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He's a giant, buttery slab of manhood with long, flowing, ebony locks and a body that makes every single perfect beauty sigh longingly...
...is anyone actually buying this?
Harold is, by typical Rhy'Din standards, an extremely mundane individual in a fantastical realm. Likely the second-shortest human male at five and a half feet tall, he has brown hair (usually cut short-back-and-sides), dark brown eyes and he's actually over thirty years old. Which, by typical Rhy'Din standards, means he has one foot in the grave. He's likely also the only person in the realm who speaks in a Welsh accent -- in a world with a lot of Irish, Scots and even English, he's about the only representative of the lesser known part of the British Empire.
He lived the kind of life on Earth that few people could comprehend: That of a merchant mariner in the last era of sail, and the sharp rise of steam. Unlike most officers who served a four year apprenticeship to get their certificates and command positions, Harold crawled up through the ranks the hard way, through the hawsepipe.
Said by an author who wrote about the men of that era:
"Day after day, week after week, summer or winter, wind-ship sailors endured just the sort of battering wind and deluge we were comfortably observing. They went aloft a hundred feet or more on icy ratlines and footropes, up masts that could whip to and fro through ninety degrees of arc in a few seconds, to grapple with homicidal sails, certain death just one small mistake, a slip, away. In leaky oilskins, always soaked, no heat or light in their squalid fo’c’s’les, malnourished, scurvy -- the sailor’s ancient bane -- still a possibility even at the end of the nineteenth century.
"One writer, a square-rigger sailor himself, coined the phrase 'the Cape Horn breed' to describe the men who worked the beautiful, widow-making deep-sea sailing ships in their dying days. It felt apt to me. Those seamen’s work was fraught with so much danger, their plane of discomfort such true suffering, that the men who matter-of-factly did it seemed remote and alien, like shadowy warriors in old and vanished wars." -Derek Lundy
The brutality and hard living meant that he didn't get to be a child for all that long; by the time he was fifteen, he was living in an extremely adult world. The sea became his life, and his career became the focus of his whole existence; where other seamen boozed and whored around in ports, Harold firmly fixed his sights on climbing the ranks and becoming a master mariner.
It was no small thing to become even an AB (able-bodied seaman) in any era; to be called one meant you were a master before the mast of your profession. Harold climbed to that position quickly, in about four years, then continued on to third mate (something equivalent to bos'un), before sitting and gaining his second mate's certificate. Life was not easier on the after-deck; it only meant a different set of duties and responsibilities on top of that of an AB. Most second mates disliked being expected to both carry out the duties of an officer and the men; Harold loved it, loved being in command but still able to climb rigging and work.
But the rise of steam made his last berth under sail, now a newly minted first mate, one of the very last times that he was in the world he really belonged in. He was a throw-back; a man who should have been born in an earlier era, and the swift paced world that Earth was becoming made him feel almost consistently left behind.
He was still very adaptable, though, and quick to learn: He made the jump to steam and quickly proved his mettle there as well, though in his heart, he longed for the windjammers. The world of steam, especially in the passenger trade, was far more civilized and time-tabled; he gained his master's certification and eventually would have had his own command. But steam wasn't without its dangers; even the big, steady coal-burners could run into trouble.
Eventually, one did.
Harry ended up in Rhy'Din shortly thereafter. His continuity is screwy, and he had spent some time as a lawyer; suggested by a friend because he liked to argue, he thought 'what the Hell? Why not?' and sat the bar independently after a year of hitting the books whenever he wasn't doing odd jobs. He failed the first time and passed the second time, and was friends with a Rhy'Din PD detective named Kit who he later represented in a medical malpractice suit. That was between 1998 and 1999.
The next time he was in Rhy'Din was in 2001, this time with a friend he had met in a previous metaphysical adventure named Archie Kennedy. Harold, who had been on his own in almost every sense since he was fourteen, rather had to learn all over again what it was to be connected to people, and not just his career.
The Maritime gave him that chance; unable to find a ship (and initially not understanding that Rhy'Din wasn't even in the same realm as Earth), Archie and him opened the Maritime in hopes of earning enough money to buy one and sail home.
Except, there were people and he had to serve them, learn to talk to them, and inevitably, become attached to some of them. The strongest connection he had made to date was to Archie -- the optimistic, cheerful, sun-shiny English pup offset the somewhat dour, not entirely stable then, twenty-eight year old Harry. That connection only got stronger as they worked together on the business, and they balanced each others' natures.
Then came the staff and regulars. Sirin captivated him when she stormed in, and he already felt kind of hot and bothered to her by the end of the night -- here was a woman, another sailor, a bos'un's mate. Beautiful, passionate, a bit crazy but extremely tough. They had a wary relationship, though, him too afraid of what she could do to him to make a move on her; her too filled with wanderlust to commit to him later when he did finally ask her. Pacey was another; tough, but sweet, Harry and her got off to a rocky start but she quickly become one of his closest confidants.
There were several others, as well. And suddenly, Harry had a family again. Admittedly a dysfunctional one, but where life had been all career before, life was now working with them. And quietly he decided, along with Archie, to stay in Rhy'Din.
