Age: 24
Height: 2 meters (just over six feet and six inches)
Weight: 90.7 kg (200 lbs.)
Race: Human
Birthdate: August 22, 1979
Place of Birth: Melbourne, Australia - Earth
Place of Current Residence: Ardel Estates, Old-Era Ayenee
He found pulled through that instrument his very own heartstrings, although he could not possibly articulate it so at such a tender age. The gap was not yet peered into with seeing eyes, but even that which rose and tickled his lids painted a picture. Translation was always an awkward thing and so the fingers moved only as they could to find the right hues and the proper strokes.
This is not to say that he suffered specifically for want of a father. On the contrary he imagined himself to enjoy a great deal of freedom without such a figure, and although his mother tended toward a lowered foot, this was precisely what he had. As an artist the woman detested his father, having found him inspirational for long enough to marry him, in fact charmed by his negativity, but grown increasingly hateful of him as he worked less and less and distrusted more and more. Above discipline Nicholas was subject to many an extended speech of his father, of what an awful, unproductive fool he'd been. If there was any suffering to come from his father, that was it.
In the same it was inspiration, however. As much as his mother criticized the man who helped create him, she put into him a sense of art as emotional accomplishment; should he cope with his emotions strictly through violence, frustration and weeping, he was a failure. One who did not make something for each step along the road was wasting his life. Inspiration untaken was death.
For this he created something for each little pain and, not having much to speak of at an early age, he showed not creativity at that time precisely, but a definite grace. Even little fingers danced something lovely across piano keys, and so that friend of his mother's taught him songs, the classics. Through all of his life he would retain these as if the motions were built into his fingers, and he need only call on a certain movement to begin the chain needed for a particular song.
In his teens, however, he abandoned the piano on most accounts, favoring music more of his generation. His passion for art never waned, but changed almost stubbornly into one catering to things more abrasive. Intellectually Nicholas had always been advanced, but just the same it had always neared the point of disease; one who thought too much may indeed dig himself an early grave. So grand his thoughts and so mixed with creative urges were they that he frightened himself, could not stop himself and therefore self-prescribed a need for heroin, most terribly, though he'd long been fond of drink and even today smokes a great deal when faced with stresses.
The band was good. The band toured, after Nicholas graduated high school, burning an eternal mark into it with his artistic endeavors, as well as his confident, sometimes pretentious attitude and lack of qualms about coming to school under certain influences. Near the end of the year he'd been introduced to, and become enamored with, the most notable of his girlfriends (he'd only had two before, both crazy bitches as he was now concerned, the sort to inspire the most bitter of songs at their departure), one Keira Slade. Three years older than himself, she was the sort of woman most men lusted after in secret, for hers was a sense that doing such would taint her. She, too, was a pianist, though much more subdued than the man she loved for years (and still loves now, no doubt). They had their similarities, though, and it was those which inevitably caused Nick's false death.
Seemingly inborn in Nicholas was a misanthropic tendency more often swallowed, inherited from his father. Ms. Slade, too, had it, although not once had she pulled away its bonds and let it hiss and scream as it wished, as Nicholas had allowed on isolated occasion. No, she was more inclined to curl herself beside a window and wonder what a lover was doing so far away from her, how he could possibly be faithful in his occupation, being attractive as she found him. Trust was to come with love but never could she be in a relationship without that occasional tickling, a tickling that would become a scream as it persisted, untreated by her love's presence.
Upon coming back Nicholas found his beloved estranged, found her quietly suggesting that they be apart for a time. The issue of whether he'd done a thing unfaithful while he was away needed to be sorted out within her own self, and after struggle this was precisely what was allowed.
There were always places dank and dangerous when they were needed. A shack beside the swampland became his torture chamber, a place in which to sprawl out when the medicines became the man. Eventually it came about that he strut through the heart of the fen itself, and it was into this black muscle that he became swallowed, too intoxicated to avoid what he knew to avoid and even so, too weak to pull himself back toward life.
Death's lights did not consume him, however. At the opportune moment he turned aside and found himself in a most hellish realm, or so it appeared for years. Stuck without medicine, without sustenance he suffered greatly, finding solace only when a friend from the touring days revealed himself to be in similar shape. This was a realm of magics, however, and from a mage, eventually to him there was given a necklace. At least, this was the form it took. It was, in fact, composed of millions of insect-like creatures of that golden hue, all of whom could catch the direction of their wearer's thoughts and create a vessel around him, so that he might be brought where he desired to go.
There was a grave, though. An empty grave, a headstone, flowers regularly placed. For a year and a half he'd been dead to his home, and could not return but as an assumed ghost. In secret he bought things he felt he needed, long having kicked his addictions to heroin and alcohol, but ever prolonging his need for nicotine. Clothes, too, for in that realm of death there was nothing he felt comfortable wearing. It was here that he, after times of mourning his Keira, found his wife, that he found Heaven
. . .And Hell soon thereafter, when insanity and alcoholism served as the brothers to push wife and daughter away.