[b]Name of Lord/Lady[/b]: Ecclesiast Timone II.

[b]Physical Description[/b]: A tall, frail old man with only a scant few white hairs to hide his skull, the Ecclesiast could not easily be misplaced for a commoner. If his ornate white robes, gilded in silver, did not serve evidence enough to convince a passerby of his importance, the man's advanced age was proof enough; few lords and even fewer peasant men could have survived to walk the land as long as he had. Though withered by the passage of time, his skin wrinkled and his bones weak, Timone II's disposition did not betray his age as easily as his grey, tired eyes did. He moved with the vigor of a man a decade or two his junior, and was as healthy as any elderly man could be, a trait he attributed to his faith.

[b]Claimed Fief[/b]: The Parna.

[b]Basic History[/b]: Born into a peasant family a half a day's ride from the walls of Tythmas, it was incredibly unlikely that the young Timothy son of Georgius would ever amount to much of anything. The boy was from nothing and held no special talents worthy of note, being neither a great warrior nor thinker. The youngest of his parent's five children—having two sisters and two brothers—Timothy did not even stand in line to inherit his father's meager farmstead. Fully aware of the misfortune of his birth as he approached adulthood, Timothy chose to travel a route so often traveled by third sons with nothing to inherit: Osteria's church, the Church of Vinos. Once he found himself in Tythmas seeking a clergyman, he was helpfully approached by a smiling man in robes talking of Vinos. He asked the pastor about entering the Vinossian clergy, and after being approached with Timothy's intentions, the pastor found himself familiar with the young lad's story. Most Vinossian pastors came into the cloth in the same way as Timothy had. However, circumstances were special, and this particular sought to make use of young Timothy's youth and vigor while he could. Withholding the boy's consecration for another time, the pastor instead put Timothy to work, assigning him to assist the builders of one of the greatest architectural works of the reign of King Tenneth: the Parna. The ornate cathedral was planned to be the largest of its kind in the world, and construction had begun years prior, but was not yet near finished. It was in the clergy's interest to have their new seat of power completed as soon as possible, and the pastor deemed it more important for religious young boys to be sent to carry stones instead of preaching of the virtues of Vinos. 

Owing to the project's magnitude, Timothy was far from the only one of the city's boys sent to work on it. Every street urchin looking for food or itinerant farmboy eager for an extra coin or two was hard at work on the grand new church, and Timothy found himself acquiring many new acquaintances as he started on his humble career. He met a great many boys his age in the throng of people working on the cathedral day and night, and many of these young men's personalities were antithetical to Timothy's own peaceable and obedient disposition. As was inevitable, he found himself easily manipulated by his new 'friends', and drawn into their antics. He began to shirk his duties at the cathedral, instead spending his time stealing food from market stalls and pick-pocketing old men, just to keep out with his rowdy new friends. Eventually, the authorities of Tythmas got the best of him, and he and his new friends were taken in to be given a talking to at the jails. After Timothy and his friends still seemed disrespectful after being thoroughly scolded, one of the guard captains decided that an example needed to made of one of them, to show the rest of the city's itinerant—drawn in from all the neighboring towns and villages to work on the Parna—what happened to thieves in Osteria's proud capital. A stroke of bad luck saw Timothy become the one chosen to be the group's literal whipping boy. The young farmer's son was taken onto a raised platform, made of scaffolding and built alongside the main street adjoining the cathedral plot, and was mercilessly flogged for all to see. As the tails of the whip cracked against his flesh, blood coating his back and tears coating his cheeks, Timothy pictured the face of the pastor that had welcomed him to this city. He imagined the old man in robes to be the man striking him, punishing him for his friends, for accepting his own offer to work on the cathedral. By the time it was over, all that Timothy saw was the pastor's face, and it was the last thing he remembered seeing before he passed out from the pain.

