The Normal Times

Paul Dion is the patriarch of the House of Dion. He is known most as the heir of the most ruined House in Palmetto.

The “Good Revolution” was at its peak when Paul was only four years old. Once his family was incarcerated he was placed in the children’s holding facility on Rook Island. He was taunted almost daily by facility guards as his House fell, gleefully informing him when another of his relatives was executed. House Dion had been one of the most powerful in Palmetto, a steady rival to House Bourbon for the top seat. But House Dion had garnered far more bitter enemies with their particular brand of cruelty. The Directory decided to make an example of them. 

As his early years passed by in the facility, Paul became obsessed with fitness and strength building. Likely to combat the feelings of helplessness fostered by the smirks of the guards he had to endure during his foundational years. When his fellow detainees, the heirs of Houses Bourbon and Montjoy, developed an illicit fighting ring in the facility with the help of some bribed guards, Paul volunteered to be their prize fighter. Paul was a skilled fighter then and still is even as he begins his middle age, but in the end, he felt that he had never been regarded as a peer by the other imprisoned heirs. This sentiment would be confirmed after the boys all aged out of the facility. The fighting ring had been the closest he’d gotten to friendship in his long childhood, and when he found himself a (somewhat) free adult, he was shrugged off by his former bunkmates. Over his life, this developed into an obsessive and specific hatred for the Houses of Bourbon and Montjoy. 

A youth full of humiliation, betrayed trust, and bitterness made Paul into a cruel and unfeeling husband for his assigned wife and an utter terror as a father. He raised his three children tyrannically, judging any act of theirs that didn’t work for the House of Dion as bordering on treason. He gradually became a heavy drinker, but hardly shows evidence of it. In social calls, Paul is very self-possessed and could be dangerously charming on a whim. His primary focus, ever since his release at age twenty, has been to regain as much of the losses of his House as he could in his lifetime and set his sons to the same task for when he was gone.

You can read more about Paul here.