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.”
Hephiliet, a wide shouldered young man with a searching countenance, pulls off his gloves as he waits for the hag to first seat herself. Hephiliet then unbuckles his breastplate and pauldrons before seating himself, cross legged and facing the hag. The air is something rancid, causing him to frown, and the hag is more than unpleasant to look at. Still, Hephiliet is tired, and just taking weight off his back and legs, paired with the gentle glow of the candles, it is enough to set him at ease. He breaths a hot breath into his hands, then rubs the stiffness from his face as he begins to speak...
"Twenty-three years ago, there was a hopeful camp, its inhabitants dreaming to start a village where they could raise their young. The camp was in north-eastern Norland somewhere close to the border, set just aside a patch of rolling landscape. That year a child was born into that camp, the son of Ildi and Heptus Obscuris, the founders of that camp; they called the child, Hephiliet.
My father was an ambitious bastard, with a hubris larger than his heart. He swindled my mother and many others into following him out into the cold wilderness of Norland, with delusions of grandeur. At a young age I learned to disdain my father and his vainglorious nature. He once fatally wounded a bear, though it lay for some time in pain unable to move as the life slowly slips from it, my father only stood o'er it with a victorious sneer on his face.
My mother, a raven-haired beauty, and she had a voice like the soft whistle of an autumn breeze. She was far too pure to have deserved a man like my father, yes, I ache thinking of the ails my mother endured for that... villain. In the coldest months, she would wear robes fashioned of beaver fur, and her hair she would braid in rungs. In the warmer weather, my mother would trade her robes for a wool frock of the deepest blue, she would let her hair flow, all adorned with mountain flowers. The cruelest, yet sweetest, thing she had ever said to me in that lilting voice of hers, "You have more than your father's eyes, my child."
My oldest memory was one of the cold and the dark. A child had gone out into the hills one freezing eve and had not returned, so Father and the other men from the camp had taken up lamps and went to search for him. I could not have been more than four, or five years old, and the boy who went missing, could not have been much older than I. They spent all night and well into the next morning searching for the lad, they came back with sad news for the mother. It should have been the last straw, it should have driven the campers to their senses, but my father persisted, "Things will be better this year," he always promised, and every year was another of barely scraping by with our lives.
At the age of ten, I had become accustomed to living on little food and long trips into the mountains to hunt for bear and deer. We found very few animals, but the few that we did catch taught me many things. It taught me patience, it taught me persistence, the hunt even taught me strategy, but more than all these it taught me just how fragile a thing life really is.
I was twelve when Mother had finally convinced father to leave it behind when the campers had begun to feel the effects of starvation. Even then, it took those dullards twelve years, 'till starvation, 'till my father allowed them, 'till they would finally see what kind of "Fool's Venture" it was. Father, Mother and I set on southward, farther toward the capital. Sometime at the beginning of our trek, Mother took ill, pneumonia; we were no more than a day's ride from the capital when she passed away.
My mother's death was a turning point for me, watching such a graceful being parish in such an undignified manner, and for her to come to an end before a man so wicked as my father to boot. For three more years I lived with my father, on a stead of land he bought just outside the capital. I waited for my disdain to turn to resentment, resentment to bitterness, and bitterness to hate. Two months past my eighteenth birthday, my father had road into the capital for supplies, before he returned, I packed anything I could, took the mare from the stable and rode down the mountain and north out of Norland; never looked back.
Living on the road, drifting, was my way of keeping my mind off everything that had happened to me so far. I had only gotten a month into my travels when I began to run out of food and my clothes had started to ware. I ended up in some north-western town, begging for coppers and shivering in the alleys.
It took me a whole year, but I finally learned how to fend for myself. While I was still young, I grew quick, both in my legs and my hands, unburdened I can run alongside a fox. And, as I got older, I grew in stature as well. I learned quickly just how easy it is to manipulate the average mortal man with an intimidating glare.
Eighteen, and I was on the road again. By nineteen I had become somewhat of a grifter, moving from town to town and swaying all manner of folks to my benefit. Twenty years old, I had set my eyes on bigger things, raiding graveyards and offering my blade for a price and the like..."
The hag protrudes a gnarled tongue to lick scarred lips. slouching forward even farther, she says, "And... What are you now?"
Hephiliet shrugs with his hands, "Still just a drifter, woman," He waves his hand in a flitting, dismissive wave, "Do you have what I have come for?" He asks.
In reply, the hag turns around on her cushion, she reaches toward a bundle hidden in the odd shadows of the candles' eerie light. Hephiliet smiles slightly as the hag delivers the bundle to his hands, and his smile broadens as he opens it. The contents of the package: a single gold coin (on one side an image of a sword being driven downward through the jaw of some beast), an ornate, silver knife with a maple wood hilt.
