Mehmet (click for larger image)
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Mehmet was born in the little fishing village of Talston, on the western coast of Cormar. His mother was a lawyer’s daughter, herself half-Vormaran, and his father a wandering sailor who caught her eye. His disguise was good, and only when the child was born did she realize his differences; young Mehmet was clearly touched by the taint of the Khyle.
His grandfather took the boy into the family legal business nonetheless, teaching him the tenets of the ancient Vadorn legal codes that had come down to modern-day Cormar. Although a good living, the law wasn’t very appealing to a lively youth with strange flashes of alien insight, and shortly after his 16th birthday he began training with the village militia as an archer.
The skills of marksmanship came naturally to the tall half-Khyle, and he rapidly made his place in the group. This continued for five years, until the death of his grandfather, upon which he made the decision to leave home and journey to the city. His training was all very well, but it was time to put it to actual use if he could, by finding a skilled and lucky company commander to sign on with, fighting in a few battles, and making his pile through plunder.
Travelling across Cormar, he made his way to the capital. Heldorn was a shock to him. For one thing, there were many, many people there, more than he was used to. For another, where he had been generally accepted in Talston, here his Khyle looks attracted a variety of reactions, some of them hostile.
This culminated in his being kidnapped in the middle of the night and taken outside the city, to a quiet spot where his attackers bluntly told him they proposed to burn him at the stake ‘as he deserved’. He struggled, but there were five of them, big burly humans, and before long he found himself bound to a stout post as his captors stacked brushwood and kindling around his ankles.
Looking desperately around, his eyes fell on some boulders at the far side of the clearing. These looked at first like natural rock, but as his panic rose his vision seemed to shift somehow, and faint runes appeared on them in the Khylar language the rudiments of which his grandfather had taught him. Stumblingly, he read them out, feeling as he did so a tingling of magical energy flowing through him.
As he completed reading, there was a stunning detonation and flash of light, like a thunderclap, and he was dazzled. A brief inner tearing ripped through him as he felt something inside change, though how he wasn’t sure. For a moment he felt as if a massive hand had seized him and pulled him forwards, and then he passed out.
When he recovered it was morning, and he hung alone in his bonds. His five would-be killers were nowhere to be seen, though their possessions and even the hatchet one had been using to cut wood were still where they had been. All the horses were gone as well.
It took Mehmet over an hour to struggle free from the ropes binding him to the stake. Once free, he searched the area, finding no trace of his enemies other than strange scrape-marks between where they had been and the mysterious boulders, almost as if something had been dragged along the ground.
He hacked the undergrowth away from the boulders, and found that as he’d suspected, they were not natural, but part of some old ruins. There was no trace of the fiery letters of the previous night, no matter how he squinted, and nothing he tried caused any form of reaction. However, in his searching, he spotted a glint and unearthed a beautiful golden ring. Once cleaned, it proved to be scribed with Khylar letters around the entire edge. He could feel magical potentials in it, but hesitated to experiment too deeply in case it was a creation of black sorcery. Pocketing it, he gathered the possessions of his attackers and set off to walk home.
Shortly after this, he heard that the commander Rurik Bloodwind was raising a company. Bloodwind was an up-and-coming captain, regarded as likely to go far, and Mehmet easily impressed him enough to be signed on as an archer.
As our story opens, he has been serving under Bloodwind for nearly a year. He has friends, and he has enemies within the Company, but generally life has been good.