Dvight didn't begin life with much. His family was condemned as serfs to plough and manage three acres of hilly, rocky, land with poor soil and worse weather.
Then, as happens in stories of this sort, something happened. The sun rose red one autumn morning, and by noontime thunderstorms had rolled in. And with the rains came a band of raiders, dressed in browns and reds, looking to pillage and burn the countryside. Dvight, only 14 years at the time, met the raiders at the front gate.
Their leader was a man named Valens. Dressed in furs and tokens bespeaking his rank, he pulled up his horse fifteen feet from the gate. "Stand aside, whelp. We have a busy day ahead of us, and no time for you."
"I am Dvight, son of Gadric, son of Gadric. My father and brothers stand guard in that homestead, and bid me come out to you. We possess nothing save that which keeps us alive, but we will defend that with our lives. But I am willing to join with you, and lend my full strength of arm and heart to your cause, if you will pass by my father's house."
The raiders taught him what he needed to know, and the next nine months were hard-lived but profitable. Every couple of weeks, they found a new land, new towns to plunder, new foes to kill. Dvight first realized his magical potential when he squared off against a deranged wizard and her goblin acolytes. When he took her magic missiles and then turned around and cast the spell back at her, he was as surprised as she. Typically, he has had to be the recipient of a spell's effects in order to learn it.
One of their forays had won for them a map to something called Grafna's Hoard, a trove of riches. The map led to rich, forested hills, and to a series of natural caves set into a mountainside. Valens led his men up to the mouth of the cave, and suddenly an enormous form burst forth from the cave, all claws and scales and screeching, and when Dvight looked up, he saw a magnificent dragon, wheeling slow in the skies above him, ready to dive.
And Dvight turned to Valens and spoke. "I see by my own eyes that your wear a torc taken from my family. You have broke your word with me," After he had said his piece, he raised his axe and, as the rest of the raiders stood transfixed by the dragon, Dvight slew Valens. The raiders fled in blind panic.
The copper dragon landed and, in a strange conversation, suggested that it was the grandfather of Dvight's own long-lost mother. With that news ringing in his ears, Dvight fled, and began his adventures as a solitary wanderer, an explorer. Dvight spent thirteen years a-wandering, never settling down, making ties to no community. His list of former comrades and allies is long, as is his list of enemies.
One crisp winter morning, amid the ruins of a profane temple to some obscure toad-god, Dvight stepped under a rune-encrusted linnet and found himself on another plane, populated by fae creatures, intelligent animals, and self-aware vegetation. He's spent the last seven years tumbling through strange realities, accustoming himself to alien cultures, avoiding the demonic slavers who seemed to be found everywhere, looking to return home.
This land is unfamiliar to him. But whether his own home is on another continent, a distant world, or a week's ride away, he cannot say. And the people here are polite; their customs, understandable; and their problems with demons, all too familiar. For now, his travels between worlds has come to an end.
