Barqus's Backstory
As a child, Barqus MacKay of Clan MacKay was a happy and healthy youngster; he loved his little family--just hmself, his Ma, and his Da--and his homeland. He loved the stories and tales of the Chattan heroes of old and he especially loved the little homestead his family had carved out of the wilderness ages ago. The cottage and workshop, situated so quaintly on a wooded ridge along the northern face of one of the Pelagus mountains, in northern Corthalia, were well-kept and always smelt of his Ma's bread and the sawdust from his Da's shop.
Contrasted with his friends' lives--the farmers' sons who dwelt down in the river valley--Barq's was a comfortable one, for coopers' sons had few worries. The woods and rills surrounding the homestead offered hours and days and weeks, even, of exploration and adventure for him; the melting snows on the speak sent cascades of quick-moving water of purest quality rolling down the mountainside through familiar channels--the cold, clear water was the secret ingredient in a family recipe for sassafras ale that was famous all throughout the countryside: indeed, Barq's fondest wish was to one day go into business selling that delicious brew in his father's barrels. In short, life was good for the only child of Rougan and Brigid MacKay.
Then, everything changed when, in the dead of winter, a lone red dragon swooped down out of the clear bright sky and, with merciless flames poured out on the mountainside, destroyed all that Barq had ever held dear. He narrowly escaped, bearing in both body and mind the wounds inflicted by the inferno. His parents killed, his home razed, his path into any nearby civilization blocked by impassable snows, he wandered out into the cold and sought refuge in the wild, relying on fledgling survival skills and a faith that something would preserve him through the winter so that he might have revenge upon the monster that had burned his world away. At only fifteen, he battled alone to survive on the mountain.
Indeed, by some miracle, the young Chattan made it through the winter and, as the snows melted in Spring, he strode into the nearest township sporting patches of scorched fur that would not grow back and a wicked scar: the Red had slashed his face and shoulder with a claw barely aimed, and Barq was fortunate to have only the flesh wound marking its path. In his sixteenth year now, he was stronger, leaner, and more stoic than he had ever been, and his skills in woodcraft, stalking, and scavenging had been developed enough to get him through the ordeal. The next several years saw Barq ranging from settlement to settlement, spending days and weeks at a time honing his craft and fostering a growing hatred of the wyrmkind. Not only had the specters of his people's past been real, but they had flown in out of the blue, into the relative safety of his sheltered life, and had stolen that life in the span of an hour. As he made his way north, he began supplementing his income with odd jobs--joining a wagon train here, bounty hunting there--and had developed a modest skillset by the time he reached Drake Hall, there to seek his death in combat with the accursed monsters.
The defenders, seeing his youth and relating with regret that his story was heartbreaking but not remotely unique, sent him away with only a new pair of axes. These, they told him, would be his to use until he be "longer in tooth and redder in claw." Toting his new weapons and sublimating his disappointment into steely resolve, he ventured back into the wilds of Avalon's frontier, ranging here and there, seeking out information to become a well-versed and canny dragon hunter proper. For nine years, this life was all he knew... until his twenty-fifth birthday brought a startling revelation. Awaking to a pain in his brow and a a persistent itch along his shoulders and back, he found, to his horror, the beginnings of slate-grey horns growing from his forehead and that the fur along his shoulder blades and spine was melding into silver-blue scales, dappled with stripes of inky blue. Setting out at top speed for the nearest center of knowledge, Nethas Gyril, he uncovered a most disturbing truth. By all evidence, he was of a draconic bloodline and, if the scale coloration and his survival on the mountain were any indication, there was a silver dragon in his ancestry.
For a short time, this news shook him to his very core: after all, if the blood of dragons flowed in his own veins, could he continue to hate and hunt the wyrms himself?..
Of course he could. It took only a little research to find out that silver dragons were metallic, and inclined toward good, where reds were chromatic, and evil by nature. Rather than worry unduly over his newfound lineage, he instead resolved himself to use this new weapon to better hunt and destroy the chromatics: he would fight dragonfire with dragonfire...
TO BE CONTINUED
