Profile
A kajtlemta demon hunter, predator of predators and terror of terrors, able to endure the unendurable to see things through to the end.
A robust fellow, Zhenkajo is of deep-forest ancestry. His mother was a blacksmith, and his father the leader of the village rangers who would patrol the deep, quiet forests around their hidden home for potential threats. He remembers little about his childhood except for the fact that his pack-family, his terésh, secretly provided support to those valiant heroes who fought against the corruption of the Deceiver Spirit and his all-encompassing blood cult. When their minions found out, they captured his family and tortured them all to death—except for his youngest sister, who they exsanguinated upon the unholy altar as thousands of their acolytes leered with ravening gaze.
He escaped these depredations and was taken in by the heroes who his folks had once helped. They raised him, prepared to smuggle him off Rushédak into one of the hidden sanctuary domains of the fox-guardian spirits. But he would have none of that. In his heart he sought vengeance, but not primarily against the blood-besotted kajtlemta whose blind worship of their vile deity had plunged his homeworld into darkness. Instead, he found his calling in the exorcism and destruction of the heiyao demons, the whispering, grasping spirits who counted the Deceiver among their number.
In his war against the Deceiver Spirit's blood cult, he has been joined by a tight-knit group of allies who came to Rushédak to lend their aid to the faithful kajtlemta. Those who accompany him say that he is surprisingly easygoing while not on mission, irrepressably friendly and an accomplished prankster—the kajtlemta are notorious for their emotional resilience when socially situated, but his friends still wonder if this aspect of his personality is him suppressing the horrors of his past as best he can. When in the heat of battle, though, they have often glimpsed some measure of the anger and fury that smolders deep within his soul.
Few flesh-and-blood creatures have the tools necessary to fight heiyao. He manages through creative use of the supernatural energy that accompanies the shifting of forms, manipulated through the use of dangerous lishu. His weapon of choice is a Delineated bow whose sacred ward can bless the arrows it fires or imbue them with arcane properties. When confronted up close he wields a simple dagger crafted by his mother, a piece he snatched from her burning smithy before escaping from the village and a cherished memento. The exact purpose of his lantern he keeps a closely held secret, although many have deduced that its light supernaturally reveals the presence of heiyao while blinding them to his own presence.
Zhenkajo is also a formidable melee combatant in either the First or Second Forms, fighting with a savagery more characteristic of the blood cult's fanatics. Even compared to other deep-forest kajtlemta he is powerfully built, and he has been known to tear apart the unnatural monstrosities serving the heiyao limb by limb.
