Tantalus was born in a primarily dark elf small farming village, on the outskirts of the silver state of Haelun’or. He was the only child of his parents, Fr father being a travelling bard who had fallen for a local farmer’s daughter, his mother. While his father no longer told stories for money, he would often tell his son some of his favorite tales, inspiring a love of stories in him. This love of stories and knowledge, which eventually became more of an addiction, drove him to steal from his neighbors(his family was not very well off financially), so as to pay a wandering merchant to teach him to read. The books he used his newfound talnets to read were mostly of other cultures, causing him to have a vastly different outlook on life than his communal and expressive neighbors. He got away with stealing from them to pay for books from the travelers who occasionally passed through his insignificant backwater until he was sixteen. Unluckily for him, at that age he was caught in the act by one of his neighbors, branded as a thief, and subsequently banished from his village. He then, having read to many stories about heroes surmounting impossible odds through the power of friendship, traveled to the Eternal Library, hoping to become a scholar there. After a year on the road, having been kidnapped and robbed by bandits so often that he was left with nothing but a loincloth, he arrived at the library, only to be promptly denied due to A. His Race, B. His lack of qualifications, and C. the fact that he was practically naked. Following that shattering rejection, he lived life much like he lived it in his home village, stealing what he could to make ends meet, and get his hands on whatever sort of magical related thing he could find. He also began running cons to sponsor it, wherein, due to the anger those who he swindled, he began to cover his face with hooded robes. This was also done to hide the thief brand his village had scarred his face with. All of the”magic” tomes he bought were, of course, hoaxes. He still nursed his dream of becoming a great and powerful ruler/mage, and hoped that it would eventually come to fruition.
