Malachiasz Czechowicz | ǝɹnʇlnΛ ʞɔɐlᙠ ǝɥ⊥

Power is the driving force in many of Malachiasz's decisions, be it the power to protect Tranavia, the power to overcome the gods of Kalyazin, the power to destroy the gods themselves, the power to become a god, or something power for power's sake, always he has sought more. His curiosity often borders on obsession, and even more often surpasses it, leading him through doors best left close, into books best left unread, and across borders best left uncrossed. There is no limit to the extent he will go to attain more power, save one: with his soul restored, he is no longer willing to sacrifice Nadya to achieve his goals. In all else, he will do whatever is necessary to seize the power he seeks, if for no reason than to know, even if the knowing is akin to madness. He would argue madness claimed him long ago, in the absolute dark of the Salt Mines, where pain became his first power.

Regret is something with which Malachiasz is intimately familiar. He regrets introducing the idea of godhood to the king of Tranavia, catapulting the entire downfall of Blood Magic and even the knowledge of it in the first place. He regrets becoming a god of chaos, making him attractive to Chyrnog. He regrets his own overconfidence at the idea he could control the Old God of entropy and resist the urge to devour everything until there was nothing left. He regrets deceiving the beautiful and infuriating Kalyazi girl and betraying her trust. He regrets discarding his soul like a useless accessory, he even at times regrets allowing himself to grow fond of her, though he wouldn't take it back either. Regret is a complicated thing for him. He feels remorse for his actions, but wouldn't change them, even if it damned the world.

All rules have exceptions and for Malachiasz, that exception is Family. He would betray anything, anyone to achieve his goals, except those he has pulled closest to him. For a while, that only numbered the Vultures, the cultish clan of assassins he was restructured into. They and the Salt Mines in which they were mutated, tortured, and reborn were all he'd known and all he'd held loyalty to. Since regaining his soul, finding love, however tenuous, with Nadya, finding his blood brother and friends in two foreigners who'd trusted him when they'd really had no business to, that umbrella of concern has grown and he would do anything to see them safe, even if means deceiving them for their own good (at least what he believes is for their own good). He can be devilishly stubborn when he thinks he's right, which is most of the time.

Family is the fulcrum he uses to center himself when his madness spirals out of control, it is the compass that steers him back home when he's gone astray. Without family, Malachiasz is lost.

Death is a transient concept for Malachiasz and it always has been. He has only hazy memories of life before the Salt Mines, the perfect dark in which new Vultures are born and those who fail to change perish. His earliest memories are of the screams echoing through those chambers, of blood, and smells of worse, of pain and release. He's died himself, twice now; once to be reborn a god and a second time to become something worse: a creature of hunger fighting for control of a body of chaos. To Malachiasz, Death is a transition, from one state to another, and an awakening, to knowledge, eldritch and mysterious and all the more desirable for its enigmatic nature. It is also beauty, perfect in its finality and its brutality. Death is blood and ash and all things that come at the end but it is also rebirth into another form or some unimaginable next life, not because of the gods, but to spite them.

Monster is a term with which Malachiasz is intimate; he did become one. But what is a monster? Is it a being willing to sacrifice the small to further the ends of the great? If so, then any clergyman so devoted could be labeled thus. Is it a creature so lowly it cares not who it consumes for want of satisfaction or simply stimulation? So many beasts of the forest would be called monsters if it were so simple. No, monster is a label thrust upon another, an all-encompassing moniker to denote what one sees as vile, corrupted, callous and unfeeling perhaps, but ruthless certainly; to describe a creature whose motivations they cannot fathom, and who would destroy them if given the chance. It is a label given to objects to be feared, to rulers to be reviled, to gods to be cast down or cast out, to rots needing excision, to give a target to the vilified. So simple and so dismissive to label someone or something a monster.