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In 958, Alverano Eidelstein, was born in Alif, to his mother Lovia Eidelstein, a goliath stone mason. Alverano would never meet his orc father and Lovia would never really speak of him. Alverano and his mother lived peacefully for six years with just one another. Once he was old enough to take care of himself and the chores at home, Lovia continued her career, taking care of him the best she could. When Lovia would return from work in the evenings, her and Alverano would play together and she would begin to teach him masonry and to read. In 965, Lovia fell in love with Dominic Stenson, her boss, and married him. After Dominic moved in, tensions between him and Alverano began to rise. Behind Lovia’s back, Dominic would ridicule, berate, and even hit Alverano. After a year, Dominic and Lovia had a child, a baby girl, who they named Aria. The family then moved to a ranch on the ritual outskirts of Alif. Dominic’s drinking continued to decline and the beating towards the children got worse. Despite this, ranch life was rather simple for the next six years. Tragically though, when Alverano was 13, his mother developed an illness and died a year later. 

After Lovia’s death, Dominic became outwardly violent and aggressive to the children, in particularly Alverano. He and Aria continued to work on the ranch for two years until Dominic attempted to kill them both in a drunken outburst. At their wits end, Aria and Alverano had decided to runaway. They made it to a town halfway between Alif and Futann, where they were able to stay for a few weeks before picked up by law enforcement. Dominic claimed them as his runaway children and forced them to come home. Upon returning home, Dominic demanded to know whose idea it was, his fists shaking in anticipation. Alverano, fearful of the punishment and his sister’s ability to receive it, nobly took the blame for Aria. Dominic began to violently beat him. Aria attempted to get in between, and then Dominic pulled out a knife and incessantly stabbed her. He then continued to violently beat Alverano as he tried to save his sister, screaming in horror. Dominic overcame Alverano and threw him out, locking him out the house. Alverano ran all the way to town, bruised and in pain, returning with law enforcement the next day. Dominic was gone. 

At 15 years old, Alverano started drinking frequently. With his maturing body and large build, a life of crime came rather easy to him. He began stealing, mugging, and vandalizing. At 17 he was hired as an enforcer for a gang involved in organized crime. He remained there for two years, continuing to feed his alcoholism and committing crimes. At this point he had a rather large bounty for his head from both the underground criminal world and law enforcement. However, while acting in a home invasion of an opposing mobster, the man violently attacked his own wife and threw her to the invaders in an attempt to distract them and get away. In this moment, something within Alverano snapped and memories of his mother, sister, and Dominic flooded him all at once. The woman at his feet pleaded and sobbed for her and her children’s lives, immediately softening Alverano’s heart. Before his companions could simply murder the witnesses, Alverano got in between them and convinced them to spare the three. Alverano was filled with conviction after the incident to quit his life of crime, but it was too late. In 980, the entire gang was arrested by the Revagonian army. Alverano was sentenced to ten years of prison. However, with his clear feelings of remorse and desire for reformation, he was offered the choice to do seven years of Revagonian boot camp and military academy, then spend the remaining three serving. While in the academy, Alverano earned the call sign “Tiny”, from the ironic nickname his classmates adopted for him. Once graduating he served in the military for his contracted time. However, the debt he felt he owed to the people and himself persuaded him to continue serving past his contracted time. After spending many years ascending the ranks and gaining the empires trust, he continues to serve as part of Lord Revagone's Entourage into his 40's.  

The Revagonian blacksmiths were the closest the Animometretical Monks would ever get to the Revagonian monks. In 789 twenty graduates from Shackelford's School Of Smithing would board the Guild of Merchants seeking employment. None of them expected to befriend a traveling monastery of Animometretical Monks. Despite their drastically different upbringings and worldview, the young blacksmiths were intrigued by the monks' wisdom and skills. After weeks of traveling and working next to them, they approached them asking to become their apprentices. The old monks were delighted to take them under and teach them their ways of communication and skills. 

After ten years of studying Animometry, the novices were quite skilled at making and infusing weapons. On the night before they were set to officially be initiated as Monks, the fleet was attacked by Jzecki pirates. The novices wished to stay and defend their masters, but were ordered to board a lifeboat and paddle away to safety. Not long after, they were knocked off course by a giant storm. It was a miracle all twenty of them survived, but they never saw their masters again. 

Three days later they washed up, starved and nearly drowned on the East Revagonian Shore, a few miles out from Gerbald, a small town Northeast of Alif. They were found by a Revagonian Novice scavenging for berries, who quickly ran and got help from the rest of his monastery. After the novices were back to health, they explained their story to the Revagonian monks who were taken aback at their upbringing as Animometretical novices. In the end, they agreed to teach them their ways if they denounced Animometry. 

The next five years passed, and the blacksmith novices developed a strong bond to Revagone, as a Revagonian Monk does. Despite this, compared to their fellow novices their bond was weak. The reason being, that they had not completely forgotten Animometry. All would eventually come to light when, one day the youngest of the Blacksmith Novices Brock, was sparring against a senior novice. Pinned against the ground with no way out, he instinctually called upon a soul, which threw the man off of him and into the wall. After a long silence, him and the rest of the Blacksmith novices were kicked out of the monastery. 

