Hanzt

The Guild always gets what's owed. Most know this and pay their way. Those that don't might get a visit from Hanzt, known to those that fear him only as The Pathogen. Using a variety of alchemical concoctions to inflict pain, he always gets an answer.

The victims who lived whispered about the ways he uses potions to burn, zap, elicit delirium, elicit truth, or fear. Maybe he'd just keep you alive and let one of the other enforcers unleash their own simpler brand of violence.

Justified and encouraged by other Guild members, it took him a long time to question the ethics of his actions. Coin for The Guild was the only ethic that was preached, and he'd known no other family. He'd not remember his blood-relations, only the feeling of eeking out an existence on the street as a child, and the first hot meal he'd earned from a low-rank Guild officer.

Usually he'd interrogate scumbags and lowlifes, but after taking orders from one of the Guild's Made-Men, he found himself face-to-face with a truly innocent husband, wife, and newborn. You don't say no to The Guild, so left with no choice he turned on his once-allies and freed the young family.

Now forever on the run from The Guild, he can only attempt to atone for his past life, and prove to himself that there is good within himself that is worth redemption. To maintain anonymity, the braid and beard that had once made him notorious had to go.

The hunt beneath the temple should have felt like redemption. Instead, the visions of what the ritual claimed — hundreds? thousands? — have settled into Hanzt's quiet hours like a slow poison. He knows well how to brew something that dulls the mind, and he has turned that knowledge on himself. Flasks appear as if from nowhere — tucked inside his coat, wedged behind his kit — and he reaches for them more often than he would like to admit. The alchemy that once made him feared has become the instrument of his own unravelling.