A little bit of randomness, and an introduction

I work as a stocker in a grocery store near my home. Earlier today, I'm in the snack aisle, in uniform, putting bags of chips on the shelf, and a lady walks up to me and asks.... wait for it.... "Do you work here?"

Gotta love it.

So I already mentioned my BE hunter Kaledain (or Kaled). Figured I would share at least part of his backstory.

Kaled was about a year old when his parents left him in his cradle and started working on a magical experiment in the workroom of their house. Something went wrong, and the experiment exploded, taking both his parents in the blink of an eye. Kaled somehow survived without anything worse than severe burns over part of his body, which thankfully healed without scars. But as he grew older, the couple who had taken him in noticed something. Usually by his/her third or fourth year, a young blood elf would be starting to show some magical ability, commonly by putting faerie fire on various objects, or making things float. But Kaled had shown none of that, even by his fifth year. His adopted parents took him to the highest-ranking mages in Silvermoon to see what they could find out, and it wasn't good. Kaled's innate ability to cast magic had been burned out of him by the accident. It showed further in that his blue eyes had none of the glow that was normal for a Sin'dorei. The mages, and his caretakers, were shocked; what could they do with him? As far as the blood elves were concerned, he was useless, a freak.

His adopted parents cared for him for another 2 years, but things soon grew too much for them. Kaled was shunned by everyone, and became a favorite target for the bullies his age. The couple that cared for him were pitied openly, which was a great blow to their pride. Finally they took him and left him at the one place where magic was not everything; the Farstrider Retreat.

Kaled was raised and trained by the hunters there. By the time he was 12 he was a crack shot with a bow, and had mastered the sword, spear and two-handed axe by age 15. The farstriders taught him how to coax a wild animal into a bond, and he tamed his first companion, a red lynx cub that had been staying near the retreat and often allowed Kaled to play with him. He named the cub Ashkeyana, or Ashke for short. At 17 Kaled traveled to the tauren land of Mulgore, to train with the hunters there for a season. While he was there, 2 things happened. He found he could use and adapt the tauren's shamanistic magic, which worked differently than the Sin'dorei's arcane magic, to do the skills that hunters used most often, such as healing their animal companion, or imbuing an arrow with poison or arcane energy. And he discovered a young owl, which had been blown far off her normal migration and wound up in Mulgore alone. He bonded to the bird and named her Kechara.

Kaled returned to the Farstriders almost finished with his training, and by his 19th nameday he was out on his own.



To be continued...