Darien Rusk

Darien Rusk was a provincial officer of the Veinwright army who became commander of the rebellion that ended it. He is remembered by turns as the hero of the Free Provinces, the coward of Lareth Plain, and the man around whom the Apocalypse Horde first gathered.

He was no court lord. He commanded the garrison at Blackwater Ford, a weathered soldier with a scar across his cheek from the same campaigns that made General Tharos famous, and he had spent too many winters watching distant decisions arrive as empty granaries and unpaid soldiers. When an order under Tharos’s seal told him to crush the levy protests with whatever force was required, he refused, reported it, and left his post. The army called it desertion; he called it resignation for the rest of his life. The order had been forged.

He led the western provinces with narrow, practical demands — an end to the winter levy, suspension of the mine debts, restoration of the provincial councils — and when the crown refused them he won the war’s first great battle, at Halren’s Bridge, and became a hero with songs already being written about him. He never wore it comfortably. From that victory on he was the rebellion’s voice for restraint, and he learned too late that his cause had been financed and steered by the Gilded Coven and the Shadow Weavers for their own ends.

The rebellion outgrew him. Warbands followed their own chieftains, officers ran provinces as private holdings, and when three of his commanders marched against the Justicar’s Legion at Lareth Plain over his objections, he kept his companies out of it. The rebel army was destroyed in a day, and he was called a coward for having been right.

He gave himself up to the Legion and was held as a witness for the Grand Inquest, then escaped during a transfer west — an escape the Shadow Weavers allowed, so that he would be convicted in absence and discredited rather than heard. He found the last survivors in a quarry in the western wilds and was blamed to his face for what the war had cost them. How he died is not known. Some say he fell protecting refugees from an early Horde warlord, some that Mara Venn executed him, and a Horde song holds that he tore away his own name and became the first Uncrowned Warlord.

He was the only leader in that war to stand in front of the people he had lost and be told to his face what it had cost them.