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Durdekedohedron the Wicked
A character featured in the novel 'Til Time is No More. Durdekedohedron, known as Durden to most, was always an ill tempered and disagreeable sort. Despite this, it was not until he discovered the Dagger of Many Pokings that his true destiny was revealed. He would become known as one of the most wicked killers in the history of Battal. So evil was he that the name Durdekedohedron, fairly popular at the time, has almost completely fallen out of common use.
It started out simply enough, in a disused windmill he had pried open to see if anything remained there that was worth looting. Under some burlap sacks and years of dust, Durden spotted a glint of something shiny. Shiny, of course, equals valuable. When he pulled out the dagger, he had no idea of its otherworldly origin, all he was sure of was that when he held it in his hands and thrust is just so it was a feeling like coming home.
Being physically unremarkable, Durden passed unnoticed through the taverns and inns of Battal, killing when he felt like it, always with the brutal 64 stab precision killing move for which he became infamous, and never when there were any witnesses.
Durden was never caught, the authorities having bigger issues to deal with, what with the events of the Great War of Magiks and Things going on, noone even stopped to count the number of deaths from this rogue serial killer until well after his death. And his death was almost as sudden and random as his life, being conscripted into the war when the local constabulary came into the tavern where Durden was staying and "volunteered" every able bodied man there to join the army.
It was not until after the war, when other matters where being attended to, that the sherrif of Dundersville, Sander Sarif, began putting together the case and reconstructing what had happened.
In all Sherrif Sarif counted at least 15,000 murders of Battal that Derden was probably responsible for over a 2 year span.
Meanwhile, on the other side of time, the Chronoclave, who has a whole panel of fact checkers, log checkers, and chronological cross checkers, thought this to be quite suspicious. As is their policy, they dispatched one of their agents, a certain Fendor Dalt, to investigate whether so many deaths in such a short period, by just a single individual was the result of some sort of "chrono-tinkering."
What Dalt discovered was that no time manipulation was involved. Instead, he found a time of chaos and disorder, where a murderer could go unchecked from tavern to inn, sowing the seeds of discord and death, unchecked by a society that in many other ways was falling apart.
Dalt realized, during his conversation with Durden at the Nikbix Nushka Tavern, that he was the only one who knew, who would know for years, that this quiet man he was talking to was a simmering cauldren of wickedness, just short of boiling over at all times.
Dalt looked over the brim of his frosty mug at the man sitting across the bar. Terrible deeds this darkly still man had already committed. So many more deaths were in his future as well. So much loss. Such senseless killing. No... There was no manipulation of Timenes here. Only evil. True evil in the posession of a particularly pointy dagger.
That was it. His investigation was over. He could go home. But could he really? Could he bring himself, the only person who is alive at this moment who realizes what this man is, the only one who could stop all the suffering, could he just allow the murders to continue?
Fendor Dalt's internal conflict of causality over morality drive him to the brink of madness. Although he comes close at times to intervening, ultimately he merely bears silent witness to the attrocities, and in the end, goes home.
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