Cornelius was born into a rather poor family residing in Mavgrad. Despite being a very essential member of the family that marks the bond between Gelerts and Lerkhits for many centuries to come, his mother Floda had to learn the hard way that her son had inherited their infamous family curse, granted to unlucky generations within the family. The moment Cornelius was born there were already complications and it had seemed at an early age that he’d have frequent internal or external bleeding episodes, most of them being uncontrollable nosebleeds that would often end up with Cornelius waking up in his bedsheets that were completely soaked in blood during the night. Floda never mentioned to anybody in the family that the Lerkhits had suffered the hemophilic curse, which mostly affected the males within the family, for ages. In hopes that evil would never reach Cornelius, Floda had put gargoyles of the Drey deities Astaroth and Zhitis in front of their farm to protect him. Additionally, she adopted a raven, which Cornelius later named “Grimsel”, that would hopefully guide him the right way and lead him away from his eventual demise.

The rest of the family would only ever find out about Cornelius’ condition as soon as he and his elder brother Andrei had gotten into their first physical fight, the moment Andrei punched Cornelius into the gut he ended up bedridden for weeks. It was a shock to everybody, even for Andrei himself, hence why he refused to get into physical fights for years to come. Hardly did the brothers ever speak to each other again since that particular incident.

The family was facing harsh poverty as years went on and even Cornelius couldn’t be spared from fulfilling his part in feeding his family as well as the neighbouring ones within Mavgrad. He’d help his mother with their Mavgrad-Chicken-Farm, mostly doing the butchering and feeding. In order to prevent Cornelius from hurting himself with a butcher’s knife, she’d give him big and robust gloves. Often would Cornelius get to experience his mother’s wrath as soon as he wasn’t being careful enough, which led him to believe that his condition made him weak and useless to the whole family, a “burden to the family” he’d say. The older Cornelius had gotten, the less he’d speak. It had gotten to the point he’d only answer with very short sentences and never continued a conversation if he didn’t deem it necessary. He preferred to keep to himself, as his opinion just didn’t seem to matter to anybody else. The only person he’d ever speak to was either his father, that he grew to be very close with, or his raven Grimsel, sometimes claiming that the old raven would even answer in Drey.