User:Joshmaul/Gabriel Underwood

"'May you choke in the grasp of the roots.'"
 * - Inquisitor Gabriel Underwood, to his first slain witch

Gabriel Underwood is an Inquisitor of the Order of Embers, trained in the arts of the Thornspeaker. As a man of two worlds - combining the ancient druidic powers of Drustvar with the desire to defend his homeland from very modern threats - he serves House Waycrest, Kul Tiras, and now the Alliance in his own unique way.

=Biography= Gabriel Underwood was born in Boralus, the capital of Kul Tiras, right on the shores of Tiragarde Sound. His mother belonged to a branch of the Surrette family that had settled in Gilneas. The Gilnean branch of the family eventually pulled stakes and left with Colonel Arom Waycrest to settle in Kul Tiras (and began spelling their name "Surette", with one R, for some reason). This family connection makes Gabriel a distant cousin of Adesse Surrette, a powerful Kirin Tor archmage from a branch of the family that had settled in Lordaeron. His father was also of Gilnean ancestry; he was a washed-out purser for a Kul Tiran patrol ship that had spent its career in friendly waters, who liked to exaggerate his "war record", and whose surly temper and mental illness were fuelled to nightmarish levels by drink. Due to their father's violent behavior, Gabriel was fostered by other families for a time while his mother worked to get her own life in order - without her abusive husband, who ended up earning a life sentence in Tol Dagor Prison. So far as Gabriel knows or cares, he is still there.

When he was twenty, Gabriel left with his mother and her new husband and settled in Drustvar, the land where her forebears had settled with Arom Waycrest and his troops centuries before. His mother was descended from the harvest-witches of Gilneas, part of whose traditions were upheld by those Kul Tirans who studied under the Thornspeakers - ancient Drust who had not supported the war against the newly-minted Kul Tirans by their king, Gorak Tul, and retreated to the wilds of Drustvar. By the time Gabriel came of age, living in Falconhurst, the original Drust Thornspeakers had died out save for one: Ulfar, who resided somewhere in the mountains near Arom's Stand. Aurelius followed his mother into the mountains, where she instructed him in what little she remembered - the rest, she left to Ulfar and his students at the ancient one's secluded den. He would regularly travel to Ulfar's den for the next decade.

Suffer Not the Witch to Live
Growing up, Gabriel was a voracious reader of history books, and kept that interest well into adulthood; his interests focused primarily around the three great wars that had been fought since the arrival of the Horde on Azeroth. In time, he would play a small role in history himself...

While the heroes of Azeroth fought the Legion on Argus, Drustvar was being invaded not by the Horde, but by a sinister foe that corrupted both the land and the people: the Heartsbane Coven, witches who used dark magic similar to that wielded by Gorak Tul. The hexes began infecting many of the towns surrounding Arom's Stand. The upsurge in Heartsbane activity also coincided with the return of Jaina Proudmoore, the reviled "Daughter of the Sea"; her arrival in Boralus heralded the first forces of the Alliance to step onto the shores of Kul Tiras since Jaina had allowed the Horde to kill her father, Grand Admiral Daelin Proudmoore, at Theramore several years before. The Alliance forces included heroes of Northrend, Pandaria, Argus, and numerous other conflicts since Kul Tiras' isolation, and some of them set out for Drustvar to aid House Waycrest. By that point, Lord Arthur and Lady Meredith had disappeared and were believed dead, and Lady Lucille, their only daughter, was accused of witchcraft; the Alliance were able to clear her name, and aid her in re-establishing an ancient order of warriors originally founded to fight Gorak Tul and his Drust, and now was reformed to fight the Heartsbane.

Though he was dedicated to learning the art of the Thornspeakers, Gabriel decided to use the powers he had learned in a more proactive sense, and swore the oath to become an Inquisitor of the Order himself. Though he was a large man, he learned to use the quiet and stealthy movements of his chosen druidic form to ambush his targets before tearing them apart with his thorny claws. Even after the purging of Waycrest Manor, the Order kept on alert, not only against the Heartsbane, but against the occasional attack by Horde airships. In Gabriel's eyes, the Horde was no different from the Heartsbane, corrupting the very land they walked upon (particularly where the Forsaken were involved), but that judgmental eye also turned to those who used dark magic in the Alliance. To Gabriel, the idea of fighting with the tools of the enemy was sacrilege, and he saw no good end to a conflict where black magic was used to combat black magic. The rumors he had heard from Brennadam about Lord Stormsong's corruption by the power of the Old Gods gave his belief credence, so far as he was concerned. However, due to Jaina's eventual redemption and ascension to the Lord Admiralty, solidifying Kul Tiras' return to the Alliance fold, he was unable to act on what his common sense showed him when it came to Alliance sorcerers... so he took it out on the Horde ones whenever he could instead.

