Where he comes from
Born in a small farming village in Lion Throne territory, in a family that was neither poor nor comfortable. Home of honest people, flat land, nothing extraordinary to offer a boy with a mind like his.
At six years old, playing alone in the woods, a wolf crossed his path. Panic did the rest. In an instant he was on the other side of a river with no idea how he got there. When he told his parents, his nascent telepathy showed him what they felt before they even opened their mouths. He learned two things simultaneously: what he was, and that honesty about it was dangerous.
The years that followed were quiet deterioration. It was never spoken of openly but the distance grew. At fifteen, his parents called a Dawn Church official to deal with their burden. He didn’t wait to find out what kind of help was coming and left that night to never go back.
The first year alone was brutal. Near starvation drove him to steal from a market stall. Running from the owner, something shifted and he found he could change his face, his voice, his whole appearance. He walked away clean while the owner chased a face that no longer existed. That was the turning point.
From there he iterated. He discovered he could project private illusions, false images and sounds only a target would perceive, and learned to pair them with documents he could temporarily rewrite the appearance of. A forged seal backed by a convincing illusion. A fabricated identity made tangible. He learned to nudge thoughts toward more agreeable dispositions with a subtle mental push, though occasionally a target sensed something was off and chalked it up to magic. He sharpened his senses, learned to read a room before entering it, to notice what others missed.
Then his luck ran out. Two men whose money he had taken tracked him down with the intention of killing him. Cornered and out of options he reached into their minds and caused genuine pain. He won. But he pushed further than he ever had before and what followed wasn’t pleasant. He came closer to his limit than he knew he had, and the experience left a mark he doesn’t discuss.
What brought him to the Ash Marches
He arrived in Blackmere chasing opportunity. The Ash Marches draw relic seekers and treasure hunters, credulous people with coin and clouded judgment. Easy ground for someone like him, or at least that’s what he tells himself anyway.
What he wants
The short answer is money and comfort. The longer answer is autonomy. He never wants to be someone else’s problem to be managed again.
What he fears
Whatever he is, it’s rare. Rare enough that he never found someone like him. He has no peers, no mentor, no one who could ever explain how his powers work. He has been improvising since he was six. The night he nearly broke himself showed him there is a ceiling somewhere, but he still doesn’t know where it is or what crossing it fully would mean. That uncertainty sits underneath everything. Not a fear he names out loud. Just something that is always there.
The burden he carries
A few weeks before arriving in Blackmere he ran a routine con on a mercenary party passing through a Lion Throne settlement. He read the leader’s mind as a matter of habit. What he saw there has not left him since. He doesn’t know what it means. He isn’t sure he wants to. He came to Blackmere partly to put distance between himself and that moment, and partly because something in what he saw pointed vaguely in this direction.
A note on who he is beneath the con
He has an awkward sense of justice that occasionally overrides the pragmatism, normal folk would call it a conscience. Whatever it is, it annoys him every time.
There’s two rules he’s adamant on.
- Never con or endanger a child;
- Never take from someone who’s already desperate, unless they had it coming.