The border villages of Vieland often feel a world away from the urbane and sophisticated salons of Lepidstadt. Orc raids are a constant worry and one such raid carried off Katya Kuznetsova, the daughter of the town smith in the village of Tochka. The Tochkan village council collected enough coin to hire a group of adventurers to rescue Katya and several other women the raiders had stolen. Katya’s homecoming was darkened by the fact that one of the raiders had despoiled her virtue. Her father, Gregor, hid her away in their home as a baby grew inside of her. The birth was an awful thing and Katya did not survive it. Gregor would have simply exposed the child to the elements, but a priest of Pharasma had attended the birth and forbid him to deny the infant its chance at life. The cleric took the infant to Lepidstadt, where he grew up in the Grey House, an orphanage not far from Gravecharge Cathedral. He was named Dmitri for the cleric who spirited him away.
Dmitri grew up quickly and grew up massively. Life in the Grey House was continual labor, punctuated by periodic meals and religious services. Despite his fierce appearance and growing stature, Dmitri rarely got into fights at the orphanage: his size usually dissuaded smaller boys from picking on the half-orc (at least to his face). He earned his more dramatic moniker at the age of 12, when the clerics took the children to see a traveling carnival. A half-starved firepelt escaped from its cage and charged at the children, easily the smallest prey at hand. While even the clerics recoiled at the wild animal, something broke loose in Dmitri’s heart as the creature stalked a pretty little brunette girl. He charged the angry cat and attempted to pin it to the ground. He was successful in restraining the creature, but the cat’s claws made a ruin of his face, leaving a mass of deep cuts across his face that became a mass of scars, punctuated by turning his right eye a dark red. The clerics’ healing kept him from dying, but his face remained forever a ruin. Members of the Pharasmin Penitence proclaimed him “blessed” by the Lady of Graves.
Said blessing must have been one of the “in-disguise” sort, because his appearance had gone from merely fearsome to the stuff of nightmares. The clergy who ran the orphanage began to encourage him to “find his way in the world.” He began looking for work as a porter or manual labor. When he gave his name in one tavern, an older man called him over. Alexei Danesti had been hired by a small village to save a girl named “Kuznetsov” some 14 years ago and he put Dmitri’s story together with his own. Taking pity on the young half-orc, the older warrior used his contacts to help the boy get his start, first with the Lepidstadt City Watch, and then as a bodyguard to Professor Petros Lorrimar, who had come to Vieland to study the Kellid ruins under a grant from Lepidstadt University. Both Alexei and Professor Lorrimor gave Dmitri something he had never had before: father figures. Alexei died in a street duel with a talented duelist from the university, leaving Dmitri his old breastplate. Having just received news of the Professor’s death, the young warrior feels more adrift than ever, though he is determined to honor the academic’s wishes.
