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This is the story of a man who, fattened by decadence and luxury, fell to his unconventionally extravagant ways from a high, high perch. Variations in public knowledge leave behind an obfuscated tell to the background behind the man named Gael, but if the right Faithful is prompted - especially if hailing from the Mourning Isles while under some measure of duress - they'll be given a story that leaves little space for envy or admiration alike. But before he was man, he was boy, and as a child he wanted little. Gael was born a royal to Thrax in a night of stormy Winter. Her mother oft told of how the windows cracked to the adversity of his arrival beneath the mighty hail, covered in verglas and piled snow that too mired the moorland surrounding Maelstrom in a sea of white arsenic for but a day. Some would see this as a vile and presagious portend of doom to come, but little Gael arrived fat, his skin was pink, he had five fingers in each hand and five toes in each foot, and so his parents cared little. Not an ailment upon his body, no stigmata of the eyes, markings, nothing; Gael was just a child, like every other, and Thrax embraced him happily for it. In the halls of Maelstrom he grew, joined by other contemporaries to his age in sinister but childish acts of naughtiness all thorough the domain. He grew without sisters or brothers, but with enough cousins to fill a Cathedral, how could he care? They were the siblings he needed. Like all sprouts when dutifully watered and fed, he then grew. And quickly, too. Too quickly. Coming into his teen years destructively like the very storm that bore him, Gael distanced himself from the usual family with which he mingled when much younger by deciding that a life of violence and martial training wasn't to his taste. That like his mother, coincidentally of Lycene roots, he'd partake in things seen as deviant to some and unlike the cultural expectation of Thraxian lifestyle according to his father. And so it was that he began a life of excess in every regard. He set aside the sword, the shield and duty, to care for only himself and his needs... soon learning, that though long years may seek to separate them, action and consequence will invariably have their dreadful reunion. War came to the Compact and, consequently, Thrax. While different and more selfish than his average peer, Gael loved his family and wouldn't dare be one of the only few in his kine to be left behind, regardless of having discounted for most of his life conventional training and tutors in leadership and command. Against his mother's sheltering wishes, when the call to arms came he answered, and the day the Army of Silence came upon Arx, there on the battlements was one unprepared and unreadied Prince Gael Thrax. The war bore many heroes, but he was not one of them. He, like most, was just another sacrifice. While he had proven to have an instinct towards the sword, a predisposition for violence even if he had been escaping it his whole life, it only served in keeping him yet living inside the shuffle of his mortal coil. Having gazed upon the Archfiend's herald with his own eyes and witnessed a darkness beyond the veil if for but a fleeting moment, something broke in the mind of the then young Prince. Something in his psyche that'd never return. He sailed back to the Mourning Isles hailed as a hero like many others, with many less cousins than he had when he left. Friends, colleagues made and lost. Once again, he turned to the things he once did for dalliance, but now out of need. Wine became an escape, luxury a hideout, fleeting companionship an excuse. He swum and waded through these three in superfluity, earning a reputation as cantankerous and fond of extremes. His respite was short-lived. It turns out the war wasn't finished, and the fleets of the Gyre marched upon the Compact yet again. Technically still tied to his duties, and crestfallen from the cling of life altogether, Gael was given command of a small armada - no more than a hundred - to lead a westerly flank of Thrax in defense of the Lyceum, an act merited to having 'proven' himself in the defense of the Capitol. In truth, his only true achievement had been survival and nothing more. The flotilla in his charge would never arrive to Lenosia. Ambushed while crossing across some straits near Setarco, by an eastern boundary, a fleet twice his number came out the dark of night in a hail of fire arrows and drums of war. Gael had proven an incompetent leader, more fond of hiding in his cabin in the company of alcohol and delegating every minute task to his officers than see to their refinement himself, so when the sound of alarm - like a clarion from hell - rung across the fleet's various bells, he panicked. And fled. He deserted his post, escaping the violence of the battle in a small but speedy cog commanded by a single other sailor. The sailor told on him, for no other witness living were left, and he was tried an abandoner, a shame to the household, and made a pariah. In his shame, Prince Gael Thrax turned to the waters and drowned with said shames and his dishonor. The man who has now surfaced in Arx once more in service of the Inquisition as Confessor must be someone else with a likeness of bearing and name only merited by fate, and to suggest any different is nothing short of lunacy.

In him lie telltale signs of a once warrior-made body, now fading and degrading with the languorous passage of time. Purely genetically gifted components make him broad of shoulder, his limbs down to their appendages thickened, and towards a burly predisposition. He's host to various scars here and there, some across his face; one across his jaw, the other opposite across the lips... but worse of all, like roots that spread from the low of one blackened and charred tree, scarified veins of black virulently rise out across his left cheek all seeking the center front of his face, but not quite reaching it. He's tall much like the members of his lineage, but far from the tallest. His height's deceivingly made shorter by an often slouching posture, it a lack of rigidity. His hair is long and dark and far-reaching, on jaw and scalp alike. Many muscles across his body, while somewhat hidden by the amassing of hairs, are atrophied and ache in their dispossession.

In present day, Gael is said to be often perceived as grim and lorn, with unexpected moments of levity that teeter towards sardonicism and a cynical purview to anything within the boundaries of irony or something by its likeness. Very little rouses his sense of humor, but he's not without a shadow of it, only that it is kept behind cracked lips and aloof looks. It is easy to mistake these uninvolved and unassuming ways as if facets to a more shallow and fragmented character, but it is not the case. This has often seen him written off as a broken man, a possible bandit, a thief, a criminal, the greatest evil. Below the mystery is instead just a soul of waning enthusiasm and low spirits, with a negative grip on the reality of the world... and yet, where he walks, the atmosphere feels the more oppressive. As if accompanying him was some unseen burden at constant odds with any attempt at lasting merriment in him. None of his noble roots yet remain, all manners and etiquette have long since faded in the briny deep. His accent's yet Thraxian, his vocalization still harsh and caustic with a rugged depth, but when he speaks, it is evocative in gesticulation to the listless man left within him.