Titus IV Alorius
AGE: 45 (Born 12th Hearthfire, 3E 243 at Sentinel, Hammerfell)
RACE: Colovian highlander, Imperial
GENDER: Male
OCCUPATION: Imperial Legate, Septimia Martial Law Governor
APPEARANCE: Titus' blotched and mottled skin smacks of a life spent out of the climbs one was appointed to by birth - spotted, as it is, with splodges of fading off-cream pigment carved by the permanent fixture of a thin-desert head-draped cowl. The Colovian's sun-bleaches brown hair drapes over his skull in wiry patches, left for long months without so much as a hewing razor - the soldiering sort are not often concerned with the intricacies of a customer-attracting-front (something that must change if he is to governor effectively) - to rest almost at the crook of his remarkably aquiline nose, an appendage that, despite decades of proximity to warfare, has survived un-bowed until now. Titus' tanned, roughly six-foot physique is stuffed with mismatched patches of muscle, built up and lost again over a life spent hopping between pen and sword.
PERSONALITY: A seasoned commander, Alorius tiptoes a precarious and oft-trodden line between a capacity for great, gregarious affinity and a grave propensity for punitive bouts of self-righteous fury and discipline. Accustomed to trawling the sun-bleached dunes of northern Hammerfell, where the sands mingle with sodden soil and the topal, becalmed crests of the Illiac's waves, Alorius looks out on his new fief, dripping and wind-blasted and sees some grand and poignant metaphor for the anti-climax his life. Since arriving in Septimia and dispatching the deeds to ancestral home, Alorius has been a far more reclusive figure, ascetic and brooding in the sparkling shadow of his light-house citadel. Raised in a Colovian's sense of duty, Alorius has an almost elven-like revulsion to what he views as the debauched denizens of Tamriel's fringe societies (particularly Nibeneans), who reject the lovingly-offered gift of divine Imperial civilisation to languish in hedonism and aversion to purpose and self-denial. Being an imperfect man, however, he has been know to struggle with vice, particularly Alcoholism, which has been a recurring bane of his life - a fact which has afforded him a oft-times mocking, sometimes cruel or violent demeanour towards those who embody the vices he so loathes in himself. Depressed by his station, Titus has become increasingly abstinent in all aspects of pleasure, in part as a pragmatic answer to his bout with the bottle, and in part due to a disastrous and scandalous marriage back in the west. That said, his love for Imperial culture has lead him to seek to be a fulcrum point for community - he attends worship at the Chantry of Tiber Septim almost every evening, and is keen to adhere to and enforce the observation of all of the sanction Imperial Public holidays.
BACKSTORY: Titus was born to the storied Alorius family, prominent amongst the stoic and warlike families that make up the land-holders of the Colovian Estates. Though his family's seat occupied a large, fertile and lucrative tract of the Imperial Reserve's wheat field bread-basket - a model environment in which to raise a young Colovian to revere duty, deference and self sacrifice - Titus IV spent a majority of his childhood tucked beneath his father, Titus III's imperial plate-skirt, accompanying him throughout his incesenting touring of his ill-governed provinces.
Given his relationship to his father, Titus IV is rather insecure in personal relationships.
Titus III, much like his ancestors in the Alorius clan, was appointed Imperial Governor of High-Rock - an increasingly hereditary and monarchical title, much to the chagrin of the proud, ancient regimes of the landed nobility. Whilst his charge-cities were cultured and rich in artisans, who drew fleets of merchant-galleys to purchase and spirit away their crafts, Titus III was an irresponsible man, who's naive dealings demanded much more gold than he could comfortable levy from what was, in reality, the smallest of the Empire's nine region. Obsessed and addicted to opulence, Alorius has sequestered the resources of his ancestral estates in Colovia, selling off the vast wheat and rice reserves stockpiled by his diligent and deserving ancestors within their mountain keep just west of Sancre Tor to fund his rather untenable diplomatic habits. High Rock, and the Bretons who dwelled within, you see, were an endlessly competitive and grasping lot, hiding behind a culture of "quest-obsession" to indulge in self-aggrandisement and a culture that worshipped feudal hierarchy, and placing oneself at the top, above all else. Racked with more territorial disputes than he could handle, Titus III turned to the one unifying factor that all Bretons had inherited from their half-elven ancestors - snobbery and high-society.
Using the assets of his homeland, Titus III transformed his seat of power, the Imperial fort of Rivenspire, just outside Wayrest, into a social capital, flowing with Colovian honey-wine and sprinkled with Nibenean bright-salts, to the envy of any who might be offered the dishonour of the retraction of invitation. Titus III used these social occasions as political commodities - inviting one warring party but not another, filling the spurned combatant with envy and driving him, meekly, to Titus' lap to beg for favour and and end to their being ostracised. For much of Titus IV's childhood, his father's policies worked to perfection, so much so that Titus III felt comfortable installing his son as an apprentice to a succession of increasingly senior subordinates to his father. This had a particularly lasting effect on the young Titus IV - observing his father's euphoric revelry, he came to the view, far from the truth that of his father's pragmatism towards his de-facto vassals, that Titus III loved his socialites to a far greater degree than him. Had Titus IV been raised in Colvia, he would have know that his father showed only the proper highlander detached and purposeful deference, meant to instil hierarchy and an endless drive to please and serve, but contrasted against his father's debauchery, it seemed only as if he was being spurned.
However, in 3E 264, a drought passed over the Colovian estates. With the stockpiles of grain depleted, Titus' peasantry, starving, began to rove from their farms, leaving what little crop was tenable to over-grow and wilt in the sun, cramming into the perceived security of the cities. From here, starvation spiked the crime, riots were common, thievery and black-marketing rife. Being a dutiful Colovian, not willing to let his people starve, Titus III levied enormous mortgages against his holdings, and loaned crate-loads of rice from his hated Heartlander rivals around the centre of the Imperial City.
Soon, however, the political weakness of the fractured Empire under Cephorous II, seen by some as a usurper of his distant relative, Andorak Lariat, began to beknight Titus. Eager to secure themselves with tax-levies and troops, the Nibenean heartlanders who had been Titus III's benefactors began to call in his debts, eager to procure the estates from a man they knew could not pay. Desperate, Titus III's dutiful governance, his divine service to his rightful Emperor, Cephorous II, was corrupted.
In the political chaos of Cephorous II competition with Andorak, many of Tamriel's Imperial governors began to aggrandise themselves. Far from embracing traditional Colovian stoicism, governing as if a divine father for the greater peace of the Empire, regardless of who occupied the Ruby Throne, many Governors began to declare themselves for one side or another, not for loyalty, but for the pretext for the seizing and annexation of their undeclared "traitorous" neighbours regions of governance. Titus III had no interest in this scrapping - until the debts came. Desperate, he looked across the Illiac to Sentinel, where the Imperial Governor of Northern Hammerfell quietly and peaceably voiced her support for her great friend - Andorak, without raising so much as a legion in his defence. With this, Titus III saw the excuse he needed to annex her territories and grasp at the lucrative and readily tax-able trade that flowed through Hammerfell's northern ports.
WILL FINISH SOON
- When the Camoran Usurper swept over Tamriel, much of Titus' father's charges rebelled, and defeated and butchered him in an ambush battle outside Anticlare
