Self-portrait with favourite forest animal

I was born on the western slopes of the Vashnars, near the Aalen, but I remember nothing of the first three years of my life. My first memories are of being brought on horseback to the Siroccans by a druid named Symmachus, who raised me in a remote valley near Mt. Sinope until I was sixteen years old.

Symmachus never claimed to be my father, and said that my parents both died after a row with a local money-lender from the Tsol'aa village escalated, and that he was barely able to save me, being indebted to my father for something many years past. When I, at 17, travelled to the Vashnars and the Aalen to find out about my family, no one was able to remember anything related to Symmachus' account, and only he, himself, was remembered as a loner who was respected for his wisdom and shunned as an outsider at the same time. Thus the first three years of my life remain a mystery.

In his hut in the Siroccan's, Symmachus, a somewhat gruff but never unfair man, taught me both the love of the wild and the love of books. He began to take me on hunting trips and long treks through the mountains ever since I was ten years old. Then, when I was sixteen, disaster struck.

Hunting for wolverines, we were surprised by a sudden heavy shower of rain, which made the rocks we walked on slippery. I slid down a rock fifteen meters downward, my fall being broken by a hawthorn bush growing on a steep slope. Symmachus, who tried to save me, stumbled and fell to his death in the ravine.

After burying my foster-father, I tried to heal my shattered leg myself, incompetently. I have been limping ever after.

I remained a year or so in the mountains, then packed my own few belongings and the books Symmachus left me, and set out to look at the world outside of the Siroccans. The next year and a half, I lived as a pearl-diver in Tasur'ke, as a shopkeeper's assistant in Delos, as a farmhand in Shaastan and as a street musician in Shallam. Only in the last-mentioned city I began to feel I could not tolerate walls around me and roofs above me, and thus decided to join the guild of the Druids.