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Early Life[]
Childhood[]
Arycelle was born to traveling merchants in the northern reaches of the empire, who very rarely returned to their sylvan homeland. She had a happy and relatively uneventful childhood, free from real tragedy. As part of the traveling merchant’s lifestyle, she also grew up without experiencing the war and violence that so often comes with protecting a permanent home.
While on the road, Arycelle’s parents taught her swordplay and stealth to protect herself, and a large amount about finding and identifying useful plants and animals so she’d rarely, if ever, be without work once she came of age. Young Arycelle took easily to everything she was taught, and also proved to be a bit of a perfectionist. She would often wander out to the wilderness alone to hone her skills while her parents sold goods in town (occasionally resulting in bounties being posted at the local adventurer’s guild for her return).
While away in the wilds, Arycelle’s skills and hiding and stalking prey rapidly improved, to the point where young adventurers sent to find her often had difficulty doing so. She also became more attuned to the mana of the spirits of the forest, and though she didn’t know what to call it, became able to harness magical energies and cast simple spells, mostly related to blending in more easily with the forest and protecting herself from the weather and the elements.
However, because Arycelle was always traveling, she had very few friends. Also, because she lived mostly in human lands, what friends she did make aged much more quickly than she did. They quickly outgrew her and reaching adulthood while she barely aged at all. This left her with an unconscious sense that life other than her own and that of her parents was inherently fragile and fleeting. She was twelve years old before she met an elf or sylvankind outside of herself or her parents, and wasn’t around them for long enough to become friends.
Arycelle’s childhood was not entirely free from the experience pain and death. Her parents hunted both to collect hides to sell and to feed the family, and they would take her along to teach her how to do so as well. The dangers of the road also often befell them, in the form of the occasional bandit or monster attack. Either Arycelle or her parents would often become injured before fight or flight brought them to safety. No rarer were the circumstances where they’d come across dead travelers and ruined caravans on the roadways. These events weren’t thought of as unfortunate in her family, but rather as an unexpected opportunity for profit, if they played their cards right. Though she learned quickly while in town that blood and pain were off-putting to others, she never understood particularly why. Especially as she often saw people consuming meat, and even wearing the skins of monsters she’d heard speak before, apparently unaware of the nature of the things they were consuming.
Though she grew to love the bustle of towns and the open serenity of the wilds alike, as a child she never came to think of other people (even to a certain extent her own parents) as anything more than inconsistent curiosities. This was not helped by the fact that her parents were not entirely scrupulous merchants who would trade not only with humans, dwarves, and other citizens of the empire, but also with trolls, ogres, kobolds, bandits, krolvin, and almost anything else that could speak, when the opportunity arose. When she then saw the denizens of the empire calling other such things monsters, and fighting with them for dear life, she became confused. Out of this confusion grew curiosity as to why such things happened, without judgment or understanding. Arycelle came to think of the monster on the road or the rampaging beast as little different than herself, seeking only food or to defend itself or its territory.
These events repeated as Arycelle grew, until she separated from her parents shortly before reaching adulthood. Not because her parents died, but because she simply grew bored of traveling with them, and wanted to see what the rest of the world outside of merchanting held. They parted ways with a hug and good blessings for the future, and never again saw each other. Arycelle assumes her parents are still alive, traveling somewhere and selling goods, though it's been more than half her lifetime since she last saw them. She assumes also that she'd still recognize them if she ever happened across them, mostly because she also assumes they haven't changed much since they parted ways.
Coming of Age[]
On her own, Arycelle had little trouble feeding and clothing herself. She killed animals small and larger, and cooked them for her food, and traded their skins to furriers in town. She took the profits from the sales to tailors for new clothes when need be. When she became injured traveling or hunting, she’d forage for herbs to keep herself healthy, or in extreme cases travel to town to employ a healer.
Being away from her parents did allow Arycelle to discover a whole new world of joys and vices. She proved to have a taste for alcohol and gambling, often frequenting less than upscale bars and taverns. As a young sylvan girl less than scrupulous people often tried to take advantage of her. It rarely worked well for them, because beyond taking her coin through gambling, they found her to be an elusive target, almost as at home in the shadows of the streets and alleyways as she was in the forest. Her quick retreats and occasional propensity of losing all her coin did, however, result in more than a few arguments with tavern proprietors over unpaid bills. She also got into the occasional fight, when she thought she could win. There are also at least a couple of small towns she can no longer legally visit.
Rather than dwell upon her failures, Arycelle’s successes and relatively easy escapes caused her to grow somewhat overconfident, and this overconfidence led to her becoming easy to provoke. This rashness didn’t come along with a loss of strategy and tactical thinking, however, as it does with so many others. Arycelle registered with the adventurer’s guild before she was fully an adult, and sought the council of more experienced adventurers and made them her traveling companions for a bit of added safety. These other adventurers became her first true friends, and while she’d often part with them due to a difference and age or even a brief uptick in her tendency towards wanderlust, she still thinks fondly of them and often wonders what happened to some of her favorite ones.