Unsure of what to do next, the now extremely close band of Novices, skilled in Blacksmithing, Animometry, and the Revagonian arts headed to Alif, in hopes of finding work. Along the way they were approached by a dark figure. Instantly, they recognized him as Lord Revagone. All of them, thinking back to getting kicked out of the monastery, dared not speak. It was quiet until Lord Revagone said one thing to them: "Show me Animometry will lift up my empire."

Understanding the task that had been given to them, the twenty of them worked tirelessly for two months straight. They purified the finest adamantine and carefully forged it into a colossal shield. Then they concentrated and fused thousands of souls of Revagonians lost in the Great War. Finally, when it was done, they traveled to Revagone Capitol to present it to Lord Revagone. He awaited them at the gates of his castle and grabbed the shield. He simply asked "Will this shield protect me from the worst of fires." "Yes, my Lord" replied Geovan, the eldest. With that Lord Revagone left them and was not seen for three months. 

A parade welcomed his return to the capitol where the Blacksmith Novices saw the head of Fyrzrik, one of the evil ancient dragons on a pike. When Revagone approached he offered them a new job. The Revagonian Blacksmiths, masters of Steel and Souls.

Arrash was born a Golorocath in the countryside of Revagonia, 50 miles North of Futann in one of the many small settlements that had learned to survive in the long shadow of the Great War. Her family was never wealthy or particularly important. They were farmers and laborers, the kind of people whose names would never appear in history books and whose greatest victories were usually making it through another winter with enough food left to see the spring. Arrash’s mother, however, always insisted that there was nothing wrong with living an ordinary life. The world had already lost enough people trying to become extraordinary.

Her father was a different matter.

Arrash remembers very little about him with any certainty. He was there when she was very young, but sometime during her childhood he simply disappeared from their lives. There was no dramatic farewell that Arrash could remember and no satisfying explanation that her mother was willing to give her. Whenever Arrash asked where he had gone, her mother gave different answers depending on how old Arrash was and how much she thought her daughter could understand. Sometimes she said he had left to find work. Sometimes she said he had gotten involved with people he shouldn’t have. Once, when Arrash was old enough to realize that her mother was avoiding the question, she simply said that some people were better at leaving than they were at staying.

Arrash eventually stopped asking.

Whatever happened to her father, he never came back.

Her mother raised her alone, and it was not an easy life. Being a Golorocath already made them noticeable, and living in a poor rural community meant there was little protection for anyone who could not defend themselves. Arrash’s mother was a kind woman, but kindness was not always rewarded in the world they lived in. She was not particularly strong, and she had no military training, no wealth, and no influential family to protect her. She survived by working, trading, and relying on the goodwill of people around her.

Eventually, that goodwill ran out.

The details of her mother’s death are something Arrash has never completely pieced together. What she knows is that her mother was killed because she was considered weak and unable to protect herself. The people responsible were not legendary monsters or infamous villains. They were ordinary people who saw someone vulnerable and decided that vulnerability made her disposable. That was the first lesson the world ever forced upon Arrash that she could never quite forget: being a good person did not guarantee that anyone would protect you.

Arrash was still young when it happened.

She did not know how to grieve properly. She didn’t know where she was supposed to go, and there was no father waiting to take her in. There was no family with enough room or enough resources to raise another child. Eventually, Arrash found herself among people who lived outside respectable society.

They were bandits.

They weren’t a grand criminal organization, and they weren’t the sort of people who would ever find themselves written into the history books. They were a loose group of thieves, smugglers, deserters, drifters, and other people who had learned that surviving outside the law was sometimes easier than surviving under it. Some were cruel. Some were selfish. Some were genuinely dangerous. A few were surprisingly decent people who had simply run out of better options.

Arrash grew up around all of them.

The bandits did not raise her out of kindness. At first, she was simply another mouth to feed, and everyone made it clear that if she wanted to remain with them, she would eventually have to contribute. Arrash learned quickly. She learned how to tell when someone was lying, how to keep her belongings close, how to sleep lightly, how to recognize when a stranger was looking for trouble, and when it was better to walk away rather than prove a point. She learned how to move quietly through the countryside and how to find food when there wasn’t much available. She learned that a person could be friendly one day and dangerous the next, and that trusting someone did not mean ignoring the possibility that they might betray you.

Most importantly, she learned that strength mattered.

The bandits respected strength because they had to. Someone who could carry their own weight was useful. Someone who could protect the camp was valuable. Someone who could not defend themselves was a liability, and Arrash had already learned what happened to people who were viewed as liabilities.

She hated that lesson.

She also absorbed it.

As Arrash grew older, the physical work of surviving naturally made her stronger. She carried equipment, hauled stolen goods, chopped firewood, helped set up camps, traveled long distances, and occasionally had to defend herself. She learned to use an axe because an axe was useful for more than fighting, and she became comfortable with it because it was a tool she could actually understand. She was never formally trained as a warrior. Nobody taught her elegant swordsmanship or battlefield tactics. Most of what she knew came from watching people who were better at surviving than she was and copying what seemed to work.

