Aragaz Wyldking

When Siroth launched the Second Great War, the whole world held its breath. Truces were made, alliances forged, grudges set aside, and almost all other concerns faded to insignificance. Heroes emerged and rallied their people, for all Teleria knew that they had to stand together and fight or else be destroyed. One of the great leaders of the War was Aragaz, called Wyldking for his affinity with the wilderness and its creatures, especially the hyenas that he made his totem animal. From a youth, he admired their individual ferocity, tenacity, and communal cooperation, fearing them and respecting them equally. Aragaz was at one point an unlikely warlord. He was part of a Dusk Hills Orc clan, whose members were beset by hunger, thirst, foul weather, and predators. Aragaz resented the struggle, the sacrifices, the ancestral sense of alienation. He thought that Orcs should take a place among the urbanites and agrarians of the great kingdoms and city-states, reconciling. Even more than he wished for Orcs to be accepted, he wished for them to accept each other: to him the constant, casual warfare between Orc clans was tragically wasteful. These views would have made him craven and pathetic in the eyes of his clanmates, even subversive, so he held his tongue. He did this for two decades. Everything changed when Aragaz returned from a routine hunt to find twisted, blood-soaked Demonspawn, vanguards of the Second Great War, cutting down the cream of his clan's warriors. Aragaz charged into the midst of the Demonspawn from behind, taking them by surprise and buying the Orcs under attack breathing room. But they were shattered and terrified, and victory was impossible, so Aragaz urged them to make a fighting retreat with him and regroup. The clan's leaders were all dead. Aragaz suggested his clan's remnants join forces with those of former rival clans, whom they found had also been beset by Demonspawn. He was a gruff, abrasive, and uncompromising negotiator, short on charm and charisma. But his clear-eyed logic forced his own people and the survivors of other clans to concede they only stood a chance by working together. Aragaz and his followers camped in the hills, accepting any Orc refugees they encountered. They also began a guerrilla campaign against the Demonspawn. Adopting the canny tactics of hyena packs, Aragaz harried and harassed the invaders, chipping away at their numbers and melting back into the landscape when attacked in strength. He used false flags and forged letters to direct Demonspawn forces into ruinous engagements. Feint attacks from multiple directions stretched the defenders of Demonspawn encampments thin, only for Aragaz to lead a spearhead charge into their heart, cackling and howling like a hyena pack alpha as he did so. The Orcs under his command found his skulking, tricksy stratagems inglorious, at first. With victory came acceptance however and, finally, pride. Orcs flocked to his banners. After months of hard fighting and rough living, Aragaz drove the Demonspawn out of a large swath of the Dusk Hills. Pushing into the Krokhan Desert, he encountered armies under the Arbiter's direct command, recovering from their own battles. He hurried to offer his strength to their cause, but when the Humans and Elves saw an approaching Orc horde, they reacted hostilely. Even when Lightbringers arbitrated between them to ensure they worked together as part of the Arbiter's grand coalition, old prejudices against Orcs were impossible to extinguish. Aragaz's totemic embrace of the hyena did not help, for the beasts were associated with death, disease, and malice in the eyes of the ‘civilized' world. His forces won many triumphs, disrupting the enemy's crucial lines of supplies and intelligence. More than once, his forces' interventions saved elements of the Arbiter's forces on the brink of destruction, sometimes at heavy cost in Orc lives. Regardless, his efforts were dismissed and diminished by non-Orcs. By the waning weeks of the Great War, Aragaz's old belief that the Orcs should seek partnership with the other peoples of Teleria had been destroyed. His Orcs were, by then, fiercely loyal to him, having long since overcome their clan disputes and ceased infighting under his leadership. If that was to be his legacy, he was content with it: if the rest of Teleria would look down upon the Orcs no matter what, then Orcs should stand united against the world that scorned them so. For generations afterward, Aragaz was known as a symbol of the Orcs' stubborn pride and dignity, their unwillingness to compromise and refusal to passively accept the abuse of their oppressors. He had been a prickly, moody, sharp-tongued leader, but those very traits became a point of pride for his followers and admirers. To this day, many Orc clans in the Dusk Hills hold the hyena as a totemic creature, and sing the praises of the Wyldking.