cw: death, murder, execution

Born as the only child to a forest warden and his wife. Despite living but a bird's flight away from Faline and its grand markets, their family was majorly a self-sufficient one, Locryn learning early on to make most out of the forest they called home.

His father was a well-respected but proud man, suffocatingly so, and it was eight long years later that his mother finally had enough. It was a blow to his father’s ego, and one he never truly recovered from even as he carried on with his duties and eventually began to introduce Locryn to the people who had appointed him in his honorable post. As time passed, Locryn began to wonder if the fox’s cry he had heard on the night of his mother’s disappearance had been a fox at all.

Years rolled by, and his father drank more and more. Locryn was fourteen when the accident happened, their hunting trip cut short by his father’s fatal stumble down the hill to a dried up ravine. The fall was bad, but the man lived yet, calling out to his son to help him get out. Locryn, for all it’s worth, did consider the plea. Briefly, but whatever morbid, wilful curiosity took hold of him that day made him settle down on the edge instead, not uttering a word as he watched his father first plead, then curse at him, and eventually panic as the day turned into a chilly night. ‘What would it feel like,’ Locryn had thought as the long wait had stretched on to the next day while his normally indomitable father began to falter. ‘What would it feel like to bear witness to someone’s death?’

Three days came to pass in total before the lad sought out another hunter he knew to live in the eastern parts of the dense forest to help him pull up his father's corpse. The truth about the incident remained Locryn’s secret alone, the assumed tragic accident leading into the now orphaned lad inheriting the house, and much of his father’s connections, some of which offered him aid and others who did not. If he ever held love for the man who once was his father, turned his mother’s bane, the young man felt none of that in the wake of his passing; no satisfaction, no grief, not even remorse. There was only him and every opportunity to make himself anew with his mother’s untimely demise avenged.

Over time, Locryn got more and more involved with the underworld of Faline, mingling with the upper crust and dregs of the society alike in his pursuit of that elusive something. He grew into a handsome man, as rotten as he was charming to those he needed to be, entertaining proposals of violent revenges and nighttime dalliances both in exchange for favors and wealth.

He descended deeper into this new world, until it all came to a stop when he was twenty-three years old. Locryn was ratted out to the authorities - by who, he didn’t know, but what followed his trial and public execution made it matter little. Sometime before he was caught, he’d acquired an amulet from a woman who claimed to have mage ancestry. A token of good luck, she had told him, and one Locryn had been allowed to wear on the day of his supposed death, tied around his neck, and it was only for his father’s good name that he was granted the mercy of beheading. He can’t say how the amulet worked its magic, but the next time he woke, it was in a shallow grave much to the man’s horror who had been tasked with the thankless duty of burying him, the trinket nowhere to be found.

Like a wild animal, Locryn attacked the man, leaving another body behind to fill his grave with under the mound of grass and dirt before stumbling away, letting his legs carry him back to the place he knew best. The house was dusty, having been left unoccupied for the last two years during his prolonged stay in Faline, but it was dry, untouched, and as Locryn settled down to rest on his old bed in his blood-stained clothes, he swore to be more careful next time.

After cheating death and coming to terms with the magic he now found himself to possess, Locryn has kept a low profile for the past few years, mostly keeping to himself and his old huntsman way of life. Every now and then though, he pays a visit to the streets of the capital, sought out only by those who wish to leave no trace of their dark desires.

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