Rant

Rant
Rant by Shadaan
Biographical information
Race	Human/Teblor
Gender	Male
Family	Karsa Orlong (father) Sarlis (mother) Delas Fana (half-sister) Tonith Agra (half-sister) Synyg Orlong (grandfather) Pahlk Orlong (great-grandfather)

Rant was the half-Teblor bastard son of Karsa Orlong and Sarlis, a Human woman. Karsa had raped his mother while under the influence of Blood-oil during his raid of Silver Lake with Bairoth Gild and Delum Thord. Rant's mother had been driven half-mad by the taint of the oil and was eventually forced to become a prostitute to support herself and her son. The Teblor half-blood grew up unaware of the identity of his father.

Once he began to outgrow the settlement's adults before the age of nine, he became an outcast who was pelted by stones by the children who had once been his friends. At what he believed to be fourteen years of age, Rant was eight feet tall, towering over the adult residents of Silver Lake who looked up at him from chest-height. He was so often referred to as "Blood-oil bastard" that he came to believe that "Blood-oil" was his surname. His heavy-boned face, the mass of his body, and the set of his shoulders resembled his father's, while his eyes came from his mother. Like his Teblor sire, Rant possessed two hearts. Despite his size, he had the innocence of a child and little understood the world around him.

Rant and his mother lived in a house by the boat-yards of Silver Lake. Rant's room was in the attic loft overlooking the house's main room. Rant was fascinated by the various skulls that decorated the Three-Legged Dog tavern, including one of a Teblor mortared into the stones of its fireplace. The tavern's proprietor, Drunk Menger, had no more love for the "half-breed" than Silver Lake's other residents.

The half-Teblor's prized possession--and the only gift he had ever received--was a knife made of Aren steel given him by a Malazan Marine whose troop had passed through Silver Lake when the boy was five or six years old. The man had seen Rant dodging the stones thrown at him by his "friends" and offered the knife for when he became "tired of playing." It had a leather-bound grip, a short and stubby crosshilt, and a dented and scarred pommel. And it came with a battered and worn wooden sheathe with only a few flecks of gold and red paint still filling its carved patterns.

He wore the hide tunic common to the Teblor slaves of Silver Lake before their uprising, likely because it was the only garment that would fit him. His belt was a length of rope. He wore moccasins on his feet.

In The God is Not Willing

Rant's mother, Sarliss, got Rant to flee town by threatening her own life. He nearly drowned in Silver Lake, but was saved by Damisk who took him north.

(More information needed)

Trivia

When asked for the inspiration behind Rant's voice and sense of being, author Steven Erikson said he thought that Rant was "almost the equivalent of the Feral child" from old psychology textbooks, but not to the point where he possessed no language skills.

"In many respects, Rant's upbringing is a feral upbringing because his mother is in no condition actually to properly convey to her child the social conventions. She's incapable of doing so. So, he was a child who grew up in an imposed isolation, but was unaware of just how dysfunctional that isolation was. At the same time, physically he was going to be growing past all his contemporaries, which would further alienate him and isolate him.

So, it's very much a voice of a child whose only point of reference is in his own head. And to me there is something very tender in that, and I wanted to hold onto that tenderness in his voice. And so, in a lot of respects, a lot of his experience is that of an innocent being driven by forces outside his control to surrender that innocence in exchange for experience. And at the same time, Rant, because of the nature of his upbringing, and his personality, and the legacy, has a greater appreciation for innocence than any of us would."

Notes and references

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