Darrel Mytura (Bio)

"And this time, I mean to be sure that they never return. This time their defeats, their deaths, will be final. Whatever the cost."

— Darrel Mytura

Darrel Mytura is a playable character in Interloper War created by Cream04849.

Appearance

Darrel is a tall figure with a heavy musculature earned through rigorous training and exercise. His silver-blonde hair falls to mid-neck and, when not brushed aside, hangs just across his eyes. Of late his hair hangs lank, unwashed and plastered with dust, dirt and grime. After six months of guerrilla warfare, he now sports a thick blonde beard. Despite his unkempt appearance, though, his gray-gold gaze is still powerful as ever.

He girds himself in the garb of a Hylian knight of old. White trousers and under tunic, over which he wears a short sleeved shirt of chain mail and a crimson surcoat trimmed in gold with a golden sunburst on the back. Both chain mail and surcoat fall to mid thigh and are belted at the waist. On his hands he wears leather gauntlets inlaid with steel plates, with matching steel-plated leather boots on his feet. Again due to his months waging a guerrilla campaign in the southwestern woods, his clothes are filthy, stained by sweat, dirt, and blood, and the armor he wears is tarnished and spotted by patches of rust. Clamped about both wrists he wears a pair of Twili manacles which now are inscribed with spirit runes. The chains attached to those manacles, also bearing the runes of his element, are typically wound around his forearms, lest he have need of them.

Inventory

As previously mentioned, Darrel bears two heavy manacles, one on each wrist, and the chains linked to them. While wound around his arms and fists, he uses them like a huge pair of brass knuckles. He wears his legendary spirit-aligned sword, Morning's Edge, in a scabbard at his left hip. When necessary, Darrel can affix his sword to the end of one length of chain to create a new ranged weapon, the Horizon Lash.

Strengths

Darrel is a spirit mage of significant power. For all intents and purposes a master of his element, he can channel and manipulate spiritual energy in countless ways. He can manifest it into physical strength or into bursts of energy. He can sense the strength of one's spirit and he can also sense people via their spiritual energy. On top of all that he's a highly skilled swordsman and hand to hand fighter.

Weaknesses

Shadow magic is his primary weakness, as it can weaken or even nullify his powers. He is still a mortal man (more or less) and can be harmed by more mundane means. Due to what appear at least to be some similarities in aspect between shadow and Dusk, Darrel's abilities can also be potentially neutralized by prolonged exposure to the Twili mystical arts.

Background

Unlike his sometimes adversary, Isaac Telmar, Darrel was born with a world of opportunity laid out before him. An idealist in his youth, Darrel deigned to leave his family when he came of age and joined the Hylian army. Because of his family's affluence, he was taken on as squire and apprentice to a well-regarded knight and commander in the military, and Darrel learned much about the world and his place in it by watching from his master's shadow. In the course of his training, Darrel excelled in particular learning the sword, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he had learned all he could of knighthood from his teacher. Knighted in the field, Darrel parted ways with his mentor and took up an active role with the army.

Serving as a squad leader, Darrel was present from the very outset of the Imprisoning War. In the first days of the campaign, he began to develop of reputation, spread in whispers around army campfires, for surviving impossible circumstances where most or all others would inevitably fall. However, his uncanny ability in the field belied what he felt to be his greatest failing; while he survived and succeeded time and again, he could not always keep the members of his squads alive. He was a great warrior, but a poor commander, and try though he might he felt that he could never live up to the titanic warrior mercenaries, quickly coming to be known as the Light Warriors, who were fighting to protect the realm from its most lethal enemies.

This was never truer than on the day his commanding officer dispatched Darrel and his current squad southwest toward the desert, where they were to intercept an enemy column preparing to move into Hyrule proper. While encamped in a rocky valley, out of sight of the enemy, their position was somehow compromised. To this day Darrel cannot say for certain how the Gerudo found him out. They came howling out of the night with little warning, and though he tried desperately to rally his meager force against them, his fellow Hylian soldiers were swiftly butchered before his eyes. Unwilling to fall, alone facing dozens if not more than a hundred, Darrel avoided death or capture by plunging hundreds of feet into the swift waters of the river that separated the warring nations.

