Name: Major General Alexander len Myrtenblume, Count of Velburg

Age: 30

Caste: Lesser Nobility

Occupation: Chief of Staff, Army of the Northern Electors

Appearance and Personality: Alexander’s picture could very well be found in the dictionary, next to the word ‘Soldier’. He is tall, broad-shouldered and well-muscled. His skin is tan from years in the field, and he looks perfectly at home in grey uniform and gold braid. His posture is pike-straight, his strides purposeful, and his voice loud and confident. His black hair is kept neat, a dusting of stubble always visible on his chin. He bears the scars of a professional soldier, but they lend him an air of worldliness and bravery rather than danger. His brown eyes are always set on the horizon, and he always gives whoever addresses him his full attention, and is never disrespectful. He is rarely seen without his sword, and more rarely seen out of uniform. Though the gruff and adventurous man has dropped out of fashion somewhat, he finds himself blessed with the attention of fashionable ladies, though has never been seen letting them interfere with his duties.

Alexander is, at his core, a man who understands the workings of power. Every action of his is a move in the game of its accumulation and exchange. He acts and looks the perfect soldier, kind, fair and ruthless, and is loved by his subordinate officers for it. He understands rhetoric and its uses, and applies the tactics of the podium in his everyday life. Alexander values friendships for their practical applications, hates those who prohibit him from continuing his advancement, and deals with both friend and ally with decisiveness. Years ago he learned to control his temper, and now uses it rarely and forcefully, wielding it as other men may handle a sword. He is an utter fake, through and through. He wears the mask that suits the situation, and changes them like other men change clothes.  His free time, if it can truly be called that (as he seldom swerves from his goal of accumulating power) is invested in knowledge. He understands that knowledge brings opportunities, and those opportunities are the path to power. Deep down, he respects those who follow the same path as him, who work with single-minded determination to reach the top and never let it go.

 Biography: The county of Velburg is poor. Its people work for subsistence and little more. His family was poor, and though he was an only child thanks to his mother’s untimely death at the hands of the flu, he was never used to luxury or excess. He helped his father manage the estate to earn his keep, and spent what little time he was given free to attend lessons and learn the scriptures, despite his protestations.

At thirteen, his father was killed. The family had borrowed money from another family, having too much pride to turn to bankers, and when that family was denied its repayments, it invested Velburg with soldiers, hundreds of trained and fit men fighting a score of second sons masquerading as guards. His father resisted in a fit of anger or fright, and he was killed. Alexander only learned of the event when he returned from a camping trip in the mountains, so quick was the affair that would change his life forever.
Like any son who loses his parents, he was driven mad. Grief consumed him, and he dedicated himself to revenge while in the constricting clutches of sorrow and desperation: revenge not only against the family who had killed his father, but against the institution that let it happen. He blamed the structure of the world, and decided he needed to rule it to change it. What he would change was not something with which he was concerned at the time. Seeing no other avenue for advancement, he studied desperately for the entrance exams to the Imperial Military Academy. He earned an almost full scholarship. He still needed to sell his mother’s jewels to pay for the tuition.
At the Military Academy, he excelled. He made friends, established connections, and worked as many of his peers as he could into his debt. He made every effort to appear the genius, the invincible. He studied all night, worked all day, learning to fight and speak and act and command. He graduated when he was 16, and shot through the ranks of the army with single-minded determination and heinous, exorbitant corruption. He bribed, blackmailed and stole his gold braid, and spent the political capital he had accumulated over 14 years of service to be named Chief of Staff for what he thought would be a docile, easy-to-control Prince, one at the head of the Army of Northern Electors. He held the role for no more than five months before the Crown Prince was pronounced dead.
Motivation: Alexander wants to rule the world. He hates those above him, and pities those below him in the great chain of being. He dreams of commanding the great masses of humanity, justifying his burning ambition to himself by promising unspecific reforms to vague sections of the population. He can have no man as his equal, and will be named a deity just to have no metaphysical being who stands above him in the hierarchy the unconscious masses decide.