In the dead of winter 7 years ago, Heldren's apothecary braved a snowblind to collect the bark from rare coniferous trees. It is the only time of year when the bark of these trees becomes suitable for brewing into a tea said to bring great visions; collected at any other time of year, the tree's toxic sap might instead create a severe case of the runs. Instead, the apothecary found a 15 year old boy stalking the Taldan countryside, wearing only wolf skins and wielding a scythe covered in blood.
The apothecary took the boy to Heldren, where he did not speak a word for over a year. The local authorities, at first fearing he might have lost his mind and slaughtered a farming family, made sure he was kept under close supervision until the snows cleared and they were able to take census of the outlying farm communities. No one had been brutally chopped to pieces. Under intense questioning, the boy only cried, and seemed to be unable to answer.
The apothecary arranged for the boy not to be adopted and brought into a caring family, but simply to be given the opportunity to make whatever living he could by assisting in menial tasks. When, after a year, the boy began to speak in broken Common, it became clear that he had never learned the Common tongue to begin with, and was only just beginning to pick it up. While many chalked this up to the reason for his silence, the apothecary always had a suspicion something else was involved. He remembered the dead look in the boy's eyes when his tall, fencepost frame blackened in the snowblind. For years to come, he would see the way he stared out into the snowy landscape, as though expecting something to be there.
In truth, Aurachas expected someone to be there. The creature from whose frigid loins he was shaken from after cloying about her hips and ankles for years. The woman who taught him many things: fear, self-loathing, self-hatred, bitterness, maternal love and affection, kindness, the hot joy of vengeance and the cold comfort of murder, how to skin a wolf, how to love a woman, how to eat a chipmunk without cooking it first, how to see the future in icicles, to seek the past in parchment, and how to command the eldritch forces she granted to him while he festered in her womb, causing her so much discomfort and distress, and how lucky he was not to have been an intentional stillborn fed to starving wolves.
Mother.
Nowadays, Aurachas lives in Heldren in an annex of the apothecary's. He is available to do odd jobs for the townsfolk and locals, and seems to relish the opportunity to keep his hands busy, if only to have them avoid the devil's work. He keeps the scythe with him, and sometimes joins the Taldans in their fields, using the weapon he was found with for prosperity instead of war.
Yet when it comes time to celebrate, Aurachas retreats to his small annex and cannot be found, missing most festivals, dances, fairs and carnivals. On the few occasions he has attended, those who see him characterize him as "wandering haunted through the crowd like a man marked for death."
And in some ways, he knows he is, after what he did, leaving her there in her hut in the middle of the frosted woods, white body drenched in blood. He would not let her bring another child into the world to suffer like he had. Better to end it's life before it had his "fortune" to be born. She had forgotten that she had taught him how to brew Midwife's Tincture, and cover its telltale flavor with hoarberries...
Now, every winter, when the snows came to Heldren, Aurachas could hear her hissing in the wind. Enticing him back to his homeland, to stop living this lie and to suffer the consequences of his actions. To come home to die.
