Cade spent his youth as a rugged delve-scavenger, scraping out a living on the cutthroat fringes of the Ashen Marches. His education was forged in the dark—learning to read the crumbling masonry, ancient architecture, and hidden triggers of forgotten vaults to safely extract buried relics before the ceilings collapsed. He relied on sharp wits, a heavy crowbar, and pure grit to survive.

Everything changed during a deep descent into a sealed, primordial vault. Cade unearthed a fractured artifact from a long-dead kingdom, still pulsing with a volatile, primordial light. Before he could safely prize it from its altar, the ancient warding stones shattered. Instead of turning him to ash, the blinding explosion of divine fire bound itself directly to his soul, transforming his flesh into a living, walking kiln of intense, suffocating heat.

Because this power was forced upon him by a twist of fate, Cade's relationship with the divine is deeply personal and hazardous. He views the flame within him as a wild, dangerous entity that must be bound by absolute mental discipline and sheer willpower. His heavy iron plate armor isn't a symbol of pious devotion, but a walking forge—a crude iron cage built to bottle up the immense heat and pressure radiating from his skin so he doesn't accidentally incinerate his companions or the taverns he walks into.

Cade adventures out of absolute necessity. He knows his current armor is merely a temporary cage; eventually, the constant heat will warp the iron. He hunts the world’s most dangerous ruins for lost vaults, runic seals, or ancient craftsmanship—anything that might hold the secret to permanently binding the forge burning in his chest. He is determined to solve the riddle of his own condition, driven to uncover exactly why the ancients bound a power of such terrifying heat into a weapon, and what primordial threat it was originally meant to destroy.