Colin

Backstory

Colin is not a knight, not a lord's champion, and not a man who arrived at heroism through destiny or divine calling. He is a soldier who aged out of one war and drifted into another, spending the last decade as a caravan guard on the Ashfen Plains routes — a job that paid in dried meat and copper coins and asked very little of him beyond the ability to look threatening. He is broad-shouldered and sun-darkened, with a scar that bisects his left eyebrow and a jaw that suggests he has absorbed more than a few blows in his time. He is not especially clever, not especially devout, and not especially ambitious. What he is, in a world full of people who have found excellent reasons to look away, is stubbornly unwilling to do so. He was in Velmoor when they brought Princess Flora through the market square in chains — not ceremoniously, but quickly, before a crowd could gather, the way you move something you don't want people to look at too closely. Colin looked. He saw a young woman being taken somewhere she didn't want to go for reasons that were being explained in language designed to prevent questions. He has seen that specific transaction before, in army camps and border towns and the back rooms of merchant houses, and he has never once seen it end well for the person in the chains. He asked questions in a tavern that night and was told, with increasing firmness, to mind his business. He asked more questions the following morning and was escorted to the city's edge by two men with official-looking armbands and a very clear suggestion about the direction he should walk. He walked toward the Cinderpeak Mountains instead. Colin's motivations are not complicated: he saw something wrong being done to someone who couldn't stop it, and he is going to go stop it if he can. He carries no particular hope of reward, no political agenda, and no plan more sophisticated than getting there before something irreversible happens. What he does carry is a well-maintained sword, fifteen years of experience in situations that were trying to kill him, and a particular talent for finding a way through problems that more intelligent people have declared impossible. He is, in the most straightforward sense, the right man for this — not because he is exceptional, but because he is the only one who showed up.