Burangiri

Burangiri, infamous throughout Yakai as the Soulmonger, was once known as the Boar King and Master of the Rampage. Born among the Fae of the Mistwood, he quickly acquired a position at the Fae Court that involved protecting the Sylvan realm from interlopers and corruption. Like many Fae, he is capable of shifting his form, and in his early years often assumed the guise of a huge, tusked boar. While Fae are sometimes imagined as effete, mercurial creatures, Burangiri’s attitude was always more brutish and simple. He delighted in breaking and sundering things with his thick skull or horns, and other Fae came to view him as nature’s wilder and most untamable elements given form, a roving beast-spirit of the forest. Like a cyclone or a summer storm, Burangiri would shatter old, ailing trees to clear the way for new life, or plough up and mulch the woodland floor. The Fae Court put him to work driving out unclean spirits and interlopers, setting the Boar King loose on those not welcome within the Mistwood’s borders. In this way he aided the Sylvan Watchers and did his part to preserve the Mistwood and its Rhythm. Things changed when a Dark Elf sorcerer named Lameth made the Mistwood his new home. Lameth had been exiled from Durham, and sought a new deep wood to make as his lair. Burangiri’s stampeding soon put a stop to the Dark Elf’s schemes. He trampled Lameth, but as he did so, Burangiri did more than merely destroy Lameth’s body. As the Dark Elf’s life essence left his broken body, Burangiri’s mane of blue flames snared it, and he found himself able to devour the incorporeal spirit before it dissipated. Such a meal filled him for a while with an unstoppable energy, adding to his already bountiful strength and vigor, and he found the taste of soul essence exquisite. Burangiri repeated his consuming act with another invader of the forest, and another. He grew addicted to the devouring, his body becoming lit by spectral blue soul flames, his need to feast growing ever-greater. He found himself relishing the power derived from consuming souls far more than he would any regular meal, eventually using it as his only source of sustenance. The more dark beings he gorged on, the more his own mind and form became twisted. Other Fae were not ignorant of the changes Burangiri was undergoing. As his rampages became more fraught and unpredictable, he was summoned before the Fae Court. They banished him from the Mistwood, saying he could not return until he had learned to tame his hunger, a decree that initially enraged him. Try as he might though, he could not break the arcane wards put upon him that kept him outside of the Mistwood’s borders. Frustrated, the hulking Fae set out into Yakai, determined to overcome his need to feast on a diet of foul souls. His struggle continues, and at times he succumbs. His legend has become renowned throughout Yakai, where he takes on a hulking form bearing a skull-mask framed by the blazing soul fires of those he has consumed. One wise woman of Yakai’s high hills has prophesied that only through good deeds can Burangiri drain the evil he has consumed and find the abstinence he craves. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen, but there are many dark spirits within Yakai, a legacy of the brutal reign of the Mikage, and Burangiri pursues them with the same relentlessness that he once showed driving corruption from the Mistwood.