3.1 KiB
Born as the son of a merchant, Kaeros got basic education in reading and writing. he travelled with his parent from one small village to another, trading basic goods between them and taking some as pay for their own survival. Sometimes they visited towns cities to buy rarer goods and sell them to the villages. Rarely during these visits, they would meet up with strange people and his father would sell them bundles of which he had no recollection of them buying, but he didn't think too much about it.
During one visit to the village of Mora, he met a girls his age called Mira, and they played together while he stayed. She was blessed by Fire, allowing her to create small bursts of flame from her hands, while he hadn't been able to manifest his blessing yet. While playing, she accidentally burnt his arm, causing him to lash out at her and leaving. Before he departed, he wanted to apologise to her, but she was nowhere to be found.
They departed the village and went back to the city, where they were again about to meet the strange people, when during a rest he heard a knocking noise from the storage room of the carriage. As his parents were not around, he investigated himself and found a hidden compartment, in which he found another one of those bundles they sold to the strange people, which was moving. When he unwrapped the bundle, he found Mira completely bound up, starving and dehydrated. That's when he realised that they had been selling people in those bundles, and Mira was about to be sold.
Enraged by this revelation, he takes as much food and water as he can carry and wants to run away with Mira, but she is too weak to walk. While desperately thinking of a way to keep Mira safe from his parents, he notices that the loafs of bread he was holding were wet with a distinct purple-greenish colour in the places he touched with his hands. When letting go of the loafs, his hands continued to drip slowly with a fluid of the same colour. Instinctively he knew that it was poison.
So he hid away Mira in nearby bushes with some food and water, while he prepared food for his parents, waiting for their return. He poisons their portions and eats with them as if nothing happened. When in the night they wake up gasping for air, he ignores their pleads for help and waits for them to be dead. He retrieves Mira from the bushes and they stay in that rest spot until Mira is feeling better, after which they depart on foot with as many rations as they can carry to the city. There, they see a recruitment poster for a mercenary group, which they decide to join, as living on the streets would also be dangerous, especially with the human traffickers around.
They are welcomed surprisingly warmly, taken in for training, during which it turns out that Mira is quite talented with the sword, and her gift of Fire is fairly powerful with large reserves or Essence at her disposal. Kaeros meanwhile is not as talented with the sword, but can use a bow, with his blessing being useful for coating the arrows in poison. He also learns to control his blessing, allowing him to selectively secrete the poison only from his fingertips.