Raulus, son of Connolsk, was a barbarian of the northern Tarsis Forest, sometime around the year 867 Avard. The forests had been wild even during the height of the Karatikan Alliance, wherein the druids had ruled much of the land. In the aftermath of the druids' fall, the forests turned even wilder – and so did the men who lived there. Raulus grew to be chief of his people in a fairly short period of time, through brutal methods.

As the First Crusades wound up, many mages fled before the massed warriors of the Inquisition. Many of those mages perished in the wild, or were captured by the barbarian tribes that lived there. The barbarians learned that they could barter the mages with the crusaders. They feared the mages, because few of the tribes understood magic in any form. The occasional hedge-wizard or witch was burned at the stake or stoned to death, because out of their ignorance of magic came fear and hatred.

Raulus' tribe captured a mage fleeing his home town of Brevit (near what would one day become the capital of the Vridaran Empire). The mage, a woman by the name of Elsme of Brevit, was going to be burned at the stake by the fearful tribes. Raulus' lust pushed him to keep the mage alive a bit longer 'under his protection'. Elsme, seeing no other choice of survival but to woo the barbarian chief, convinced him that she could build him a weapon with which to cow all the other tribes. The barbarian chief seized upon the idea, and in his mind, he envisioned the power of a summer storm held in his hands – even as a storm raged about his village.

Elsme spent the next month slowly gathering the materials she needed, even convincing the barbarian chief to barter heavily for the ebonite ore. Threatening to turn the village smith into a toad if he didn't work the ebonite into a gauntlet, the mage finally constructed a thing of beauty, and of fear. The ebonite piece was a barbarian smith's interpretation of a fleeing mage's description of the crusaders' gauntlets. The village's smith then etched out and filled in the lightning bolts, hoping that his chief's first victim would be the mage that forced him to craft such a forbidden piece of magic.

Raulus went berzerk with power, once he used the gauntlet. He poured enough energy into Elsme's body to literally pop her head off. The poor smith was killed, as well – and then the entire village either fled or died at the hands of their chief. Raulus wandered about the Tarsis Forest for some years, killing anything or anyone that got in his path, until he died at the hands of another barbarian tribe.

The other tribe contrived to get rid of the forbidden, mage-constructed item, and had one of its warriors travel 'to the ends of the earth' to be rid of it. The warrior returned to his tribe, stating only that 'it was up to the gods' to ensure the gauntlet was never found again.

The Hand of Storms appears as a thickly-built, spiked gauntlet made of black ebonite, with platinum etchings in the form of lightning streaking up from the fingers and along the back of the forearm.