Il'Arik Portrait

Just a speed painting of one of the major characters in the grand scheme of things. He's always on fringe of major events it seems. Guess that's the perk to being an assassin.

Il'Arik started out alright. Had a nice village, a family that loved him, a baby sister he was pledged to protect. When he was five, Ivvo slavers came. His parents died in a fire trying to protect the library his family maintained for their clan. Il'Arik and his sister escaped, but poor little Arik was scarred by the whips of the slavers. The baby didn't survive the winter. After that, Il'Arik found himself in a city, and fell in with the gangs as a runner. Eventually he was caught by the local law enforcement and put in an orphanage, where a whole new kind of abuse met him. He proved so unruly that he was sent to Nin, one of the largest and certainly the foulest metropolis on Otska. For a while his life was defined by efforts to get himself out, and eventually this goal included a girlfriend and her unborn child. When his gang leader got rid of the baby (the girlfriend was, after all, a prostitute and it's hard to attract business with a kid at your heels,) it was the death of any remaining decency, any restraint. He became an assassin, a drug addict, a hedonistic liar who has scores of bastard children he barely deigns to notice. He also became the most powerful crime lord in Nin...but he's still aware, deep down, that he's nothing but a shade of the man he used to be. The frustration of being unable to change the past and unable to change himself kinda drives him a bit over the edge toward the end....

Anyway, enjoy!