Her temper developed during those years.

Arrash could tolerate insults directed at herself surprisingly well. She had been called plenty of things throughout her childhood and eventually learned that words were usually harmless. What she could not tolerate was watching someone deliberately prey upon somebody who was weaker than them.

The hypocrisy of the bandit life bothered her more than she admitted.

The people around her often talked about survival, yet some of them took pleasure in making survival harder for others. They justified theft because they were hungry, violence because they were afraid, and cruelty because the world had been cruel to them first. Arrash understood the reasoning even when she hated the conclusions. She knew what it meant to be desperate. She knew what it meant to have nobody protecting you. But she could never completely accept the idea that suffering gave someone permission to make another person suffer.

That became one of the few principles she developed entirely for herself.

Being strong enough to take something does not mean you have the right to take it.

For a long time, Arrash had no idea what she wanted her life to become. She was a bandit’s daughter only in the sense that the bandits were the closest thing she had to a family, but she never truly considered herself one of them. She participated when she had to. She carried things. She watched roads. She helped with camps. She occasionally fought when there was no alternative. But she never developed a taste for hurting people, and she never became comfortable with the idea that someone else’s misfortune was an opportunity.

Eventually, she began drifting away from the group.

It wasn’t one dramatic betrayal or some great moral awakening. Arrash simply started doing more things on her own. She took odd jobs when she could find them. She traveled alone for stretches of time. She sometimes returned to the bandit camp and sometimes didn’t. The older she became, the more she realized that she had spent most of her life surviving according to rules she had never chosen.

She wanted to find her own.

By the time Arrash was a young adult, she had become capable of taking care of herself, but she was still far from being a seasoned adventurer. She knew how to survive in the wilderness, how to handle an axe, how to intimidate someone when necessary, and how to fight when things became ugly. She did not know military tactics, advanced weapon techniques, formal magic, or the discipline required of a trained soldier. She had survived because she was stubborn, physically gifted, and accustomed to difficult circumstances, not because she was some exceptional warrior.

Her relationship with the law was complicated as well.

Arrash had spent too much of her childhood around criminals to believe that everyone who wore a uniform was automatically good. She had also seen enough of the world to understand that criminals were not automatically evil. People were more complicated than that. Still, the longer she lived outside ordinary society, the more she realized that she wanted something she had never really had: a place where she belonged without having to constantly prove that she deserved to remain there.

That was when the Revagone Knights first caught her attention.

Arrash knew the history of the old Revagone Empire only in fragments, as most people did. She knew that the empire had once been prosperous and that people of different races and backgrounds had been welcomed under Lord Revagone. She knew that the Great War had shattered that world and that Revagone had spent centuries fighting Ancient Dragons and attempting to restore what had been lost. She also knew that the modern world was nowhere near as simple as the stories made it sound.

She did not idolize Revagone.

She did not think joining his Knights would magically fix her life.

What interested her was the idea of service.

For most of her life, Arrash had only understood strength as something necessary for survival. Her mother had been unable to protect herself, and she had died because of it. Arrash had then spent years among people who believed that the strong survived and the weak were left behind. She had become strong because she was afraid of becoming helpless.

But she was beginning to wonder whether strength could mean something else.

Perhaps being strong did not have to mean being the person nobody could hurt.

Perhaps it could mean being the person who made sure somebody else didn’t have to face danger alone.

That idea was enough to make her leave the life she knew.

Arrash did not leave the bandits with a dramatic declaration or burn down their camp behind her. Some of them had been terrible people, but some had also fed her when she had nowhere else to go. She could not pretend that every memory of them was bad. She simply told them she was leaving and accepted that some of them would never understand why.

One of them laughed and told her that she would be back within a month.

Arrash wasn’t sure whether that was an insult or genuine concern.

She decided she would rather prove them wrong.

Her journey toward the Revagone Knight Academy was not particularly heroic. She traveled when she could, worked when she needed money, slept outdoors when she couldn’t afford an inn, and learned very quickly that being large and visibly armed was not always the advantage she thought it was. She had spent years learning how to survive among criminals, but civilized society had its own rules, and Arrash was still learning them.

She also discovered that she was not nearly as tough as she had convinced herself she was.

There were people stronger than her.

There were people faster than her.

There were trained warriors who could disarm her before she could land a blow.

There were situations where her instincts simply weren’t enough.

Rather than discouraging her, that realization gave her a reason to keep going.

Arrash had spent her entire childhood surviving because she had no other choice. For the first time, she was choosing to become something.

She arrived at the Revagone Knight Academy without a famous name, without a noble heritage, and without anyone important waiting for her. She had no great accomplishment to place on her application and no legendary story that would make an instructor remember her. She was simply a young Golorocath woman with a complicated past, an uncertain future, a strong body, a quick temper, and a lifetime of experience learning what happens when nobody is there to protect the vulnerable.

She did not expect to become a great knight.

She did not expect anyone to remember her name.

She only wanted to learn how to use the strength she had spent her entire life building for something better than survival.

And so, at twenty-one years old, Arrash left the life she had known behind and enlisted in the Revagone Knight Academy.