Grhim (prime)
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[BACKGROUND]
Grhim grew up in New Ta'Faendryl with a fairly well off family mostly of merchants. He was always a strange youth, being a Faendryl that didn't study sorcery. Luckily strange Faendryl are not much of an oddity.
He was never close with his family, and didn't grieve much when his parents died from sickness around his one hundredth birthday.
Shortly after that he began to be visited by Sheru in his sleep. He was given terrible nightmares of friends, and family members being tortured over, and over. This made him even more unhinged and even less attached to other mortals. He would grow to enjoy the look of terror and fear on the faces of the dream-people, eventually seeking to replicate the same look on the faces of real folks. The end of his dreams were always the same, the scene would fade and a booming jackal-headed man would appear above him, and shout, "Only through servitude may you become enlightened! Only through abject devotion shall you become more than flesh! Kneel!!"
Grhim was always familiar with the tales of Amasalen who through his servitude to Luukos had become a god himself. He reasoned that the being visiting him was Sheru one of the Arkati, and that this powerful being must demand the soul, and slavery of lesser beings in exchange for power. To Grhim this was quite a bargain. After all, how many other elves had lived without ever even getting an oppurtunity to obtain that level of power? He would do what was necessary, and serve this being who had chosen him fully with every breath he had, so that he might be rewarded, but also to see that look of terror on the face of others again.
He would be cast out of New Ta'Faendryl around 150 years of age after the mysterious dissapearance of his brother. He began to frequent areas of the Kannelan empire as it became clear his views on the divinity of Sheru were more in line with those of the human populace than the elven people. He found many cults of Sheru, with strange beliefs. Some would deify Sheru in strange ways and it was interesting for Grhim to observe the differing religious practices of these cults.
As he moved among the differing cults of Sheru he began to hone his skills in manipulating human emotions. He found that given enough stimuli it was possible to remove all cognitive function from a self-aware being. He learned how their basic needs, and desires could be used to manipulate them into action, inaction, or to break their minds. Grhim would spend many years among shorter lived races, and would watch many of them die, either by his hand during ritual sacrifices, or breaking their minds. He would also watch his compatriots of Sheru die of old age. He found this bothersome as he felt a kinship with them unlike what he would feel even among his own Faendryl people.
By the time of the fall of the Kannelan empire he had discovered the Sheruvian Order. He saw this as the true order of Sheru, he enjoyed the ruthless brutality, and way in which they would break the lesser, and stranger cults of Sheru. Turning the minds of their weaker members and absorbing the stronger. This was also where he would first meet those blessed directly by Sheru himself of the Order who reside in the Monastery of the Broken Lands. They were "Sheruvian", or of Sheru, and when they fell in battle there was no death for them. Merely rebirth at Sheru's behest. "To be reborn at the behest of a god, and not to answer to the deed-wench Lorminstra must be the first step to ascendancy" Grhim would suppose.
Their ruthless war against the lesser Orders of Sheru would continue throughout the time of the Turazzmyrian Empire, until very few were left to stand against them. [RECENT HISTORY]