EMBR the First

"Lefty says we should kill them. I'm trying not to listen."

At a Glance

Name: EMBR ("EMBR the First")

Race: Warforged

Role: Amnesiac construct seeking the meaning of his own parts — and trying not to become a monster

Eye Color: Glowing green when calm. Burning red when the other voice takes over.

Appearance

EMBR stands tall, framed in dark wood and weathered steel. From a distance, he could be mistaken for a battered suit of armor left in the rain too long — until he moves, and the wood creaks like a tree shifting in wind, and the steel plates settle against each other with the quiet authority of something that knows exactly how much force it can deliver.

His left arm and left eye are not his. Or they were not, at first.

Where the rest of him is dark wood and dull steel, the prosthetics are something else entirely — pearlescent black chitin, glossy as a beetle's shell, set into a frame of dark, fleshy wood that pulses faintly when he is tired or angry. The boundary between the original parts and the replacements is not clean. The chitin has grown into him. The fleshy wood roots into his shoulder and his temple and reaches deeper than he likes to think about.

When he is calm, his eyes — both of them, the original and the foreign — glow a steady, pale green. When the other voice rises, the green sours toward yellow, then orange, then a furnace red that throws light across whatever he is about to break.

The green-eyed face. The one his friends trust.

The red-eyed face. The one no one survives meeting unless EMBR allows it.

Personality

Traits

Laid back, by default. Most of the time, EMBR is gentle in a way that surprises people who expect a construct his size to be hostile. He moves slowly when he can. He listens more than he talks. He has discovered that he likes warm afternoons, the smell of bread cooling on a windowsill, and the particular quiet of a fire that has burned down to coals. He pursues these small pleasures with the focused attention of someone who has very few good memories of his own and is determined to make new ones.

Talks to himself. Specifically, he talks to Lefty. Lefty lives in the prosthetic arm and the chitinous eye, or that is the working theory. EMBR has never seen Lefty. He only hears him — a second voice that speaks when he is alone, that argues during fights, and that gets louder when EMBR is hurt or cornered. EMBR refuses to think of Lefty as a separate person. He calls it a habit. The way his words come out sometimes suggests otherwise.

Aggressive when pushed. EMBR's patience is real, but it is also a wall. When the wall breaks, what is on the other side is not gentle.

Truly dangerous when he rages. This is what frightens him. Not the violence itself — he understands violence — but how good he is at it. When the other voice takes full control, EMBR becomes a highly aggressive, extremely violent beast. He has done things in those states that he can only piece together later from the bloodstains and the screaming.

Ideals

• Protect those who showed him kindness. The world has been mostly cruel to him. The people who have not been cruel are precious. He will tear apart anyone who threatens them, and he will not feel sorry about it.
• Find his origin. Someone built him. Someone put the chitin in. Someone left him on a workbench in an empty basement and walked away. He wants to know who, and he wants to know why, and he is prepared for the answer to be terrible.

Bonds

• The party. They were some of the only people who treated him with kindness when he came down from the wall confused and half-feral. He will die for them. He hopes it does not come to that. He suspects it will.
• "Buddy" — the stray Warforged. An older Warforged EMBR has encountered in the city's lower districts. Buddy has clearly been around for a long time and has lost any semblance of sanity. He wanders. He mumbles. He has scratches in his casing that look like he made them himself. EMBR feeds him when he can and steers him away from the worst alleys. The hope — the small, stubborn hope — is that EMBR's creator might know a way to fix him, and the others like him.
• The blind merchant. A woman in the market who helps EMBR with his anger. She walks him through breathing exercises. She gives him bitter tea and tells him stories about her grandfather. EMBR has assumed for a long time that she does not know he is a Warforged. He is almost certainly wrong about that. She has known from the moment he walked into her stall and her cane brushed his foot. She has not mentioned it. Neither has he.

