Lycomedes was the second born child of three, with both an older and younger brother. His parents have high expectations of his older brother Mycena, who is 46, to someday be a politician and raise the family’s social status. His younger brother Hollis, who is 12, is somewhat of an academic protegé and his parents spend a lot of their time and money making sure he has the best tutors available. Lycomedes has no particular talents that he knows of, which he has comes to terms with as he got older. Whilst this in and of itself doesn’t bother him, his parents tending to leave his needs to last does, thought he would never admit that.
When he was little, his older brother would always taunt and tease him, so he started spending a lot of time out in the forests to get away from him, coming to learn a lot about the forest and the animals that live there. When he was about 7, he started exploring further and further away from home, running faster and further away each day just to see where he ends up, and coming back each day. He did this for half of the year, while the weather was on his side. For the other half of the year, once the lakes had frozen over, he would go out there almost every day and teach himself to skate on the ice, using blade that he’d stolen from the blacksmiths and strapped to the bottom of his winter boots. Over time, he became quite a good ice skater and dancer, for somebody who’s never had any formal training, though he doesn’t know this as nobodies ever seen him skate.
After a few years of this, his brother eventually stopped his relentless teasing as he realised that Lycomedes had become significantly more physically able than him. At age 10, he was invited to play a game with some other kids in the forest. Whilst they were playing, Lycomedes fell down a ditch and broke his leg. The other kids carried on playing and forgot about him so he was stuck there and nobody even came to look for him until the day after.
After this he spent more and more time away from home and I’m the forests and came to have deeper understanding of the plants and animals there and they came to know him as well. Eventually he would disappear for a few weeks at a time, getting to know more and more of the forest until he could almost traverse a lot of it with his eyes closed. He still loved winter more than any other time of year, but would spend more time at home due to the cold weather.
At age 14 he caught his first real glimpse of magic from some travelling mages and was instantly fascinated. He started trying to watch the mages whenever they came through his town, which at this point was the only thing keeping him from leaving entirely. He would watch from the trees, looking through windows and watching from places that nobody else could reach. He particularly loved the free and open nature of magic and how each mages craft was completely unique to them. But, lacking a lot of social skills, and the backing of his parents as his younger brother would be born around the same sort of time, all he could do was observer and try, to no avail, to recreate what he saw.
By 20, he was known through his small town in the forest as somewhat of an expert in the surrounding areas, and would guide groups of travellers in exchange for either stories of magic or money.
At 26, with his little brother now his family’s pride and joy and his older brother climbing the social ladder, he knew was a social outcast and knowing he had no ties to anyone or anything, starting taking things that didn’t belong to him. One day, he was guiding a rather shady group through the forest and set up camp in a small clearing. He planned to take a magical orb that he’d caught a look at earlier on. So, in the middle of the night he crept over to where he remembered the item to be. Unfortunately for him, a howling wolf in the distance woke one restless traveller from their sleep and he was caught red handed. He sprinted off into the night as the group woke up and started to pursue him. He managed to make it home with enough time to grab his things and offer a brief goodbye to his family before taking off again, using this as his excuse to finally leave his home forever.
With almost nothing to his name, he set off, determined to make something of himself, even if he didn’t know what yet. He didn’t want to be overlooked like he’d already been so many times in his life and was determined to not be forgotten again. All he knew was one thing, is that he wanted to see every corner of the world, not just the forests and lakes of his homeland.
