simple Jon was a working man, a simple fellow who didn't think much, just loved, lived, and worked. There was some fine wisdom in Jon's simplicity, an abundance of common sense that Anastasio didn't exactly inherit.
What set Anastasio a part from other children is that growing up where he did, Anastasio was accustomed to the dead. The child would often watch his grandfather do the embalmings, or watch his father shovel dirt in the cemetery. As time passed on and Anastasio grew older his eccentricities developed. Many of those little idiosyncrasies to full blown bizarre behaviour he got from his grandfather. Anasatsio however kept these eccentricities quite subdued, but still he couldn't help but drift away from the other children and become an introvert. None of this was helped by the fact that Anastasio took a proactive role and intense interest in the family trade. Anastasio worked with his grandfather preparing bodies and got in the much making of holes for burial. Anastasio liked being among the peace and tranquility of the cemetery and the quiet of the morgue, it was therapeutic for him. Loosing himself in his imagination, he could spend hours sitting on the floor of the morgue or the ground of the graveyard day dreaming. Anastasio never developed a fear of death, the dead were all around him, he grew up knowing only that. The corpses were his friends who replaced his alive ones as Anastasio became remote. Entire made up conversations unfolded in the young mind of Anastasio; he simply knew no different. Anastasio tended the graves of the departed, interacting in his imagination with his new friends six feet under.
Anastasia managed the financial aspects of the Undertaking, she learned from her mother. Anastasia had her mother's beauty, a point of conflict when she was younger and many suitors had vied for her affections. In the end she had eyes only for Jon, the unwitting grave digger's assistant at the time. After choosing Jon with her father's blessing she was soon with child, suitors had hounded her up until she had been wed. For some, even after that; it stopped when Anastasia became heavy with Anastasio. Anastasia never lost her beauty and for that reason it would befall Anastasio with the greatest grief he would ever know. Anastasio's mother was always watched by the lordling Jakeb Ombenji; the eldest son of Lord Ombenji, the Cairhienan Noble whose domain was most of Northern-most Cairhien. Sersik village was thus in Ombenji territory, and when Lord Ombenji died, Jakeb became the new Highseat of House Ombenji. Jakeb needed a wife and Anastasia was it, the man had never given up. When Anastasio was eleven, Lord Jakeb arranged an accident to befall Jon. Hired men killed Jon while he was digging fresh graves in the cemetery alone in the evening. Anastasio was the one to find his father the following morning, lying at the bottom of a half dug-grave.... headless. Where Jon's body was sprawled, his own shovel had been driven into his neck freeing his head to roll of to the side and stare lifelessly/blankly up at Anastasio. This of course had detrimental effects on Anastasio, whom went into shock, not being afraid of the dead didn't mean that the murder had any less of an impact. Unconscious from fainting, Anastasio passed out and was found lying face first in the dirt on top of his father's body, covered in blood.
Ullian found both the boy and the body later that day while searching for the absent lad, he had Jon's body cremated thereafter; and as Anasatsio was still in shock, he ate little and slept less, alone in his room and never speaking. Anastasia was the only one whom could make Anasatsio react in his often catatonic state. It did not last. One week after Jon's murder, the soldiers of House Ombenji came and took the now widowed Anastasia to wed the waiting Lord Jakeb. Ullian and Anastasia knew what happened of course, familiar with Jakeb's persistent lustings, but they were powerless to stop Jakeb and his men. Jakeb forced Anastasia to marry him, putting it quite bluntly that if she didn't comply, Anasatsio and Ullian would be the next to die. When Anastasio, at last, was told what happened to his mother by his grandfather, he came out of shock, as Anastasio now had an outlet for his pent up emotions. The boy hated Lord Jakeb Ombenji to the bone of his immortal soul, since he was responsible for the all of everything that had gone wrong in the child's life. Ullian being a wizened and weaker man, in his old age, he could only comfort Anastasio and raise the boy himself. Ullian knew it was futile and suicidal to pursue the grim issue, and so Anastasio's grandfather took no actions beyond forgetting, with the generous aid of brandy. Ullian took to the bottle, to drown out the pain and misery of life, and when sober, he used a psychological mechanism of denial to cope. That was how it worked for Anastasio, he was raised from the age of eleven to fourteen by his grandfather, schooled by the old man in all his wisdom and trade, while he himself steadily deteriorated. Anastasio in turn took to acting out in grand and strange ways to garner attention, as his grandfather could only do so much for the boy, and the lad was emotionally hungry. At fourteen, Anasatsio's life took one final plunge to erase his former existence completely. Ullian's drinking had piled up the debts, and he sold off the Funeral Parlour in one last desperate attempt to pay off his creditors. In the end, the money earned was mostly blown to feed the vicious addiction anyway, which Ullian had, and only a little went towards the incurred debts. Meanwhile, Anastasia, the mother, had spent several years in a dark brooding depression and overwhelming self pity, finally deciding to end it all by hanging herself with a bed sheet from a canopy-bed post. After the suicide of his mother, and the sale of the Funeral Parlor, Anastasio was both homeless, destitute, and completely-and-irreversibly parentless. Not long after that, the owed debts of grandfather were collected with Ullian's life's blood. Anastasio last saw his grandfather, before being taken away to a Home for Wayward Boys, laying face down in a gutter, with an empty bottle in hand, and with a debtor's knife lodged in his back,.
