Bio

V’Neef Cernunnos grew up heavy with the burden of his parents expectations. Cernunnos had an uneventful childhood and Exalted in his early adolescence, as everyone in his family expected given his remarkable breeding. Making the most of their newest family asset, his parents arranged for him to travel abroad to Nexus and seek tutelage under Guild merchants there. When the Empress gave V’Neef the merchant navy they dreamed that he would return and be a wealthy tax-collector and merchant prince of the Realm. Eager to capitalize on their son’s good breeding and inevitable talent for trading, his family began to arrange an intermarriage with House Ragara.

Meanwhile, Cernunnos was not getting the education that his parents had exactly in mind. Under the less than careful watch of the Guild merchant, Hans Ilva, they were paying to tutor him in the ways of mercantilism, the young boy began to travel with caravans headed out of the Scavenger Lands and into the east. There his natural talent with a bow was discovered to be useful by caravaners and he was quickly put to work as a guard rather than a merchant. On one such expedition into the Wyld-touched reaches of the east his caravan was assaulted by the behemoth, Emerald Ophidian. The giant beast destroyed most of the caravan and set Cernunnos running for his life. Lost in the Bordermarches for weeks, he began to give up hope. A hunger grew in his belly that could not be sated no matter what he ate and, after consuming a particularly delicious ram he had found and slaughtered, he had grown a pair of curved horns. Certain that he would die transmuted into an insane beast by the Wyld he was, instead, rescued by the raksha, Leda of the Everstill Pond.

Leda led the young Dynast out of the Bordermarches and even journeyed with him back into the Scavenger Lands. The two became lovers. His “tutelage” under Hans Ilva cut short but the outrage of his parents upon discovering the fate of the caravan he had been traveling with, Cernunnos returned to the Realm and promised to return to his lover. Upon returning to his home town of Arjuf, his family announced that the arrange marriage they had long planned would finally be formalized. He was to be married with a scion of House Ragara to a mate specifically selected for sharing his remarkably good breeding, Ragara Hestia. Cernunnos’ disinterest was not just because of Hestia’s admittedly bland appearance.

In the years following their marriage, Cernunnos has spent much more time outside of the Realm than within in. Despite his parents wishes he chose to start a mercenary company rather than work in more object-oriented economies. Despite their initial embarrassment over his chosen profession, he has made quite a sum of money as a behemoth hunter – slaying giant beasts that pester or threaten cities or caravan trails and selling their hides and useful body parts as reagants. He has continued to stay in contact with his lover, Leda of the Everstill Pond by periodically taking trips into the Wyld and using the Horn of Calling the raksha prince gave him. Despite his marked lack of interest in the woman, Cernunnos has sired two children with Hestia out of respect and sense of duty to his family.