Heinrich Rothschild was born into a small family of doctors. His mother, Leonore, was a field surgeon, and his father, Werner, a pharmacist. He had an older sister, Isolde, and she was learning her mother's trade—Heinrich was expected to take after his father, and take after his father he did. Heinrich eagerly learned pharmacology, and often begged his father to let him help more. Though young, he proved himself to be talented, and was regularly helping by his early teenage years. His family moved frequently, following the path of destruction caused by the world's omnipresent trickster god, but they had each other and stayed in good spirits.

Everything suddenly changed when Heinrich was 14. His family was called to tend to a community after an attack by The Shadowman's army. During routine treatment, however, the Shadowman revealed a secret trick: he had convinced a dragon named Tyrag to work with him. While the community was still recovering, Tyrag swooped in and rained dragon fire over everything it could. The survivors numbered in the single digits—Heinrich was one of them, but his parents and sister were not.

Traumatized by the event, Heinrich swore revenge on the dragon and trained in the art of war. He researched humanity's history with the great dragons, and learned much: once, Men and Dragons had lived in harmony, but Men's greed and envy of Dragons' magic had shattered the relationship between the two peoples. Tyrag's rampage was retribution for an atrocity mankind had long forgotten. Too young and immature to realize the sad irony in continuing his revenge plot, Heinrich took something else he had learned in his research—that dragon's blood was the source of their magical might—and began to kill young dragons and drain their blood. Using his pharmaceutical knowledge, he eventually refined a serum from the blood. This concoction, when injected intravenously, would temporarily grant a human the strength, speed and magical ability of dragons, allowing him to go toe-to-toe with dragonic elders.

In the escalating war against the Shadowman, Heinrich connected to other people with the same goal. Though he didn't much care to let people get too close to him, still traumatized by the loss of his family, he made a few acquaintances he grew to care about. Others who also lost loved ones to the desolation of Tyrag banded around Heinrich and his dragonic drug, eventually forming a unit calling themselves Dragoons. Outside his unit, he befriended a cool-headed lord named Altair Dawn and a reckless self-appointed hero named Conrad Schwarz. Under the lead of Lord Dawn, mankind eventually met the Shadowman's armies and defeated them. In the final battle, Heinrich met Tyrag head-on, and finally slew the cause of his grief.

Even after the war, however, there was no time to rest. Mankind had long been shattered into seven territories, constantly at war with each other. With the threat of the Shadowman removed, Altair Dawn approached Heinrich with his vision of a single, unified kingdom. Believing in Lord Dawn, Heinrich agreed to supply Dawn's armies with his dragon serum and wage a war to bring the kingdoms together. After a long and bloody conflict, the Dawn monarchy was established, and Heinrich was awarded lordship for his key role in King Dawn's victory.

Though grateful to his friend and his king, lordship did not suit Heinrich. He disliked the aristocracy, and as new money, the aristocracy dislike him. At parties, they would belittle him and mock his background. To compensate, Heinrich would use his drug on himself to the end of using extravagant magical party tricks. For a while, this worked, but as time passed, Heinrich began to notice physical abnormalities. His skin took on a sallow complexion and his hair faded to white at a much younger age than average. He attempted to ignore or dismiss this for a while, but it became obvious and unavoidable when he began to break out in boils that would heal back as black and green scales.

Panicked, Heinrich withdrew from society and began to research his malady. As his studies progressed, the horrifying realization came to light: Heinrich's serum, when used in large enough quantities, caused users to become half-man, half-dragon abominations. The condition had previously been observed in noble bloodlines, caused by excessive and selective inbreeding between families whose lineage included a shape-shifting dragon, and also had a name: dragonblight.

Devastated, Heinrich only appeared in the Dawn's court once more: at the christening of Thordar Dawn, the future third king. After that, he dismissed most of his servants, carved up his lands for common folk, and left on a journey to the ends of the world without any true goal. He visited many of the land's greatest libraries, collating a personal body of research into various species' innate magical abilities and practices. He held hope for finding a cure for dragonblight, but as time passed and a cure seemed more impossible, he mellowed and allowed himself to simply enjoy travel. When he heard news of the Shadowman's return, he was alarmed, but he did not return to his old manor until news of the massacre of the Dawn royal family reached him. At his old house, he found the single surviving heir of the Dawn's title, a tiny boy named Stellwyn. Together, the two of them gathered the remaining members of the Fellowship, a cabal of adventurers sworn to defeat the trickster deity, and set out on their mission to save the world once more.