Hamanu

Title: "Troll Scorcher"

Gender: Male

Cleansing Time: 1505 years

Info: Sorcerer King of Urik. Replaced Myron who had stalled the cleansing.

Hamanu grew up as Manu, a farmer's son in one of the many villages that supported the army of the then-Troll Scorcher during the Cleansing Wars. But on his wedding day, his village was brutally destroyed by trolls, leaving him the sole survivor with an all-consuming need for vengeance. He joined the Troll-Scorcher's army, but then he discovered that none of the army units were actually attacking trolls - in fact, they were forbidden from doing so on pain of death by the Troll-Scorcher himself! All they did was to scout on and herd the trolls, and all the human villages were little more like farms for trolls to sustain them. It was like the "Troll-Scorcher" had little intention of actually finishing the war against the troll - which was, of course, exactly right as he would discover later...

After this revelation, he managed to create a renegade unit which actively hunted trolls. This unit was destroyed after the Troll-Scorcher caught up to them - but when Manu hurled a stream of invectives cursing his incompetence at the Troll-Scorcher as he lay dying from his sorcery, Rajaat - the First Sorcerer, who had created the Champions of the Cleansing Wars - heard him, struck down the Troll-Scorcher, and turned Manu into a Champion himself.

As a Champion, Manu became Hamanu, an immature dragon who was also capable of granting clerical spells to his followers via the Dark Lens. He soon realized that this state was a terrible trap. As a dragon, he constantly hungered to devour the life energy of living beings around him. Each arcane spell he cast hastened the transformation into a full-fledged dragon, which would go mad and rampage as a beast and destroy the land - which clashed with his farmer's dream of a green and pleasant land dotted with fields that he clung to to keep himself sane.

He finished the genocide against the trolls, and then tried to go to his old home in the mountains to rebuild the farmland with his veterans of the war. But when he heard of some of his veterans becoming warlords in the plains, preying on other humans and still doing it all in his name, he became enraged and went down there to punish the wicked. Then the people of the small town of Urik offered him to become their king, saying that it was probably inevitable that each city would be ruled by a god-king (as happened in nearby Tyr), and they wanted it to be a god-king of their own choosing. He accepted for a time, and he might have left it again - but then he got visited by Rajaat.

Rajaat made it clear to him that he planned to make him into the true dragon. Then it would be his job to end the Cleansing Wars permanently - which meant slaughtering all the humans so that Rajaat could restore the world to the Blue Age, filling it with oceans and giving it back to the halflings. Desperate, Hamanu fled to the only other Champion whom he trusted as far as he could throw them - Borys of Ebe, the Butcher of the Dwarves who like him had been born a commoner and a replacement for an earlier Champion.

The rest is history. The Champions, working together, managed to imprison Rajaat for a time - but they had to transform Borys into the Dragon to secure the magical prison, and the Dragon promptly went mad for a hundred years and ravaged the land until it became the desert that modern-day people of Athas know. And each sorcerer-king had to give an annual levy of hundreds of slaves to the Dragon so that he could maintain the wards around the prison - all so that a far worse menace than the sorcerer-kings could be contained and prevented from destroying the world completely.

Hamanu went back to Urik, where he ruled as god-king. He saw it as his prosperous farm, which must be protected, taken care of so that it could grow, and its inhabitants as the children he never had. In time, he became "as wise as he was cruel". He realized that he was subject to a vast temper, pride, and whims (after a thousand years of rule, it is easy to get bored) so he didn't try to micromanage everything. He realized that corruption and rivalries between his templars was never going to go away completely, so he made them all live in one quarter of the city under fairly spartan conditions to limit the damage. He built a very oppressive society, yet where people of merit could rise in station. His temper could kill, yet "he'd never kill a man who told him the truth". He hitch-hikes on the minds of ordinary citizens to alleviate his boredom - and to stay aware of the state of the city so that he could prune the worst excesses of the wicked and corrupt. He wrote a restrictive code of law, including a curfew lasting the entire night - but accepts that people will break it by necessity. His true saving grace is that he will do anything to protect the city and its inhabitants as a whole - which turns him from an outright villain into an anti-villain at times.

Hamanu is a sorcerer-king. He is evil and has been monstrous in his deeds at many times. His sanity is questionable. But he is not the worst of the lot.