He grew up somewhere violence was constant, expected, and entirely unremarkable. Most kids there learned to survive by picking up a weapon early. He picked up a quill instead. An old scribe took him in off the street, taught him to read and write in exchange for chores, and he found that when he was writing, the noise around him went quiet. It was the first thing in his life he had any control over. He spent years apprenticed as a scribe, copying contracts by day and filling journals with his own poems and songs by night.

Everything changed when he saw a traveling duelist settle a violent dispute through mercy instead of bloodshed. He wrote an account of it, it got passed around his neighborhood, and it caught the duelist's attention. She took him on as a student, and his scribe's discipline turned into a swordsman's precision. He came to see the blade the same way he saw the quill — a way to cut through chaos instead of adding to it.

He still writes constantly and carries a satchel of parchment everywhere he goes, but now his words don't just describe the world, they carry the weight of his swords behind them.