When he awoke, Timothy found himself in a dark room somewhere, his back aching. When he lifted his body up from his straw bed to feel the scars and gashes, he was pleased to discover they had been stitched up quite expertly. The pain, though, was too much for him to rise from his bed, and he had a great thirst. He called out, crying the name of the pastor who'd put him to work on the cathedral, the man who had sent him down this road in the first place. To his great surprise, it was that same man that then entered the room; but not in his robes. Garbed in plain clothes partially covered by black leather armour, the "pastor" that welcomed Timothy back to the land of the living carried a small dagger in his left hand, his fingers gripping the hilt lightly and confidently. In his right he wielded the same weapon, but held this one by the blade, and it was then that Timothy noticed that the pastor was leaning forward to offer the hilt to him. He grabbed it, and then, quickly and wordlessly, sat up from his bed, intending to plunge the knife into the pastor's neck. The armoured clergyman evaded the thrust easily, though, and punished the boy with a superficial slice along his leg, tearing his trousers and ever-so-slightly piercing the skin. Timothy winced, reactively dropping his weapon and grabbing his leg to inspect the minor wound. Capitalizing on this, the pastor took back the weapon he'd given the injured boy and hid it somewhere on his person, in a pouch or scabbard Timothy had not seen. He explained to Timothy that he'd used his position as a pastor to help to recruit him into one of his syndicate's youth gangs, as he had with most of Timothy's partners in crime. He offered him a final say in the matter, now that he knew what he was in for. He could either be formally inducted into the pastor, his flogging initiation enough, or he could be sent back home, taken back to his farmstead to be with his family again and told never to come back to Tythmas. Without much to lose, Timothy chose the [i]other[/i] route so often traveled by third sons with nothing to inherit: a life of crime.

Some fifteen years after becoming a devoted thief, Timothy, now simply calling himself "Tim", had become exceedingly proficient. He'd bloodied his knife more times than he could remember over the years, and stolen more gold than he would've made in a lifetime as a farmer. His back still scarred after his flogging as a boy, Tim did not forget the captain who had singled him out from his friends for punishment. Now that he was fully confident in his abilities, and had the money to afford men to assist him, he decided it was time for retribution. Before he could proceed, though, he needed to be rid of one last obstacle. The pastor, his boss for the last decade and a half, had refused to give Tim permission to kill the guard captain, insisting that the murder of a high-ranking guardsmen would draw too much attention. Tim, now a street-savvy man, of course agreed, but cared too much for his own ambitions and too little for his compatriots to turn his mind away from revenge. Paying off the best killers in the group to meet him two streets away from the guard's barracks one night, Timothy took off from his hideout early, with plans to meet up with his squad late. He had to murder their boss first. Travelling, by moonlight, to the same hovel he'd rested in after his flogging so many years ago, Tim found a curious sight. A boy, like himself all those years ago, laying on his side on the same bed Timothy had once rested in, his back a gnarled mess of scars. Tim waited, out of sight, for the pastor—his syndicate's commander—to come and tend to the boy, and then acted much faster than he had the first time he'd tried to kill him. Pouncing up from the shadowed corner of the room, his dagger found the artery in the pastor's thigh, and all at once a torrent of blood came gushing out of the man's groin. He screamed, waking the injured child, and to avoid attracting any more attention, Tim then slit his throat. Tossing the dagger he'd just used to the terrified boy on the bed, Tim told him clearly and loudly that this was the road down which he traveled, and told him to go back home. By the end of that night, neither the pastor, the guard captain, or the wounded boy were ever seen in Tythmas again.

