Zerrias (Zeal) Eddison

Zerrias grew up in Beregost, a large town along the Sword Coast known as a popular merchant stop. He grew up comfortably and was well cared for, and because of his family’s money had a basic education. A bit of a shy child, he spent a lot of time reading all manner of books.

His parents had started making deals with Mammon, the Archdevil of Minauros. The family began participating in rituals to communicate with and summon a variety of fiends to do the bidding of this particular arch devil.

Zerrias was forced to participate in these summonings, but he soon became too difficult to work with because of his fear. The imagery began haunting his nightmares and left him emotionally and physically (on his left hand) scarred.

Fearing he would seek help at the local temple to Lathander, his sister, Lilith, was tasked with keeping a close eye on him. When the family was meant to participate in a ritual, and either he was not meant to be there or was too difficult to convince, Zerrias was locked in his room for the duration.

There came a day when the family and others under the same orders attempted to summon a duke of Mammon’s to the Material Plane. Sensing trouble was afoot, Lathander sent Xanthanel Syral and a handful of Planetars to eliminate the threat and make a very clear statement about what wouldn’t be tolerated.

• On arrival, Xan casted Detect Good and Evil, immediately pinpointing not only the ritual and it’s participants, but a small celestial ping in the building. Assuming the ping was a captured celestial, Xan and the Planetars took care of the threat first, stopping the ritual and destroying all of its participants.
• Upon circling back to rescue the celestial, they instead found Zerrias.

Xan, recognizing Zerrias possessed a Divine Soul, sat with him to calm him and converse.

• Xan brings him to the local Lathanderian temple for safe keeping
• Does not explicitly tell Zerrias that they are responsible for killing his family at first, but implies it later.
• After establishing a rapport with Zerrias over a few months, Xan tracks down and sends a letter to his grandfather, Eddisar, whom retrieves Zerrias and brings him to Aiben to live with his aunt/uncle/cousin in the small village of Eastcliff located in northeastern Aiben.

Zerrias lives with his aunt, uncle, and cousin for the remainder of his childhood and young adulthood. While he was extremely shy and reserved at first, his cousin Makera ended up being the only one who could really break him out of his shell. As he grew older he gained more confidence and his outgoing personality really began to shine, but for better or worse, Zeal came to rely on her to feel secure.

Xanthanel also often visited Zerrias, primarily through dream conversations they'd have multiple times a week, and they began to form an extremely close father/son relationship. Zerrias often sought Xanthanel's advice, who responded with honesty, and Xan became invested in seeing Zerrias grow into a stronger person. Xan was also impressed with Zerrias' hunger for knowledge and discovered he was a very quick study.

Zerrias eventually became a teacher at the library to help the kids in the village get some semblence of a good education. He focused mostly on maths and sciences, but became frustrated with the lack of knowledge and teaching material he had access to to both satisfy his students' and his own curiosity. When not even the nearby city's library was enough for him, he began to sneak into the local university's library without permission, much to Xan's chagrin. Zerrias' hunger for knowledge and lack of access to it became a bit of a running theme.

Despite this, Xan was aware of Zerrias' potential to be a force of empathatic good, and wanted to see him grow and flourish regardless of his restrictions and struggles. On his 21st birthday, they granted him magic through means of a Warlock pact (even though his colleagues opposed the idea).

Additionally, after deliberating about what the perfect one would be with Makera for several months, Zerrias took on the virtue name of Zeal.

Zeal and Makera travel to Faerun on a research project for Xan. After a short run-in in Baulder’s Gate dealing with the Cult of Zariel, they went to Candlekeep to do said research. The project was mostly a failure, and on coming back, they find their grandfather, Eddisar, expects them to adventure with him and participate in the Great Hunt for the Arts.

The Great Hunt was an event put on by the then-ruler of Aiben to find a lost artifact important to Aiben's history. By employing 100 teams to go out and find the artifact, he believed that at least one would be successful, and offered a prize beyond anyone's imagination for finding it. Unfortuantley, nearly every other nation, political leader, and extraplanar entity wanted to get their hands on it, and this hunt sparked a rat race to see who could get to it first.

It was a series of extremely dangerous events where the party was pushed to their limits physically and emotionally. Zeal was expected to find this artifact and deliver it to the gods of the upper planes or lose Xanthanel forever, nearly lost Makera to a tangled web of dealing with alternate versions of herself, reunited with his sister Lilith after being separated for literal decades only to find she was working with the gods of the lower planes, took on the responsibility of raising a Couatl, and numerous other crazy events that your typical campaign goes through.

In the end, everythign worked out - the extraplanars agreed on what to do with the artifact, the bbeg was defeated, and fallen allies were ripped away back to life from the chaos plane they were sent to upon their deaths.

After the events of the campaign mostly calm down, Zeal spends some of his time slowly moving over from Warlock to Xanthanel to Paladin of Lathander, and letting his innate abilities as a Sorcerer take front seat in terms of his magical abilities. Taking the Oath of the Watchers, Zeal spends the rest of his life (and afterlife) striving to uphold the agreements and accords that the extraplanars have put in place to keep the peace among the planes.

In his domestic life, Zeal goes on to live with his boyfriend/partner Zala and flops between professions of being a school teacher and researcher.

He was given the opportunity to study at a prestigeous university with a full ride, but he found he absolutley detested the snobby academic culture that permeated the school system, and dropped out. He gained most of his knowledge and connections by ravenously consuming any book he could get his hands on and taking on apprenticeships in the fields he was passionate about. There were folks within the field of Planar Physics who did not like him for his lack of "a real eductaion" but he was an academic force to be recgonized with. He identified and studied waht he came to call Quantum Will Particles (QWPs) and how they influcned the world around them.

Posthumusly, QWPs were named after him (Zeals).

He adopted three children with Zala - Milo(Halfling) and Gordon(Halfling/Goliath) the two half brothers, and Patience(Patty) an aaisamar baby that needed a home after a time-travel incident with one of Zeal's former students.

Zeal spent a little bit of his time in the afterlife resting after a long 90+ years of life, but quickly got bored and marched right up to Lathander's door saying he was ready to join up. After a test simply for formality, he was accepted and made into a Solar to join up with Xanthanel's team of information gatherers.

After some time, Zeal breaks off from Xan's team and gets more into research of extraplanar anomolies. He spends less time on the field and more time on Elysium working out complex math and digging into quantum problems of Willpower and Arcana.

Ever a teacher, Zeal becomes known for taking on an incredible number of warlocks at any given time. His love for knowledge and the aquisition of it leads him to take on students with a hungry mind. A singular exception, Zoë, gains the status as his warlock simply because she is related to him by blood (through Patience, specifically).

He spends his free time visiting with his friends and family across the different planes, and lives with Zala in their home in Elysium.

Zeal hates with all his mind and body that Quantum Will Particles were named after him and still insists on calling them QWPs instead.

In an apoloyptic level event that nearly wiped out all extraplanars out of existance, Zeal's body is shattered and his mind is broken into fragments. The biggest fragment is left with his only current warlock, Zoë, who is trying to find all his lost pieces so he can be put back together.