He’s been dominating my mind ever since I made him, so have my Worgen monk, Edric.
“There is no such thing as noble right, my son. Only noble duty. For when much is given, much is required.”
These words more than any other have shaped the life of Lord Edric Albrecht, heir of House Albrecht in Gilneas. He was born into fantastic privilege, for his family owned mines across the nation and beyond. Silver, iron, copper, they provided a great deal of metal to the Gilnean industrial complex, and received great wealth in return. Many children born this way would have been raised spoiled and selfish, sheltered from the real world and arrogant beyond belief. But the first of the many, many ways in which Edric was lucky was in who his parents were. His father was a scholar of the Old Ways, the ancient traditions of the harvest and the land, and both of his parents were a devout worshipers of the Holy Light, even when it fell out of favor in Gilneas. They viewed their wealth, power, and privilege as something they were not entitled to, but that they had achieved through sheer good fortune of birth. Because of this, their greatest motivation in life was to take those who had not had good fortune of birth and make their lives better. Albrecht money flowed constantly into the streets, helping the downtrodden and oppressed. They gave out food, helped people learn trades, invested in safe, affordable housing, and tried to improve Gilneas in a lasting, meaningful way, rather than by simply handing out gold to make themselves feel better.
Edric was born to one day assume the mantle of this duty. His father contracted a wasting sickness when the boy was a mere ten years old, and though he survived, it left him impaired. Thus, Edric took on his duties far younger than expected. His teenage years were split between training to be a Gilnean gentleman and doing the day to day work of managing as much of his family’s affairs as he was able. He would spend half of his day learning all that a man of his station was expected to know of both war and peace, and then the other half in the fields, or at the docks, or in the mines, coordinating the family’s vast wealth and vaster outreach programs. It left him with a mastery of the sort of logistical and military duties that most young men of his station would wait until late in life to deal with, and a severe deficiency in the areas of courting and socialization. Any chance he might have had to grow arrogant from being deferred to by his peers was lost in the sheer scramble of all he had to do, leaving him considerably more shy and awkward than one might expect of a man only a few steps down from being royalty.
By the time he was twenty years old, Edric was well positioned to smoothly take over his family’s affairs, and leave his father a few years of peace before he passed. All of that was shattered by the rise of the Scourge, and the rise of the Worgen in turn. The Albrecht family furiously worked in Gilneas city as the outbreak overtook the nation, attempting to use their merchant ships and counting houses to shelter survivors. Edric ended up on one such ship, packed to the gills with terrified refugees as they left the harbor. Unfortunately, some of those refugees were already infected, and within a few short days, the ship became a floating tomb, a ghost ship with nothing but feral Worgen on it. As a noble raised with the best of everything, Edric was the most physically healthy on the ship, and thus he was the last beast to survive. The ship drifted for weeks as he slowly starved, feral and alone. Then it passed through endless mist and wrecked on the shores of Pandaria.
Edric was far too weak to fight when he was found, and thus the Pandaren were able to both nurse him and study him at the same time. The Lorewalkers and the Shado-Pan were called, and between the two of them, they were able to make a good guess at his condition. After much discussion, the slowly recovering feral Worgen was sent to the Peak of Serenity. If anyone on Azeroth could heal him, it was the great masters who studied on the mountaintop. And if he couldn’t be healed, they could give him the most peaceful death. The masters worked with him slowly, using animal training techniques at first, but as they were able to calm and center him, the beast began to recede, and the man emerged once more. Over the course of several years, Edric came back to himself, communing with the Celestials, devoting himself to the ways of discipline, balance, and harmony. Eventually, he regained his mind fully, though he was never able to transform himself back into a man. He studied devoutly, for his life and soul depended on it, and he soon developed into one of the greatest monks of this age, despite his youth.
As he learned, Edric developed and refined the philosophy his family had taught him. He realized now that the reason those who were given much had to help those given little was because such a thing threw the world out of balance. Only when everyone was living together in cooperation, safe from harm, with protectors and healers standing between them and the dark, could the world be as it should be. He journeyed across Pandaria, learning from each Celestial personally, fighting the Mantid and the Saurok, and seeking to use all he’d been given to help others as much as possible. When the Horde and Alliance landed on Pandaria, he joined that war as well, assisting in driving the Sha from the world forever, and then he set out from Pandaria’s shores to carry his burden to the rest of the world and beyond. He had been given more than anyone he’d even heard of, blessed by the gods or by random chance with good fortune and great power. It was time to pay that gift forward to everyone else.
I’ll ask her to come over here and give a proper write-up for her.
Also, that is one heck of an ambition. I bet trying to achieve it leads to some crazy situations!