Born in the city of Absalom belonging to a family of sailor merchants, Cassius’s early life was travelling from port to port, marketeering and trading goods from port to port. However as the size of their businesses and holdings grew, Cassius’s parents became less and less present in his life eventually going as far to leave the raising of Cassius and his siblings to their retainers. This freedom led Cassius delve inward, focusing on books, stories, and history. He eventually became a regular among the Pathfinder Society Grand Lodge, listening to the fanciful adventures of the adventurers, arising no end of jealously in Cassius, who now wanted something more out of life than being a land locked merchant.
Because of their new found wealth, Cassius’s parents easily indulged their children’s wants and requests, from their perspective; it kept the children out of trouble. So when Cassius asked to be signed up at Blackblade’s Fighting Academy his parents saw a chance to ship an extra mouth away from the household, and save money on the retainers they paid to watch him. As the years passed by, Cassius was trained brutally hard by the instructors of the academy, turning his soft body into a sharp and lean whip.
Not feeling the slightest attachment to the parents that neglected him his entire life, Cassius never returned home to his parents after he learned everything he could from the Academy, electing to stay with the Academy, he took up a brief teaching position while he enrolled himself in a select few classes within the Grand Lodge. He studies within the Lodge focused on history and nobility, and however one day he came across mention of the cyclop empire of Ghol-Gan. Enraptured he focused on the study of the ancient language, until the wanderlust consumed him. Resigning his post at the Academy, Cassius signed up on the first ship as he made his way to the Shackles.
An easy trip however wasn’t in the cards for him however; his first ship was boarded by Chelaxian pirates who took him for a galley slave, until he managed organize an uprising with the other galley slaves, personally killing the captain of the ship himself. Their freedom lasted long enough to be boarded by a second pirate crew of the ship Torturous, their captain bent on enacting revenge for some long lost slight on the now dead pirate captain. After finding their quarry already dead and a weakened crew of escaped slaves barely able to resist them, they gladly re-enslaved everyone. Cassius’s second bout of slavery took much longer to escape from, the years in captivity causing him to become bitter and cynical during his captivity.
One day while in port he finally earned enough trust to be allowed on the upper deck while the rest of the crew was away in the city. Using a small shiv he made, he surprised and killed a crew-member and took his weapon, seized by a moment of insanity Cassius burst in on the captain’s chambers finding it empty. He quickly raided it, stealing the captain’s most prized possessions, his cutlass and armor.
From there Cassius ran, a free man once more. He made his way overland, oversea, travelling far and wide until he came to Port Peril and heard of a man talking about a map of an old cyclop ruins, the very idea that he started his adventure on. Everything was going great about the deal to get the map, at least until everything started to turn sideways, the last thing Cassius remembered was a spinning shotglass after a particularly rough shot…
