Darian Jaegar – Artificer Gunslinger

Description

Raised in the borderlands near Nan Thalias in the village of River’s End, Darian was the firstborn son of a hunter who had emigrated from the kingdom of Greypeak some years before. Darian’s mother was a midwife within the village, though perished during the birth of her own child, much to her husband’s grief. Darian’s father remarried soon after, and though his father held Darian close and treated him as his pride and joy, his step-mother ensured his life was hell when his father was away on hunts, and that Darian always came last after his half-siblings.

As soon as he could join his father on his forays into the forest he did. The Fringe was a dangerous place however, and Darian was forced to keep in the footsteps of his father. Fae guardians and gargantuan beasts dwelt in those woods, and though he had never seen them with his own eyes, Darian had heard plenty of tales about them from both his father and the other hunters in the village. For nigh on two years he followed his father through the woods on their hunts, never laying eyes on any of these supposed fey creatures, leading him to believe them to be a myth or delusion conjured up by hunters losing their minds in isolation. Complacency set into him, and carelessness had him foolishly ensnared by a spriggan’s charm, walking off the trail as a faint light glimmered through the brush nearby. His father was too slow to stop him, and Darian was soon after bound by roots and thorns. Valiant was his father’s battle against the creature, dismembering it with a shot of his handcannon, yet in its final death throes it mortally wounded Darian’s father, leaving him to bleed out in the arms of his son. Darian limped home with his father’s corpse, much to the anguish and hatred of his step-mother.

Darian was exiled; none believed his claim of his father’s death to a spriggan, and thought the wounds Darian bore himself were inflicted against him in self defense, and that he was his father’s killer. With naught upon his back but his clothes and his father’s handcannon, he left his home; the only place he ever knew. For a few months he lived off the land beyond, hunting in forests and farmland before he was driven out by a local militia that had accused him of poaching, wanting to hang him for his crimes. Realising that the world was not so free as his village, he eventually settled in the city of Edimir, a world more alien to him than the elven forests of Nan Thalias. Here he fell into destitution, living off scraps as he sold pelts and carcasses for only a few copper coins, barely enough to put gruel on his table.

One such occasion, his client was a member of the Baldurian Inventor’s Society, a high-ranking chairman by the name of Elman Alcott, who saw that Darian showed promise as a tester for experimental firearms. After much discussion, Elman took Darian under his wing, seeing him as something of an adopted son. Darian quickly learned the tricks of the trade, and before long was making and modifying his own firearms as well, his latest invention charging kinetic force into a pistol, allowing it to fire with as much energy as a canon, capable of tearing down stone walls and shredding a spriggan into naught but splinters. He only wished he held such a weapon a decade ago.

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