An orphanage is where Anastasio spent his days for the next two years of his life. In reality it was no better than a child labour camp, a place where an underage work force was housed and was never paid. Because their was next to no overhead for the set up, the Orphanage Master could acquire many work contracts, underselling any other bidders. The Orphanage Master, a Mister Hoyt, spent more money on bribes (to the make the law look the other way) than he did on food and clothing for the boys. It was a bloody miserable and hard set life in Master Hoyt's Home for Wayward Boys, but Anastasio still had to live there anyway. Ironically, it seemed Master Hoyt had a private benefactor in the form of Lord Jakeb, the man supplied the guards whom kept the boys in line, and unhappy out-of-work adult-labourers silent. Everyday was pretty much the same for Anastasio, wake up and eat a slim meal of gruel, and if lucky, spoiled meat. Next, you washed in cold tainted communal water (or more hygienically never washed at all;) then you marched off under guard from the Orphanage to wherever your work crew was assigned. Mostly in was ditch digging or straight hauling. Then when you were exhausted you worked another four hours before coming back to the Orphanage to eat another shoddy meal and collapse onto your bug infested cot. That was how life went for Anastasio day in and day out till he was sixteen. By luck or coincidence, when the work-crew of Anastasio was in was working on the new wing of the estate of Lord Jakeb, (something not uncommon given the affiliation between the Ombenjis and Mister Hoyt;) Karin Ombenji was visiting her brother Jakeb. She was on the veranda drinking, and watching the boys, when she laid eyes upon Anastasio; she was clever, and had of course known the late Anastasia Ombenji, thus it did not take her long to figure out the story thereafter. She inquired of her brother as to why his step son was toiling away at the estate. Jakeb crudely replied that it brought him a certain satisfaction to know that the Creator loved him enough to let justice be done after his bitch of a wife, Anastasia, had abandoned him to run away into the Grave. First the women had poisoned herself with abortifacient herbs so that Jakeb would have no heirs by her, then she secondly fled into the afterlife; and yet what a delight for the Lord to learn that her only child was at good Hoyt's facility. The Creator was kind enough to allow Jakeb to exact some measure of vengeance on his dead wife by making her son suffer so. Karin, in her own self interests, told her brother that she could make his step son suffer even more; this intrigued Jakeb, and he agreed to let her have the pretty young boy.
Anastasio woke up one day, to find himself purchased from Master Hoyt, and placed into the service of Madame Karin Ombenji. Anastasio had emotionally dulled himself to the pain of life and its surprises, so he went along listlessly. Soon he settled into a new life of waiting hand and foot upon the Madame, all the while listening to her berate him. He was unphased by her verbal abuse, and so Karin soon turned to slapping Anastasio hard every day. Openhanded, closed handed, backhanded, with rings, and without them; whatever fancied Karin at the time, she would slap him. Unreactive as ever, Anastasio repressed all his pain, and he shutout reality; in his own mind he was happy, for he had his imagination. Towards the end of that year, with Karin, Anastasio was physically coming into his own, and was by no means harsh on the eyes despite the fact that Anastasio was always told to the contrary. The Madame fed up with Anastasio's impermeability, was soon bedding Anastasio out of frustration, whom had no choice in the matter. For Karin it was not an act of making love, but one of making hatred. She would mock Anastasio for an immature body and pathetic novice performance. The emotional experiences finally broke through Anastasio's mental barriers, though, withering under the emotionally draining acts, that were violent and as good as mind rape; he was soon living in an unbearable misery, with Karin having finally hurt him so bad that he couldn't repress it any further, his will to fight was sapped by passionless ecstasy and brutal abuse.