Life eventually caught up with the new lord of the underworld. Tim's reins over Tythmas' crime syndicate had been firm for years and years, but a crisis came up. The King himself, Tenneth, was growing anxious of The Parna running years and years over schedule and piles and piles of coin over budget. Tim, and the Pastor before him, had been using the project as both a front and a recruitment pool, and had made sure the work went slowly to ensure they could continue to have a legitimate pretext to pay off their hired hands, and a continuous new influx of people into the city for them to either bring into the life or rob blind. The King deigned to directly intervene in the cathedral's construction, firing most of the management and replacing them with loyal advisers of his. Earning an enormous salary, straight from the royal coffers of Osteria, they proved too rich to bribe. Worse yet, King Tenneth had also suspected that Tythmas' underbelly was meddling in the city's affairs, had the city guard's high commander replaced too. The new High Commander was of Tythmas' lesser nobility, and even richer than the cathedral's new foremen. No more would the guards turn a blind eye to Tim and his men's affairs. As weeks passed and more of his henchmen were apprehended and hanged by the day, Tim made a decision. Eventually, one of his captured brigands would talk, and betray Tim as he had betrayed the pastor all those years ago. Eager never to meet the chopping block, Tim decided that if he wanted to escape the pastor's fate, he'd need to become one. Hiding all of his greatest valuables away on his person, Tim fled the city without informing a soul, leaving his entire life theretofore behind him. Not wanting to pass by his old boyhood farm in Tythmas' northern environs, he instead crossed through the south gate, and headed from there to Osteria's most peaceful and inconspicuous province: Marethia.

Though he wished they hadn't, the pleasant fields of the Marethian countryside reminded Tim of his childhood. As he purchased himself an isolated country-house and set about planning what was next for him, Tim would often find himself drifting back to his younger days, to his abandoned parents and siblings, and how different his life could have been had be gone down a different path. His reflection made resolute his choice to flee the capital, and reinforced his decision with what to do now that he'd gone. Timothy affirmed that he would become the person he had always planned to be when he was a young man: a pastor, a real one. Of course, he would go about it an easier way. Using some of his acquired wealth to purchase himself tomes and articles of the faith, Timothy set about preparing to pretend to have already become a pastor. He invented a history for himself, deciding that he would tell others that his family were settlers of the Southern Reaches, but his village was destroyed by Orcish raiders and he moved to Marethia as refugee. His time conning men out of their gold in Tythmas had taught him to fake the accents of any of the provinces, and his natural low capital speech was generic enough for him to sound realistically enough like a transplant. After donning the robes and studying, Tim traveled to the nearest town over and approached the local clergyman, claiming to be from a neighboring village, sent to inform the pastor that he was being promoted and that he was his replacement in the town. The pastor bought the lie, and after heading out for Tythmas the next day, was never seen again. Timothy became established as the town's new pastor, serving them for years as a self-taught Vinossian pastor. Years and years onward continued to ascend the ranks of the church, using his talents for subterfuge to expedite upward mobility. Eventually, he found himself a high-raking Pastor in Tythmas, serving in the Church of Vinos' former cathedral: Skyhall. One dead Ecclesiast later, the young farmboy named Timothy was the head of the entire church. As the new Ecclesiast, Timothy chose to take on "Timone II" as his Ecclesiastical name. The first Ecclesiast Timone, a shut-in of a clergyman that had led the Church ineffectually for some three years before dropping dead and falling into the irrelevant section of the history books, had the sort of lack of legacy that Timothy was happy to outdo. His ascension, as luck would have it, came only scant months before the completion of the Parna—years overdo—and so it became that a young boy who had once carried stone to build the cathedral was now its first sitting Ecclesiast. The newly named Timone II's first years, under King Tenneth, were mostly uneventful; largely spent consolidating power, earning the respect and adoration of his underlings. It was only after the great King Tenneth's death that Timone sought fit to begin to pull strings.

The reign of King Timault was another story altogether. The newly crowned King found himself with the Eccliast's underlings constantly in his ear, encouraging his aggression and steering him inexorably towards war. It was made clear to him that the Church would support him on a foreign excursion, calling a crusade to help pull all of Osteria's great warriors to his assistance. Timault rewarded this stalwart support with massive financial aid; mountains of gold were spent on amassing well-outfitted and expertly trained soldiers for a new standing army, devoted directly to the Church of Vinos: the Templars. It seemed that Timone II and King Timault were destined to be a great pair, making Osteria strong together, but the King's untimely death complicated matters. The Ecclesiast distanced himself from Timault's campaign against the Blackmouth Clan after it failed, and has since then focused once again on rallying support at home. In particular, care and attention has been placed in ensuring that the next King of Osteria heeds the word of the Parna as loyally as the last.

[b]Background[/b]: Diplomat.