Let's talk Tragic Backstories!

[lightningbearer]

Welcome to the Tragic Backstories™ meme!

Step 1. Post your character(s)!
Step 2. Explain your character's horrific, tragic backstory in as much lush and lurid detail as you can manage!*
Step 3. Read everyone else's posts and be appropriately horrified!


*Please be sensible and note if there's likely to be particularly disturbing imagery, and likewise keep in mind when reading that these are tragic backstories for a reason

OPTIONAL: Use this handy-dandy code to white out spoilers and/or any particularly gnarly bits:

<span style=" color: #FFFFFF; background-color: #FFFFFF;">SPOILER TEXT GOES HERE</span>

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Sion Astal | The Legend of the Legendary Heroes

[dreamsofahero]

NOTE: Sion's canon has Berserk-levels of screwed up and much of it shows in Sion's backstory

Seriously I don't think I can even make a comprehensive list here since there's so much wrong, I'd probably forget something. Just be warned that yes, it really is that horrible!

Anyway!

*deep breath*

To start it off, Sion's mother was a commoner who was kidnapped and raped by the king, who then discarded her after she became pregnant. Sion as a child knew about this and while his mother was always adamant that she loved him, he still tended to blame himself for her suffering. Sion himself was treated pretty poorly, too, his royal half-brothers and their lackeys calling him names, harassing him, and beating him up for the fun of it when he was a young child. Even at that young age Sion realized that if he fought back, resisted, or even seemed to be in any way willful/defiant, the situation would from being harassed and beaten up to being seen as a threat and killed, so even when he felt confident he was strong enough to take his tormentors in a fight he still just kept quiet and let them do what they wanted.

His mother as mentioned before was similarly harassed, called names like "low born dog" (Sion was "son of a low born dog") and generally made miserable. When Sion was still pretty young it eventually became too much for her to deal with and she killed herself, still to the end reassuring Sion that she loved him and that he didn't have to worry about being alone because he's a kind person who'd always find himself surrounded by people who love him. This was so traumatic for Sion that in all his recountings and recollections of his mother's death he has never acknowledged it was by her own hand, instead placing the blame on his brothers for "killing" her via their torment.

Oh, and after his mother died Sion found a present left for him from one of his brothers: a dead dog with a note saying that it was appropriate company for a lowborn dog like his mother in the afterlife.

A few years after that, Sion fell in love for the first time. The girl was just a commoner, no one of note, but he didn't care. He loved her and even went so far as thinking that maybe he'd give up on his plans to overthrow his father and fix Roland, if settling down somewhere in the country and having a family instead was an option. It turned out it wasn't, however, because once his brothers found out, one of them had the girl killed, apparently just because Sion wasn't allowed to be happy or have nice things.

A few years after that, Sion was enrolled in the Royal Special Military Academy. Which despite the fancy name was basically just a school to train orphans and children of criminals--undesirables, basically--to wage war in the stead of nobles. So that the nobles' kids could continue living cushy, safe lives while the commoners fought and died in their place. Between his looks, his academic skill, his presumed noble heritage, and general charisma, Sion was wildly popular with (almost) all his fellow students. He frequently was approached by girls confessing their love to him, even, though he always gently but firmly turned them down, not wishing to have a repeat of the last time. He learned of a student by the name of Ryner Lute who also was an Alpha Stigma bearer and decided he was going to befriend him, even if he had to resort to blackmail.

Oh, and somewhere in here he started having to deal with actual assassination attempts, requiring him to run and/or fight for his life. In one case he only survived due to choosing to trust a mysterious blond swordswoman he happened to cross paths with; she protected him, then demanded dango in repayment, and thus began Sion's dealings with the powerful but mysterious Eris family. More on that to come!

Any all was more or less fine and dandy at the academy until war broke out between Roland and Estabul (again) and guess who all is being sent out to the front? Sion pulls some strings to get himself and his classmates assigned to someplace relatively safe in the back of the lines... Only for it to turn out one of his brothers anticipated this and, via a double-agent spy, effectively sicced a bunch of Estabul's elite magic knights on the group. It was a slaughter. Soon the only people left standing were Sion, Ryner, and Kiefer (said double-agent spy and friend of theirs), with the magic knights apparently planning to have some fun with torturing and killing them. Except then Ryner's alpha stigma flipped out, he slaughtered the magic knights instead, and almost killed Sion and Kiefer before they managed to stop him.

In the aftermath Sion wound up praised as a 'hero' for allegedly being responsible for killing Estabul's elite forces, while Ryner was labeled a dangerous monster and imprisoned. Sion tried to help Ryner escape, but his friend declined.