Jakeb was mightily pleased with his sister when he learned of her success, and the pain of his stepson; at last justice was done. Lord Jakeb rewarded his sister Karin, by allowing her to represent the Ombenji Family interests, at an important meeting, in Tar Valon. House Ombenji did a lot of banking with Tar Valon, and the majority of their monetary assets were held safe there. Every decade an Ombenji went to Tar Valon to meet with the bankers, to update their connections there, and to deposit the bulk of the wealth earned in those ten years. The interest on the money held in those banks made House Ombenji very powerful, and their ties with Tar Valon added to their prominence. So it was that Madame Karin and her entourage, a suffering Anastasio included, traveled the long way south and then northeast to Tar Valon. Once there, they stayed at a luxurious Inn, known as the Headless Hat, it was then that all of Anastasio's torment came to culmination. The wicked Karin newly introduced sick familial references in with her carnal games, (references, not to the Ombenjis, mind.) This act ripped Anastasio's psyche right open inside, hence his very core-self shook with rage and retribution. Anastasio could take no more in that room he had shared with the Madame, and so he lunged at her throat. Karin cried out as she was throttled, surprised at the normally cowed boy's vehemence; hearing the sound the entourage guards came into the room. Anastasio released the Madame's neck at the interruption, whom lay on the bed thereafter, breathless and lifeless by that point. Staring at a now dead Karin, Anastasio saw the guards coming for him armed with swords and cudgels, murder burning in their eyes. It was in that moment, that a perfect clarity came to Anastasio, and he let out one final burst of all his previously restrained feelings. In a primal howl of raw emotional rage, hurt, and turmoil, he channeled; unseen lines of hard Air and Fire were cast out, and this razor-wind hacked, flayed, scorched, and hewed the guards with their flailing flaming tendrils, reducing them into mere piles of dismembered pieces. Grim and silent, attaining an inner peace, Anastasio recovered his clothing, dressed, and walked calmly out of the room, and out of the Inn via the family's private way. He was detached in the wake of Saidin as it left him. This specially reserved Inn not unfamiliar to the clandestine dealings of Nobility, it was disturbingly not-entirely unheard of to find people disappear. Every important Family had it's own access and apartments, or rather they did... until the smoking charnel ignited the building and raised much of it to the ground. Fire consumed all evidence of the crimes.
Weeks past with Anastasio living homeless on the streets, he just turned seventeen, and for him it was all like one big waking dream. With the channeling residue, the Black Tower was not unfamiliar with wilder accidents, as such it was written off, and given time they tracked down Anastasio, finding him in a back alley half frozen and starving. The boy, whom was technically now a young man, was tested by an Asha'man for confirmation of his ability and then enrolled in the Black Tower. The name Anastasio Malignansi was written in the book of soldiers; Anastasio was a soldier not remarkably strong, but the originality in the way he could channel was not something to be scoffed at. He had a way of thinking outside the box, as if his brain was hardwired differently than most. The short time wilder gained a block in that he had to be near the dead, or think he was, to channel. It gave him a sense of tranquility to be with familiar friends, and reminded himself of the happy times of his early life. This was the story of Anastasio Malignansi, which was by no means over, and was in fact, only just beginning. Know that this story was not meant to have a happy ending, and that this was only the beginning of the next stage in the tale. The Ombenjis are still in power, Lord Jakeb is more wealthy and influential than ever, and he has since acquired many new wives. Master Hoyt still runs his Orphanage successfully, and the law still looks the other way. In time it is the young man's destiny to confront these life's demons, but for now they remain distant and obfuscated for the presence in the Tower. The tale of the young mortician's apprentice, his tortured innocence, and that bizarre gift for abnormality.