Description
This wild elf stands a little under six feet, all wire and tension rather than bulk. Clothes hang lightly from a lean frame: travel-stained leathers and a short, sleeveless coat cut for movement, not display. Nothing about him looks imposing at first glance, right up until he moves. Then it’s all precision and economy: no wasted steps, no fidgeting, just clean, practiced motion.His skin is a deep, warm brown, marked with thin ash-grey tattoos that crawl up his arms and neck in patterns like burned branches or old scars in bark. The left side of his face and neck carries real scarring beneath the ink: warped skin, a faint pull at the jaw, and a pale, damaged left eye that never quite focuses. The right eye, by contrast, is sharp and alive, watching everything with a steady, unsettling attention.
His hair is straight and black, worn long but tied back out of the way with simple leather bindings. There’s little ornament beyond a few beads and cords; what he owns looks chosen for function, or for memory, not wealth. A longbow of good make rarely leaves his hand, its string well cared for, and a quiver sits where he can reach it without thinking. At his belt, small pouches and a worn spellbook hint at more than simple archery.
His presence is quiet but not gentle. He tends to stand where he can see doors and open ground, listening more than talking, eyes tracking movement rather than faces. When he does speak, the words are blunt and to the point, as if he’s more comfortable with facts than with people.
Background
Early years: the forest and the ruin
Sythian was born into a small wild-elf tribe deep in the forests south of Amn, one of many nameless clans who lived half in the boughs and half in old stone.Near their hunting grounds lay an ancient ruin, half-swallowed by roots and earth. The elders considered it taboo: remnants of “high magic” from before the Longest Year, a place to be watched, not plundered. Sythian grew up on stories of what had once been wrought there… and what it had cost.
From the start he was a strange fit for his people.
He had the wiry grace and sharp senses of any wild elf, but his mind hung on _patterns_: bow-angles, trail layouts, the way old stones lined up with stars. Where others heard “forbidden ruin,” he heard “unsolved problem.” He asked too many questions, and his curiosity was encouraged just enough to be dangerous.
By the time he reached his first decades of adulthood, he was already trusted as a young scout. He knew the paths around the ruin better than most, and that knowledge is what ruined him.
The “friendly traders”
They found him first.A small caravan of humans and half-humans, presenting themselves as rough but harmless traders: cloth, salt, tools, and small trinkets. They spoke a smattering of Elven, knew enough forest lore to sound plausible, and treated Sythian with a kind of easy, flattering respect he wasn’t used to.
They wanted a safer route. A way around the worst ravines and patrols. Somewhere to camp unseen. They were “afraid of bandits,” they said.
It was easy to believe. Too easy, with his naivety and need to prove himself.
Over several meetings, he walked them along “safe” paths that threaded closer and closer to his clan’s hidden approaches and to the taboo ruin. Each time he told himself he was clever, that he was weaving them past the heart of his people, not toward it.
He only realised what he’d done when it was far too late.
The burning of the Bough
The attack came at dawn.Sythian was out on the edge of the territory when he smelled smoke that wasn’t from cooking fires. By the time he reached the trees above the settlement, it was already a killing ground.
The “traders” were mercenaries and slavers. With them: a human battle-mage in proper robes, circles chalked into the dirt, sigils etched into the stones of the old ruin.
Fire came down in sheets. Not “wild magic,” not a freak surge, but deliberate, calculated spellwork amplified by relics pulled from the ruin. Huts burned. People ran. And where they ran, soldiers were waiting.
Sythian tried to get down there. He loosed a few hopeless arrows, screamed warnings that vanished under the roar of flame. Somewhere in the chaos, he took the blast that scarred the left side of his face and neck and ruined one eye. He remembers the heat more than the pain.
The clan never stood a chance.
Those who weren’t killed outright were shackled. Sythian, half-conscious and burned, was an easy prize. A “useful” wild elf: able to guide, able to read the forest, clearly acquainted with the ruin. The mage in charge took note.
The name “Burned Bough” started as a slur used by the raiders for what was left of the place. Sythian later took it as his own byname. Better to carry the shame openly than pretend it never happened.
Years in chains: the wizard’s slave
Sythian passed through hands after that. From raiders to slavers, then to a buyer who wanted something specific: a wizard in need of “expendable labour” that wouldn’t panic around sigils and sparks.So he ended up in a tower on the edge of human lands, formally property, informally apprentice-adjacent. He fetched reagents, cleaned circles, held lamps, and stood very still while dangerous things were tested at arm’s length.
Two things happened in parallel:
- He learned to _hate_ wizards, especially human ones.
He never forgot the fire that erased his clan, and he saw the same calm detachment in his master’s eyes when experiments went wrong and people screamed.
- He absorbed everything he could.
Not as a student, but as a prisoner who refused to stay stupid. He learned words, gestures, the logic of spell preparation. He learned what _not_ to touch. He watched the way power moved through ink on a page, through geometry on the floor, through a whispered phrase.
The Longest Year and the break
Then the Longest Year came.Magic failed, sputtered, and disappeard. The wizard’s power, vanished. Sythian watched the man crack under it: the frustration, the panic of someone whose identity had always been “one who commands the unseen.”
For Sythian, it was… complicated. On the one hand, it felt like justice. On the other, he realised just how vulnerable he was without that structure. No spells meant no magical safeguards against other humans either. No “value” meant he was just another piece of property that could be sold, beaten, or discarded.
Once magic slowly began to return, something changed in him.
He’d seen a world with magic and a world without it, and in both cases, wild elves like his clan had been prey. Tools, terrain, collateral. He made a decision that felt like betrayal of his own instincts:
If he wanted to stop being prey, he’d have to _take_ the same kind of power that had broken his life.
So he watched harder. Took more risks. Tried small things when alone: tracing sigils from memory in the dust, sounding out words from half-seen pages, testing minor cantrips with stolen components.
Eventually one of them worked.
Escape
His escape was not a grand uprising. It was opportunistic and precise.He used a spell the wizard would recognise as trivial: a simple illusion and a minor utility effect to unbar a door. Just enough to slip chains, cloud a guard’s senses, and vanish into a storm-dark night with nothing but a bow, a handful of stolen pages, and the clothes on his back.
Since then, he’s lived in the cracks between worlds:
- Too _wild_ and scarred for most city folk.
- Too tainted by wizardry and human contact for many elves.
- Legally, still someone’s property, at least on paper.
Current age & outlook
At present, Sythian is [roughly 140-160] years old, young by elven standards but already carrying enough history for two human lifetimes. He reads as late twenties, early thirties in human terms: young, but not a boy.- He blames himself for leading the raiders near his clan. Even when logic says it wasn’t all on him, that’s how it feels.
- He distrusts humans, particularly organized ones: caravans, mercenary bands, wizard circles.
- He has a complicated relationship with magic: disgusted by what it does in the wrong hands, unwilling to be without it ever again.
- Fenmarel Mestarine is the only god that makes sense to him: exile, outcast, watching from the edges.
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