Kharan Khatan

Pirate Warlord

Kharan Khatan was the most feared and reviled pirate warlord of pre-relay Geba. He lived roughly eight thousand years ago, in the Middle Dominion Age of the old Thazvaari Dominion, some two thousand years before the Geban chronicle begins. Contemporary accounts describe him as very tall and lean, with dark wool-like hair and eyes that reflected pure darkness. He was already infamous for atrocities across the Dominion and the Geban Sea when he came to command the last remnant of organized seaborne piracy, in the region's final age of maritime predation. He burned villages for pleasure, sank civilian ships out of boredom, and kept lieutenants as cruel as he was.

Siege of Kharan's Gulf

Nobody trusted or respected him. When the Thazvaari Dominion's forces drove the remaining pirates toward extinction, his plan was the only one that could delay death, so the remnant fleets followed him into the coastal inlet that would later carry his name. The blockade of Kharan's Gulf was his final act of defiance. He fortified the inlet, consolidated the remnant fleets, and held the position long enough that the geography itself became synonymous with what he had done there. He was regarded as the embodiment of free will, and he ruled without honor or loyalty, on the certainty that he was the only option left. There is no account of his death. He may have died at sea, or old and at peace.

What Survives of Him

His legacy survives in few places: the name of the Gulf, scattered accounts in archives that predate the relay system, and the rare bloodlines that still carry his surname. Generations later his descendants still carry that lineage as a stigma, and most of them deny the relation. The Children of Kharan, the largest pirate confederation on Geba, operating across inland Thazvaar and its coastal waters, took their name from his legacy whether his actual descendants wanted them to or not.