PCs:Fade Darkwing
Details of the events leading up to Fade's descent into the Plane of Shadow are fuzzy at best, but as usual, it was most likely down to the rogue arcane energies of some mage's experiment gone wrong (or right). Regardless of this, his adventures in this new world led, one way or another, to him becoming lost in the endless darkness of the Plane of Shadow. To him, in this distorted version on reality (whatever that may be) days, months, perhaps years passed as he wandered the desolate darkness of the plane. While nourishment exists on the plane of shadows, it is always black and dripping with a thick ichorous fluid; however, such things are of no consequence in desperate situations. As he drifted the plane, voices in the shadows spoke to him, and the essence of the plane slowly took its toll on his mind and body. He became a different entity to his former self; his skin became of purest black, absorbing all light that touched it, and his blood ran black and thick like the rest of the liquids on the plane. His mind was similarly affected, the unintelligible voices of other lost travellers, their souls given up to the darkness, drove him to the brink of madness. He lost all conscious memory of his former life, and forgot who he was.
As he was about to give up his own struggle, and give up his own spirit to the dark plane as the other lost travellers had, he was overwhelmed by a blinding light. He found himself back in the place he had been before entering the plane of shadow, though now it seemed wholly unfamiliar. Those who had been travelling with him at the time of his passing, though equally unfamiliar, were still there searching for him. It would seem that, over the perceived months he had spent on the plane of shadow, on this material plane only a few hours had passed. Of course, these adventurers did not recognise the entity they saw before them (from here on referred to as Fred) as the one they knew as Fade, and promptly interrogated it on its identity and the whereabouts of their estranged companion. These questions were most puzzling to the newly awakened Fred, as he had lost all notion of identity and self. He had come so close to the plane of shadow, to merging with its essence, that he only knows himself as a part of that darkness. He cannot relate to the idea of himself as an individual any more, only as a drop in some great ocean (as the analogy he makes goes). This is why, to the confusion of many, he refers to himself in the plural (ie, ‘we’ rather than ‘I’).
For some time following his ‘awakening’, Fred was in a state of confusion as he searched for some purpose of his continued existence, and frustration at his lack of memories of his former life, fragments of which would sometimes come to him briefly as waking dreams. At this point, even his memories of his time within the plane of shadow are little more than dreamlike recollections. However, recently he has come to accept this new chance at life, and applies the way in which he views his existence to his philosophy on self-improvement.
He sees himself as a drop, moving fluidly within an ocean of darkness, an ocean of the unknown (this ocean is in fact what he calls the Tel’shadar). His philosophy is based on people following their animal instinct of fearing the what they do not know, this unknown being embodied by the Tel’shadar, portrayed in the analogy as a great ocean or forest. People who fear what they do not know within this great forest, try to cut a clearing. But in doing so, they merely change the forest to suit what they want to see in order to satisfy their instinctive need for self-assurance. Fred’s philosophy is that to truly understand the unknown, one must flow within it. That is, to move deftly among the trees rather than cutting a clearing, or to swim fluidly in the great ocean, rather than try to part the waters.
Similarly, this is the outlook he takes on shadowdancing. Following the time he spent in the shadow plane, and the nature of the entity he has become, he maintains a certain affinity to the place, and has discovered the ability to partially enter it where the connection to the plane is weak, in places of darkness and shadows (ie, shadowdance). This reflects the fluidity with which he seeks to moves within the realm of the unknown (in this way, he may often refer to the plane of shadow as the Tel’shadar, in that it is the embodiment of darkness and the unknown. The name actually comes from the old tongue of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, if anyone’s read it, meaning ‘World of Shadows’) Over time, he has also rediscovered many of the talents he possessed in his previous life, maintaining an affinity to them, as well as finding that they work well in synergy with his shadowdancing ability (Thus Rogue/Shadowdancer).
Fred despises zeal, seeing it as ignorance in the hands of those with too much power for their own good, and views zealots as those who wish to destroy that which they fear through their own ignorance. He also looks down upon most other shadowdancers, whom he feels do not follow his philosophy, seeing them as unworthy to abuse the Tel’shadar for their lesser ends; to skim the great ocean without appreciating its depths. He wants to start something of a following of those who follow his philosophy, an order called the Sharin (shǎ`rĭn). He thrives on obtaining information; whether it is from the study of literary texts, ‘overheard’ conversations, finding secret passages, or keeping well informed on current political situations. He especially goes out of his way to find information that it classified or widely unknown, feeling that the only way to achieve superiority over an adversary is to possess not just more information than them, but the right information. In this way he is a firm believer in the notion that ‘knowledge is power’. There are many aspects to this character that I haven’t covered, but of course, those are for you to discover…