Caranlos

R aised by the Sentinels and the draenei paladins of the Hand of Argus, Caranlos’ motivations and world view were initially identical with the credo and agenda of those same organizations — she wanted, in a nutshell, nothing more in life than to make the world a better, safer place. Beyond that, her life experience was too limited and sheltered to have any motivations that weren’t rooted in chivalrous ideology.

Consequently, hers was always a life of martial austerity, partly because of her military service, partly because self-denial was how she expressed gratitude to whatever forces led her to the Sentinels when she was orphaned as a baby. That changed somewhat when she befriended a draenei named Alexiphosa while growing up in Forest Song, the first person she met who did not process all life through the lens of asceticism, but saw the world as something to be enjoyed as well as defended. The second such person Caranlos met was a night elf called Yarralomë, more about whom later. Sadly, this learning to drink from the cup of life was tragically cut short, and since her undeath, Caranlos has more and more been motivated by the ugly rapture of the brain-grasping dead that comes from the physical suffering of others. She tries to compensate for that by directing her sadism at the enemies of the Alliance, but knows that sooner or later she, too, will be more enemy than ally, and will have to be put down. Combating her sense of fatalism is ever-sunny Alexiphosa, who sought Caranlos out when she heard of her return to Stormwind after being released from the Lich King’s control. It is through Alexiphosa’s offices that Caranlos reconnected with her mother/aunt Isilyë, and through Isilyë allied with Ulvin, through whom she met Kalika, a fellow monster in the making whom Alexiphosa distrusts and whose own sinister fatalism daily undermines what progress Alexiphosa has made with Caranlos. Background

W hen the truth is ugly enough, ignorance always seems an attractive option.

And in Caranlos’ case, the kindest: Her parents were Isilyë and Isilyë’s brother Yarralomë, two rising stars in Ashenvale’s defense who were eventually captured at Splintertree Post. Yarralomë had raped a blood elf named Ruinwen, and as punishment Ruinwen’s father turned Yarralomë and Isilyë (who had created a diversion so as to make the rape possible) into a breeding pair of druidical animals over a period of five years, collecting their offspring at the end of each year. But at the end of the final year, which the felonious siblings spent as moonkins, Ruinwen’s father was unable to distinguish the night elf moonkins from the real moonkins, and had to guess which ones to turn back into night elves. He guessed wrong. The pair of moonkins who were now Isilyë and Yarralomë continued to mate even as they spent the next year starving, and when Caranlos and her twin brother were born, they crushed his head with a rock and ate him. Luckily for Caranlos, elves from Auberdine discovered them and rescued her before they could eat her as well. Caranlos was then taken to Forest Song in Ashenvale, where she was called Lómion (she had no name before then) and trained to serve as a Sentinel. For the rest of her life, Lómion never knew anything about her parents beyond what the Sentinels had told her — which was that they were heroes captured and killed at Splintertree Post — and never gave them a second thought. The Sentinels and the Hand of Argus were the only family she knew, and all the family she needed, though as she grew older, her reputation as a fierce fighter against the Scourge also led her to long association with the Argent Dawn.

Years later, she met an older man who seemed uncannily well suited to her — they shared the same views on important topics, had many of the same tastes, the same humor — and soon after they were married at Light's Hope Chapel.

But then a mysterious package full of documents arrived the morning after their wedding. Whatever was in them caused Lómion’s husband to go berserk: he slit Lómion’s throat, slung her body over a horse, and sent it across enemy lines to the Scourge. Then he slit his own throat and bled out where he fell.

The package, as it happened, was a stack of documents sent by Ruinwen, the blood elf who had been raped by Caranlos’ father years ago. Ruinwen was profoundly unsatisfied by the punishment her own father had meted out to Yarralomë and his scheming sister Isilyë, and had been hunting for them herself ever since. For all her efforts, though, she was never able to get to Isilyë — but she did find Yarralomë, who, her investigations revealed, had risen through the ranks of the druidical Cenarion Circle and was now about to marry a young woman from the Argent Dawn — Lómion. Neither bride nor groom had any idea that they were in fact father and daughter (as well as uncle and niece); the package revealed all to Yarralomë, and, as Ruinwen had hoped, he took the news badly. Even worse for Lómion, her body was taken in by the Scourge and turned into one of the new breed of death knights, reanimated killing machines in the thrall of the Lich King.

After the doomed battle of Light’s Hope Chapel, when the death knights of the Ebon Blade were freed of the Lich King’s will, Lómion set about trying to recapture the life that was hers before her death — her position with the Silverwing Sentinels, the Argent Dawn (now Argent Crusade), and, most importantly, herself. But it became apparent to her over the years that her old self was gone for good, and that her new self was still every bit the bloodthirsty monster it was when she was in the service of the Lich King. And she was becoming bloodthirstier still. And though she was loathe to admit it, she knew she was starting to like it. Because of this, she gave up the name Lómion, and took instead the nickname high elves of the Silver Covenant gave her in Dalaran on account of her splatter-heavy “blood” style of fighting: Caranlos, or “red snow”. (The name would be Carnlossë in her own language, but it was the high elf term that stuck.)

But if she can’t control her growing compulsion for carnage, she reasons she can direct it all at the Horde and Scourge. In this way she can continue to fight for the Sentinels and the Argent Crusade for a while yet before she, too, has to be destroyed.

Gear