And so Arycelle’s life continued, experience upon experience piling up and then fading from memory as the years passed as she grew fully into adulthood.
Adulthood[]
Arycelle still considers herself quite young, and isn’t sure it would be proper to call herself an adult per se, even though any human born at the same time as her would be quite old and possibly on their death bed. As such, if asked what she’s done since coming of age, she’d have difficulty answering but for a couple of experiences.
The Undead[]
Arycelle was well into her travels before she encountered any sort of undead creature: a wraith in an abandoned inn she chose as a place to sleep once evening. She learned quickly that the creature was immune to her weapons, but was relieved to find that her magic worked well enough against it, and was ultimately able to kill it. While there’s little more to the story, she found the creature disturbing, a being that was clearly dead though still moved about.
Reflecting on the encounter, Arycelle surmised that it made sense that her weapons were ineffective against it. After all, it was already clearly dead, so an object meant to kill wouldn’t have much effect on it. However, the encounter still left her with a sick unnatural feeling about the thing, after all, dead things should by and large remain dead or at very least return to actual life. In order to conduct further research, she hacked the hands of the things re-lifeless corpse, and took them to a nearby town to find out more. She was surprised to find that the furrier there wanted those as well, though for what purpose she didn’t care to ask.
While in town, Arycelle met a warrior who informed her of an order specifically devoted to ridding the world of the undead plague. She couldn’t really argue that it sounded like a good idea to do so, and so she decided to join. She was inducted into the order, and began to advance through it. She often clashed with the other members, however, finding that she didn’t understand their philosophical views on the evil of the undead, as she couldn’t relate to their unbridled zeal. Though she still does her duty and kills the undead willingly without any purpose other than to rid the world of them, she also doesn’t do so out of a sense of righteousness, to rid the world of evil, or even out of compassion. She only kills the undead because she finds them to be the only truly unnatural things she has ever encountered, and because for some bizarre reason their parts fetch a decent price in the town.
Perhaps it is because of this disconnect with the philosophy of the order that Arycelle has not reached true mastery within it.
A Large Cat[]
Arycelle has only ever had but one permanent companion. A jaguar she met in the steppes of the elven nations. Most other animals she encountered in the wilds she would fight or hunt, and usually kill, and usually skin, cook, and eat. This one, and only this one, was different.
It approached her, and they did not fight. She left the steppes, it followed. For a long while it kept its distance, occasionally approaching, but only to share her dinner. When she was badly injured once in a fight with a skeletal giant, it leapt to her defense, finishing off the creature. She didn’t know whether this was because she fed it, or because it was otherwise attached her her.
Slowly they became closer, and when Arycelle slept in the wilds, it would sometimes act as a pillow for her. When she was bored, she’d play with it in groves, rivers, and springs. Before she really understood what was happening, they’d become bonded friends, and the animal would even follow her into towns and hunt by her side even when she wasn’t injured.
Arycelle never named her companion, though she determined that other adventurers in similar relationships she came by had named theirs. She felt that her companion probably had its only name, though without appropriate vocal capacities to express it. She also felt that there was no need for naming, she could understand the jaguar, and it could understand her.
They quickly became nearly inseparable, and the jaguar further proved to be extraordinarily long lived and slow aging. Arycelle chalks this up to the natural magic of the world, and does not question it further.
Her Continuing Adventures[]
There are few other events in her life that Arycelle would consider significant. She’s often settled down in one place for a time, though even though regularly changed inn rooms and inns to stave off the boredom of being in the same place day after day. She’s found it increasingly difficult to sleep outside of warm beds, and despite her upbringing vastly prefers them to tree branches or the hard bed of a cart.
Arycelle does work for the adventurer’s guild, the gemshop, the furrier, and sells oddities she finds to the pawn broker to make her money. Doing so has made her relatively well off, though not by any means rich. She often takes companions, though most are loners and wanderers, like her, and their association never lasts forever. She occasionally takes lovers as well, though none have ultimately come close to convincing her to think of them as anything more than a fleeting but enjoyable pastime, or in the very best cases, a warm companion and friend.
Though she has seen towns literally sucked into the void by rampaging demons, and helped to end the schemes of corrupt politicians, kidnappers, and even the occasional dark god, she’s rarely thought of any of these things as having to do with her particularly. In each case her motivations were different: to help a friend one time, because one side was offering more coin in another, because she had no choice in a third.
Thus, she continues to travel about the world, relishing in the new experiences doing so brings her.