It didn't last.
Everyone drifted away, one way or another, and Harry was left alone and shocked and broken-hearted in the Maritime's empty walls. It took him about a year to fall to pieces after everyone he'd grown to love had vanished on him, some without a trace, but he did. And in late 2003 when he found the strength to open the doors again, he was not the same man he'd been before. Gone was a lot of his high-wired temper; he was stable again, but it was hard won and there were a lot of old wounds left unhealed.
Harry was the center of the Maritime. Not because he wished to be, but simply because he was. As time went on, he lived to care for the place and the people that came and went. And deep down inside, hoping that those he loved and lost would come home.
Sometimes they did; Sirin first, and she and Harry tried to make a go of a relationship. But Sirry didn't stick around -- she vanished for months at a time, only to show up briefly and intermittently, and distantly, and left Harry (who was extremely committed to making it work) to wait and wonder and hope.
Then Lilith came in. Another strong woman, but stable; she could fight and live on the road, but she could also commit. And Harry and her had an instant chemistry, but since he was loyal to Sirin, he didn't act on it. But Lil was good for him -- she reignited some of his old attitude, and the two of them spent a month in the Underdark, killed a whole house of drow to stop some raiding on the surface, and became almost inseparable.
It was in Avalon, both of them rather desperate, that Harry gave into how he felt and he and Lil spent some time rolling around in the high grass outside of the catacombs. Not his most shining moment, admittedly -- not because he didn't feel strongly for Lil, but because he still had his commitment to Sirry, even if she hadn't committed back. A half-year more passed before Harold, finally realizing that he would never be able to make it work, told Sirin goodbye.
Archie came back, though it took almost two years before they mended their fences; there was a lot of hurt on both sides. Harry trying to reconnect with his best friend, Archie thinking that he himself was worthless and not worth the effort and therefore vanishing for long periods before coming back to act, pretty much, like an ass. It took a big blowup between them before they started to face up to what happened.
Lily had gone to the Hartwood (her home) that spring, and never quite came back. She only visited twice in October, a different woman, broken, before she drifted away for good. She and Harry had had a good period between when they were reunited after his shipwreck but before her trip, and they were engaged to be married. He saw her off on her trip home, never knowing he'd never see the woman he loved again, only twice a shadow of her.
But he persevered anyway; he and Archie were at least on good terms, and in their finest hours, they were able to hold each other up when life became too much for one or the other to bear alone. Despite the heartache that came with losing Lily, Harry was pretty damned optimistic about his life in December of 2006, when he and Archie agreed to help a stranded girl find her way home.
It became a nightmare. Some literally bad things happened -- a bandit raid, for one. But the emotional nightmare that came with the girl and the trip did the most damage.
Archie drifted away, and Harry, still in a bad way after all that had happened, found evermore elaborate ways to try to cope on his own. He worked hard on the Al Na'ir, and when it was finished, he roamed around and tried to distract himself. He cracked badly once and tried to go north, to a mythical portal where he could go back in time and change everything -- Archie chased him down and stopped him.
He came home, losing more and more hope as time went on, searching for more and more ways to escape that hurt. He made some acquaintances, but didn't trust them enough to let them in. He slept with Kitty Helston, a wildly uncharacteristic one-night-stand for a man who prized emotional commitments. He tried to set up a trading run for the Al Na'ir, hoping that going to sea might save him. He tried everything he could think of.
But there came a quiet point on the docks when he realized that he was just doing all of it because he was finding ways not to give up. That he was, essentially, just waiting to die.
So he set his affairs in order, put his beloved Browning HP to his chest, and fired on the Ides of March.
No one really saw that coming, and a lot of people were left reeling. Archie had to face up to trying to live a life without the one person who had always been there for him, consistently, and who he knew was suffering but didn't want to believe the depth of it. Renne went mad, bit by bit, until he turned into a serial killer. Kitty, Victor, Vicfryn and several others grieved the loss of a decent man. But at least for Harry, there wasn't anymore scrambling desperately against the heartbreak; he no longer had to try to keep fighting a losing battle alone.
But Archie had made a friend (or two) over the years, in far more powerful positions, and completely against his will, Harry was dragged back to the living world in late June. Archie had done a lot of growing up in the meantime, and pretty much firmly planted himself between Harry and his wish to finish the job properly.
It took time and an insane amount of conversation, and it took a lot of trying to pick through old hurts and newer ones, but eventually Harry slowly gave up on the idea of offing himself. Even now, he's not entirely sure where or how he fits into the living world, but at least he's not wishing for his Browning back to finish himself off.
In the current days, he's ended up on the opposite side of the court room from Renne, and Archie has gone off to go teach and wait for Harry to finish his business in the city so that they could get their lives back on track and try to live happily for a change, instead of always waiting for the next blow to fall. How he's going to handle this, or anything in the future, is always up in the air.
But ultimately, he's still Harold. His best strengths and worst weaknesses are the same things: His intensity, and his humanity.
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