Flaws

• Gullible. Lying does not come naturally to him, and detecting lies comes even less naturally. He believes most people most of the time. This has cost him.
• Split personality. Mellow ninety percent of the time. The other ten percent, something else is driving.
• Not yet wise to the world. He is still new. He does not know the patterns of cities, the meanings of titles, the way money is supposed to work. He asks questions that mark him as strange. He answers questions in ways that mark him as stranger.
• Antisocial. People are tiring. People who flinch when they see his eye are worse. He has learned to avoid crowds when he can.

Biography

EMBR's story begins on a basement workbench, in a shack he does not remember entering.

He woke alone. The room was lit by a single lamp burning low. There was a smell of metal and something sharper — chemistry, or sap. He had no memory of arriving. He had no memory of anything. When he tried to sit up, his left arm did not move the way it was supposed to, and when he raised his hand to his face, his fingers met something cold and faceted where his left eye should have been.

He explored the basement first. There were tools and ledgers and notes in a hand he could not read. There was no sign of anyone. There was no name on the door.

He climbed up and out of the shack and into a stretch of open wilderness. In the distance, beyond rolling country and broken fields, he saw a wall. A wall the size of a mountain.

He walked toward it.

The trip was longer than he expected. Along the way, he found signs of something massive moving through the land — flattened forest, drag marks, the bones of animals that had been opened the wrong way. He did not know what had made the signs. The voice in his head — a voice he did not yet recognize as separate from himself — told him to track the creature and kill it. EMBR fought that urge. He kept walking.

When he reached the wall, he could not find a gate. So he climbed.

The city revealed itself from above as a vast, rain-dark grid of buildings hemmed in by stone — too many people in too small a place, the smell of smoke and tar rising in a column that the sky did not bother to disperse. He climbed down into it.

He looked for help. He found prejudice instead. Most of the people he asked treated magic-touched folk with the kind of polite hostility that does not need to raise its voice. A healer eventually told him gently that Warforged were not common in this city, and that no one she knew would be able to explain who he was or where he had come from. She suggested he try someone who understood nature — his frame, after all, was largely a kind of magical wood.

She gave him a name.

Jorath Hroth'Dar.

EMBR found Jorath. Jorath looked at him with the careful, patient attention of someone who actually understood what he was seeing — and admitted, kindly, that he could not explain the black parts. He could not explain who would have built EMBR, or why, or where to begin looking. What he could offer was a place to sit, a meal, and the suggestion that wandering alone in a hostile city was a bad way to find answers.

EMBR stayed. Not because Jorath solved anything, but because Jorath did not flinch.

He found himself in a group — Xander's group, the others called it — and they did not flinch either. They moved against the government. They had reasons. EMBR did not understand all of the reasons, but he understood the shape of the work: protect people, push back on the ones who hurt them, do not stop. He could do that.

He soon learned something else: the new parts made him a very capable fighter.

He used the new parts to help. He hit things that needed to be hit. He held lines that needed to be held. The first few times, he was proud of himself. After that, he started noticing what the rages cost — the blood under his fingernails that did not belong to him, the memories of his own movements that came back to him in fragments, the way his friends sometimes looked at him afterward and tried to hide the looking.

He is still here. He is still trying. He is balancing two selves and hoping that finding his creator will give him a way to make the balance permanent.

He is afraid that finding his creator will be worse.

Personal Arc

EMBR is two things at once: a kind, slow, curious construct who would prefer to drink tea with a blind merchant and watch the sky, and a violent foreign engine grafted into him that wants to hunt.

The work of his life — the only work that matters — is figuring out which of those is him.

Every fight makes the second voice stronger. Every act of restraint makes the first voice clearer. He does not know which one is winning. He suspects neither is, and that is the worst possibility — that he is the rope between them, and that ropes break.

He wants to find his creator. He thinks the answers are there: who built the black parts, what they were meant to do, whether they can be removed, whether the voice can be silenced or only fed. He is afraid that the creator is the kind of person who would build this into a person and walk away — and that meeting them will end one of the two voices for good, and he will not get to choose which.

Whether he ends up the gentle Warforged or the beast is the question his story exists to answer.