House of Dion

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” peaked when Paul was but four years old. When his family was incarcerated he was placed in the children’s holding facility on Auview Island. He was taunted almost daily by facility guards as his House fell. Guards gleefully informed him when another of his relatives was executed and would sometimes even fabricate deaths to taunt him. The House of Dion had been one of the most powerful in Palmetto, a steady rival to the House of Bourbon for the top seat. But House Dion had garnered far more bitter enemies with their particular forms of cruelty to their subjects. Much of this was amplified by propaganda, as the Directory had made a scapegoat of the House of Dion. 

As he grew up 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 was asked to be their prize fighter. Naive, lonely, and eager for some resemblance to the Old Way, he quickly agreed. Paul was indeed a great 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, he had been more their beast of burden. This sentiment would be confirmed, to Paul, upon the release of those held at 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 once again found himself friendless. Over his life, this developed into an obsessive and specific hatred for the Houses of Bourbon and Montjoy. 

A beginning of humiliation, betrayed trust, and bitterness made Paul into a cruel and unfeeling husband for his assigned wife and an utter terror of a father. In social calls, however, Paul was very self-possessed and could be dangerously charming on a whim. He became a heavy drinker, but hardly shows evidence of it. He raised his three children tyrannically, judging any act of theirs that didn’t work for the House of Dion as bordering on treason. 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. A sharp climb for the House rendered from a predominant Highland position to a battered Lowland one.