Thorstmixx

Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”

((How do you respond?))
 

Arthwyn eases himself down onto the indicated cushion, brushing the road from his trousers and an errant strand of brown hair behind the telltale point of his half-elven ear. "My story? It isn't much yet," he tells the crone truthfully. "But I suppose I can tell you what little there is so far."

"I was born in a tiny village on the edge of heartlander territory. Too quiet a place for anyone to remember it, nameless to history and the world at large. My father was the blacksmith there, and from the day I could lift a hammer, he set me to work in the forge. I was good at it. Could have spent my whole life there, beating steel into swords."

He pauses, rubbing his palms together, almost anxiously. "But my mother... she wanted something else for me. She worked with small magicks; trinkets, charms bits of artifice like that. Nothing grand, but enough to show me that there as more to the world than my father's workshop. She said I had the spark for it. And the day I got that idea in my head the village felt too small for me."

"One day I packed my things and follwoed the pull out into the wider world. My father hasn't forgiven me for leaving the forge behind, but I couldn't stay. Not when I knew there was so much more out here. Places like this... and people like you." He gestures at the mysterious old crone, no doubt a great sorceress in her own right. He glances around the dim tent, then finally meets her eyes. "So now I make my way however I can. Mend steel when needed, swing it when I must, and I'll try to learn whatever scarps of sorcery or craft I can get my hands on. I'm no mage or master smith. Not yet. But I'm young, and I work hard, and the world is wide enough that maybe I'll carve out a place of my own one of these days."

He shrugs lightly. "That's why I'm here, I suppose. Still looking for where that road leads."