Bio

Alden was only a tender young boy of eleven when his family had to leave his birth town of Havenwood near the King’s Forest. His father was a hunting guide, hired out to young lordlings and accompany them on hunts in the King’s Woods. His father had a reputation for hidden areas of the fattest of wild animals. What those who sang his praises didn’t know was that Merrick, Alden’s father, secretly trained and fed the animals to fatten them up for lords. The bigger the purse, the bigger the prey to which Merrick would lead them. His ploy was kept up for some time until Merrick was caught walking the woods without a lordling in tow. The king’s guard were unable to find evidence that he was poaching, but the suspicion of such was enough to have the man exiled from the King’s Wood.

The family traveled north and started wandering the settlements in the Eld’s interior. Merrick’s only skills lay as a woodsman, but his reputation kept him from any work except aiding foreigner loggers and trappers. A close family friend became Hothgar, an Ain trapper, who started a skinning business with Alden’s father. It was by these two men that Alden was to be raised in the family business, but they found him to be too much like his mother, Anna, and sister, Tabitha, obsessed with music and friends. Alden never developed a love for skinning creatures, so his father taught him instead how to train them. Life went well for a few more years until Merrick got back to his old tricks. He and Hothgar would capture wolves which threatened the limited livestock of the settlements for ransom to the various work chiefs, and then offer to kill and skin the creatures, offering the pelt as proof. Except the pair would recapture the same few wolves, and pass off dog pelts for the reward. When he was caught, the gang that found him out ambushed him while he was alone, and used recovered elven arrows to look like a sylvan assault. When Hothgar and Alden found him, it was Hothgar who was able to divine the true nature of the assault. It took two years and a lot of digging, but the pair found it was a Merceshian gang calling themselves the Jackalites who were responsible. Alden fought through several skirmishes with the group until he was able to get revenge for his father’s murder, but, afterward, the settlements were no longer a safe place for Alden’s family. He moved his mother and sister south to the small farming hamlet of Glendale. Using the money he had scraped up from the gang members he defeated, and by selling the last of the pelts and the animals, they were able to avoid a small hut and a plot of land. Alden, then continued to aid loggers and hunters, but only in the smaller glades that dotted the interior of the empire earning some coin taking additional guide or guard work, which eventually lead him down the path to the Dark Barrows with an new assortment of allies.