Sarek Leafblade (Serpent's Skull)

History

Sarek was a family man. He was born to be. Since childhood he watched a loving father provide for a doting mother. The four children were well cared for and well loved. And a good thing, too, because the Varisian fishing village of Carptown was full of bigotry against anything crossed with anything else. Half-Elf was probably the least offensive of the halfies (a slur that is only hurtful if you hear it every day), but make no mistake: they still hated them. They often just didn't know they hated them until the half-elf brushed his hair past his slightly pointy-er than normal ears. But then, the hate show was open.

Sarek's father, Larek, always said they would move away if they could. If they could -- it was that bit that always got to Sarek. He was the eldest of the 4 boys and always felt his father owed him more than "if we could" but he never got anything of the like. Larek was the one who could go down to the river, fish all day, come back, have a pint or four, and come home to clean and eat some fish all without getting beaten up even once. Sarek and his brothers, they were the targets of the town's ire.

Even Sarek's elven mother Nadielle was safe. There were some elves in town. Not many -- a handful. But they were all elf. That's what mattered -- not some unholy half-and-half like her children were.

A half-orc boy was beaten to death in Carptown when Sarek was sixteen. The boy had come looking for help; his father's caravan was attacked by goblins on the road nearby. After the boy didn't take kindly to the treatment he received, things escalated. It was then that Larek took his boys to the forest. They couldn't live in the town anymore. Things had gotten too out of hand. He had known it would not have been comfortable living, but he had not expected this. When Sarek screamed, pleaded, cried for his father to tell him why they couldn't simply leave, he said "We would if we could." In front of his mother and brothers that night, Sarek took a swing at his father out of fear, frustration, and a stinging sensation that maybe his father didn't much care for his safety. His father took the punch, but not the second. He swatted it away, took his son in a bear-hug and said quietly so only Sarek could hear, "There are those who would do to your mother such things that I dare not guess. It is in the thorny thicket that the rabbit hides."

Churlwood forest was a few hours trudge south from Carptown square, so they really weren't that far out. Most folks assumed Larek's halfie brats had skipped town, and rightly so--be a shame if an accident like what happened to that orc halfie happened to them. Sarek and his brothers Kye, Daniel, and Leoni in fact were on the outskirts looking in. The three lived in the forest in increasingly sophisticated shelters hunting, trapping, and otherwise living off of the land. Their father taught them the basics, but soon each brother took to life under a canopy of branches quite naturally.

The brothers were each a year apart, so they were very close in relationship and capability. Eventually, Sarek and his brothers became more capable than his father and mother ever dreamed. The four were all skilled woodsman, each with a particular skill that served their lifestyle. Sarek was an adept tracker. Kye had a kinship with animals far beyond his brothers' ken. Daniel was unmatched with the longbow, able to pluck a hummingbird from the air at 100 yards. Leoni was the fighter of the group, a deadly with a knife in each hand. Each brother taught the others the skill that came most naturally to them and together they were a formidable group.

The brothers kept watch over roads and byways bordering the forest on all sides. They controlled the local goblin and bandit populations and kept the roads safe, making passage to and from Carptown and the surrounding villages safe and dependable. The brothers became somewhat of a local urban myth. Clad in green cloaks with deep green balaclavas covering their features, there was no individual. Travelers took to calling them the Leafblades, protectors and guardians of the forest. Each brother took this as a surname, having not inherited one from their low born father and all-too-mysterious mother.

Sarek never did learn what his family was hiding from in Carptown. He asked his mother once and she said the same thing Larek had said some 10 years prior. "It is in the thorny thicket that the rabbit hides."

Eventually, the Leafblade brothers parted ways. Not maliciously, but each decided to leave their forest home in the order in which they were born. Their father no longer held sway against them; they were beyond his protection an he wished them well in their separate journeys. Sarek would move from the forest to the city of Roderic's Cove, far away from his humble beginnings in Carptown. Taking work as a bodyguard, wilderness guide, bounty hunter, and all manner of task that suited his particular skill set. He soon met an elvish woman named Erdessa (a scholarly client in need of safe transport to deliver manuscripts to a contact at Wolf's Ear), who he would, one year on, marry. She gave up an opportunity to join the infamous Pathfinder Society, and his nomadic lifestyle, in turn, became a sedentary one. He made his living trapping game and selling the pelts in a nearby city. Their home was a modest cabin at the edge of a forest. He would have it no other way, surrounded by nature and his wife.

The only word of his brothers he heard after leaving the forest near Carptwon was that Leoni -- always the fighter -- had not given up the self-imposed Leafblade crusade. He was still hiding in the brambles, awaiting those who would prey on the innocent. Sarek loved him for it.

Sarek and Erdessa had a daughter named Vanya and to Sarek, she was beautiful and perfect. She was born on Sarek's birthday. She was killed on her 4th, the day Sarek turned 46 years old.

Sarek had been tracking an especially difficult bear for the better part of 2 days. If he didn't find it today, he would return home empty-handed, for today was the double birthday of himself and his little Vanya. Unsurprisingly, though, he did finally take his quarry and made his way home. Immediately, he could tell something was wrong. The air felt stale. There was a quality to the silence surrounding their wooded cabin that warned of a deeper horror. Animal activity was agitated, different. Displaced.

Inside the cabin, his 4 year old daughter lay still, next to her mother on the center of the living space. Each was as straight as a board, arms at their sides, feet neatly together. If not for their red-stained clothing, Sarek might have thought them asleep. Each had their throats slit and was not yet drained of the color of the living. Sarek lost everything that day.

What he did not lose was his ability to track. So track he did.

His family's killers fled into the foothills and crags, bound, it seemed, for Riddleport, and he followed. The tracks spoke to him: there were several, resembling the tracks of elves, but clumsier. Maybe five in all -- hard to say -- but once out of sight of civilization, they made camp and... are those... the light brushes of serpentine tails? Only one set of footprints retained its elven appearance and showed the graceful light step of the elves.

Down valleys, across rock outcroppings, and around caves, he tracked. They were ahead of him by perhaps a day, and their trail was faint, but he had tracked and found more difficult prey. After 2 days, Sarek was weak and still grieving the loss of his wife and daughter when an elf stood before him, clad in dark robes with spiked armored accents. There was a snide grin on his slender, pale face.

There was no speaking. There were no questions. Sarek attacked and the elf fought back. In fact, Sarek would have been killed by the elf's magics, but for a quirk of the rugged terrain he was able to use against his foe. Sarek identified a weak point in a stone overlook and as the elf charged some unholy spell, Sarek, all but dead, crawled slowly, as if trying move feebly away. The elf followed, as Sarek thought he might, a low chuckle building in his elven throat. Sarek was able to position the elf precisely where he needed him. The elf set foot on the weak rock and it broke. Down went the elf. Sarek heard the distant, wet crack as he landed in a rock strewn garden below.

After awakening from unconsciousness -- how long had he been out? -- the weakened Leafblade made his way slowly down the mountain. The trail of the others was completely gone now. His only clue lay with the dead elf at the foot of the mountain.

On the elf's body were very few clues. So Sarek took what he could. A dagger, ceremonial in appearance, with no crossguard, blade made of fragile glass and tapered down its long, curved length. The robes, old and heavy, a deep and dark red, not black in color as he had at first thought, but with bright green fringes along the inside of the bottom. A broach the shape of a serpent's jawbone clasped the cloak, and Sarek took this as well, grasping for anything that might be of significance. Most important of all, though, was a rolled parchment, entitling "the bearer" to board the merchant ship Jenivere in Riddleport, to disembark in the distant colony of Sargava.