Still, the war with the Horde was a secondary concern to Gabriel; defending Drustvar from evil, no matter what form it took, was the priority he upheld most strongly.

Beyond What is Known


Though he did not leave Kul Tiras during the early stages of the war, Gabriel kept abreast of events, having heard of the great fleet under Jaina's command that assaulted the Zandalari capital of Dazar'alor. Though he heard about the bloody and costly victory, he did not hear any real details until, one day, he happened to be in the vicinity of Falconhurst and seeing odd flotsam washing ashore... followed by a number of bodies.

The first body that Gabriel saw looked like it had been dead for weeks, which gave him an extra shock when the "corpse" opened its eyes. The man was a death knight, a former warrior of the Scourge who now protected the living he had once preyed upon. Gabriel nearly consigned the death knight to a funeral pyre anyway when he came across a scrollcase containing letters of marque and reprisal with the royal seal of King Anduin of Stormwind, identifying the bearer as Admiral Eliphas Aximand, a privateer for the Alliance's 7th Legion - the same 7th Legion leading the campaign against the Horde from their command ship in Boralus Harbor. Realizing that the wreck was likely an Alliance vessel, Gabriel called upon any villagers able to help to look for survivors, and was surprised to find more than twenty who had, by some miracle, survived a harrowing ordeal. Among them was a worgen named Lucia Zherron, who Gabriel could sense possessed druidic powers similar to his own. He had the survivors airlifted by gryphon to Arom's Stand, where they were nursed to health.

Once the survivors regained consciousness, Gabriel was able to learn more about what had happened. Admiral Aximand's flagship, the Springhawk, had been on its way home after the battle for Dazar'alor when it was destroyed by a Horde suicide bomber. The admiral attributed their survival to the "Tidemother" regularly invoked by the Kul Tiran tidesages, which he had begun to employ aboard his vessels. Though his firsthand account of the battle interested Gabriel, it was Lucia whom he regularly conversed with, feeling a connection based on their mutual attunement to the powers of nature. Gabriel explained the nature of Kul Tiran druidism, having partly been based on the old Gilnean traditions as well as the ways of the Drust as taught by Ulfar. Lucia, in turn, told Gabriel about the fall of Gilneas and the nature of her curse. She mentioned her ties to the Cenarion Circle, the order that encompassed all of the world's druids, and suggested he visit was the Dreamgrove in Val'sharah on the Broken Isles... where perhaps he could see for himself what the combined strength of all of Azeroth's druids looked like.

Leaving the survivors to recover in Arom's Stand, Gabriel set out for Boralus and boarded the Relentless, the transport ship that connected the Kul Tiran capital to Stormwind. It would be his first voyage outside of Kul Tiras, and he looked forward to seeing for himself what lay beyond. The first place he visited after arriving in Stormwind was Duskwood, a place that reminded him very strongly of Drustvar. His path would take him to various other places where nature thrived in spite of the powers of death and corruption - the Plaguelands of Lordaeron, the Grizzly Hills in Northrend, the slopes of Mount Hyjal in Kalimdor, the Jade Forest and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria, and eventually Val'sharah, where he was welcomed into the Dreamgrove not as a bumbling outsider, but as a brother druid.

When he returned to Boralus weeks later, Lucia - now fully recovered - was waiting for him on the dock. There, she showed him how to Dreamwalk, to enter the Emerald Dream itself to visit places touched strongly by nature, including many of the places he had seen in his travels. Their calling often took them beyond the borders of home, she explained, and it was best to have a means to rapidly reach the places they were needed. In addition to this, Lucia gifted Gabriel with an enchanted staff crafted from a flowering tree branch, which blazed with fire but did not burn the wood or the flowers that grew from it; she called it "a torch to light your way into the future".