He nearly drowned in the brutal current, but eventually washed ashore some distance west of Lake Hylia, where he was dragged out of the water by a decrepit old hermit clothed in tattered rags. The hermit nursed him back to health in time, all the while engaging in endless, nigh-incomprehensible rambling. It was not until he was fully healthy once more, and made to part the old man's company, that the hermit attacked him with magic. Confused, assailed by forces he barely understood, Darrel's uncanny ability to survive rose to a new level. He would later learn—when the time came that the hermit revealed himself as the Second Scion of the Goddesses—that the unstoppable mutterings had been an incantation to coax out his latent sensitivity to spiritual energies. It all clicked into place for him, the spell mixed with bits and pieces of philosophical meditations and lessons. He found a previously untapped well of energy within himself, and for the first time allowed it to come fully to the surface. He repelled the attack, as the hermit had intended, and when he returned at last to the Hylian ranks, where his fellow soldiers had believed him dead with all the rest of his men, he did so as the Sunrise Knight, for as he left the hermit's hovel, the old man placed a new sword in his fist and named it Morning's Edge.

Thereafter, Darrel became a symbol. When he stepped out onto the field of battle with the light of a new day at his back, the Hylians did not lose a single battle. At worst they found themselves stalemated. It was perhaps this meteoric rise that brought the winged Helen to him. She was not Hylian, nor was she Gerudo or any other species he knew. She fought for Hyrule, but she did so on her own terms, a mercenary in her way, but destined to be far more. They met and their attraction was instantaneous, however Helen bore burdens and guilt that required Darrel to exercise persistence in wooing her. It was also his burgeoning reputation that brought upon him the attention of one particularly nasty agent of Ganondorf's will, the man known as Kinslayer.

Kinslayer tracked Darrel down on the battlefield at Dragmire's behest, and it was this event that signaled to all that Darrel had ascended beyond mere army officer status. Their first engagement was vicious and bloody, but it ended suddenly when Helen, who looked on from the side, was overcome by prophetic ecstasy. She proclaimed the pair of combatants bound to a distant fate, whereby one or both was destined to die at the hands of the other, and though the words passed through Helen's lips, they were delivered ultimately by the will and design of Chamdar Taliesin, who had orchestrated it to be so.

Repelled for the time being, Isaac and Darrel did not meet again until well after the Imprisoning War ended. They fought at least three times, each instigated by Isaac and each taking place outside of Hyrule, as Darrel and Helen had taken to wandering shortly after marrying. None of the fights proved to be the fated confrontation, and all ended predictably, as Chamdar had placed safeguards around them to forestall the escalation of any such clash until the conditions were right. In the course of these repeated clashes, Isaac grew obsessed and Darrel grew increasingly frustrated and dismissive. It was not until Isaac's harassment took on a deeply personal nature that Darrel fully comprehended the severity of the situation. After Helen was slain, Darrel began to hunt her murderer, pursuing him with thoughts of brutal vengeance on his mind, but Isaac slipped through his fingers time and again, until eventually the hopelessness of his pursuit became apparent to Darrel and he retired. He lived in relative obscurity and anonymity from then until the first days of the Interloper War, when Kinslayer's return and Hyrule coming once again under threat forced him to reprise his role as a defender of the realm.

Now: Unable at first to accept the mantle of leadership, Darrel's involvement in the interloper invasion was characterized, at least in his view, by the same kinds of failures of leadership that had been the hallmark of his earliest days. It was not until he was captured by Lord Grem, beaten and tortured in an attempt to break him, and it was not until the newest order of Light Warriors attacked the Twili encampment en masse to rescue him, among other things, that he began to take his position more seriously. Realizing that this new group of Light Warriors, dubbed by Mirra as the Daybreak Alliance, needed experienced leadership, he stepped forward to hold the group together, knowing that ultimately it was Kae and others who would have to take his mantle before the end. Since the end of season two, Darrel has been leading a small team of Hylian soldiers and (potentially) other Light Warriors in a guerrilla style campaign against the fringes of the massive Twili army, taking out scouts and advance posts, cutting supply lines, and generally attempting to deal the enemy the proverbial death by a thousand cuts. All the while he has been seeking any and every scrap of information about Isaac's activities, as he has faded into the background in recent months.