After this Sion gets much more seriously involved in plots to start a rebellion, masterminded by a man named Miller. Sion's perfectly fine with going along with these plans because whatever overthrows the king and fixes Roland is fine by him, and when he realizes Miller's plan basically calls for him to die to be the catalyst to start an uprising, Sion's perfectly okay with that. Up until he realizes that it won't actually work. So he goes to Lucile, mysterious head of the Eris family, instead, seeking power. After warning Sion about how horrible the fate that awaits him is, Lucile takes him into the depths of the dojo, a space filled with an oppressive presence that gets more powerful and more painful the further they progress. Turns out normally, anyone and everyone of royal blood is forced to be subjugated to this at around fifteen or sixteen years old; Sion was spared because someone else previously interfered with the Eris household. Sion manages to make it all the way to the end, where Lucile asks him one last time if he wants to go through with this. Sion does, and grasps the sword sticking out of the desiccated corpse in front of him, and through it receives the power of the god known as the Mad Hero. Oh, and agony. An intense, unending agony that feels vaguely like every single cell of his body is in pain. It never lessens and never goes away, even when he's sleeping.

But hey, he's got a god's power now, right?

The work for the rebellion continues, now with a slightly adjusted plan, Sion personally kills at least one of his brothers, and then against Lucile's advice decides to go confront the king personally. The king is entirely mad and doesn't even recognize Sion, despite Sion pretty much looking exactly like him. When Sion identifies himself as his son, however, the king flips out a little and goes on a crazy "then take this pain away from me!" rant and starts hitting Sion with more of the Mad Hero's power. It's very unpleasant for Sion. Sion does eventually manage to grab the brooch bearing Roland's crest from the king's robes and get out of there, but not without the king getting one last word of "won't you save me, my son?" before Sion leaves the room. He then meets up with more of Miller's forces, makes a speech and assists in some attacks on enemy nobles, and then suddenly learns that they've succeeded, the king is dead. Apparently when enough people switch loyalties to a different member of the royal family, eventually the Mad Hero then switches, too, abandoning his previous host in favor of the new one. Without that power the king's unnaturally long life caught up with him at once and he'd immediately died of old age. Which is to say Sion sort of indirectly killed his father.

Sion then proceeded to have to deal with nobles who still hated him (but now couldn't kill him) and trying to stop all the nasty things Roland had been up to. Like human experimentation and training children to be assassins. Except that he's also learning, along with the whole mad god trying to possess him thing, that there's a lot more fundamentally wrong with Roland and the rest of Menoris than he'd first realized. He manages to free Ryner from prison at least, so that's a bright spot, but then a commoner he befriended and who became his secretary is assassinated because guess what! Sion's enemies still don't like him having nice things!

The ensuing time involves going to war with Estabul again, restart some of those human experiments again in secret (albeit strictly only with volunteers this time), order a purge of the opposing faction of the nobility, and generally completely overworking himself constantly because it's one of the only ways he can kind of halfway distract himself from the horribly agony he's in. Ryner comes back to Roland, and then leaves AGAIN, this time running off with a murderous, magic- and man-eating cursed eye bearer, which Sion's more than a little broken up about. Then their friend Ferris brings him back, and the same noble who killed Sion's commoner friend sends an assassin after Ryner. The assassin fails, but Ryner's still injured, and Sion proceeds to grab the guy by the throat and threaten him with a knife. In the middle of a party. Before finally relenting. There might be some sanity slippage going on here too thanks to the Mad Hero possession and all. Not to mention someone else connected with the powers that be sees a young version of Sion crying in a dream... and when she approaches him, he tells her "I want to die." Which is pretty much how Sion's feeling at this point.

Oh, and periodically through all this, certain of Sion's subordinates are so determined that he needs to marry, or at least sire an heir, that they keep setting him up with random women whether he wants it or not. (He doesn't want it, for reasons varying from the trauma of his first love's death to not wanting to be anything like his father--who, as you might recall, apparently had a thing for grabbing random commoner girls and raping them.) Some of the women are very... enthusiastic and pushy about the matter. Sion manages to get out of it one way or another, but it's still a bit upsetting!

By now Sion's learned he has a problem: see, the Mad Hero isn't the only power in Roland, there's also the Lonesome Demon. In order to defeat the goddesses who oversee the world, he needs the power of both of them. But obtaining the Lonesome Demon's power would consign the Demon and his current host to eternal agony like what Sion's currently enduring... and the current host of that power? Ryner. After much internal debate Sion decides the best course of action for both his best friend and the world is to kill Ryner and cause the Demon to reincarnate. Ryner's spared a fate worse than death, and Sion only has to consign a stranger to that horrible fate, not his best friend.

He doesn't pull it off, needless to say, and instead tearfully ends up ordering Ryner locked up instead. Ferris breaks him out and this time Ryner leaves Roland for good, though not without leaving Sion a letter saying he WILL find a way to save him. Reading that letter makes Sion cry all over again.

Next comes war. This time with the northern neighbor, Nelpha. Sion's plan is to wage a total war campaign to promptly cow the country and its king into surrendering, thereby causing fewer casualties in the long wrong. Unfortunately the king was a GIANT COWARD and just fled, leaving Sion forced to continue his army's butchering march to the Nelphan capital, and making it so that the only responsible royal left (and thus who would need to be captured and killed to end the war) was a young man Sion had briefly met and befriended before. Meanwhile Ryner's off somehow getting thrust into a figurehead king position of a coalition opposing Sion, there's only ten years left before the world ends and cycle starts anew, and generally everything is a whole big mess.

And now he's been stuck in Johto for years! What fun!