Arashi #1. The most dangerous active member of the Arashi organization.
Backstory
Born in Vacron in 692 ACC, the Dark Paladin grew up in the same district as the man who would become the Crimson Knight. They trained together through childhood and adolescence, fought in the same streets, and shared the same formative understanding that the world was violent and disorganized and needed to change. The difference was always in the method. The Crimson Knight wanted to build consent. The Azure Paladin β as he was then known β believed the only cure for disorder was centralized authority, and that peace was something you imposed rather than earned.
In 712, the Crimson Knight founded the Crimson Rooks. In 715, the Azure Paladin founded the Republic of Frada. They both began what they intended to be lifelong projects. Only one of them became what it was meant to be.
By 730, Frada had conquered the Eshar-Thi and the Azure Paladinβs military campaigns were expanding the republicβs borders. The Crimson Knight visited him. He asked him to stop. The Azure Paladin did not listen.
In 732, Fluffy gifted the Crimson Knight the indestructible crimson blazer in recognition of his peacekeeping work. The Azure Paladin, who had spent seventeen years fighting wars he believed were necessary, watched his oldest friend receive a gift from the most powerful being in existence for choosing diplomacy over conquest. He did not accept this. He turned to dark magic β not in desperation but in fury β and gave himself power, immortality, and the permanent distance from the life he might have had. He became the Dark Paladin. He has not aged since.
He does not hold the rank he does in the Arashi through loyalty to #0. He holds it because he is the most dangerous active member in the organization by a significant margin. The goal he had in 715 β a unified continent under a single authority β has never left him. The Arashi, for now, serves purposes adjacent to that goal.
| True Identity | His name before the dark magic is not publicly recorded in any surviving Criozevan archive β whether because it was deliberately suppressed or simply forgotten over three centuries is unclear. |