Born to the fourth house of Arkentgrhym, Oussani, Gyldyr was the secondboy of a Matron mad with ambition. He didn't appear to be anything special at first, his blue eyes considered arresting but hardly worth mentioning; sent off to the University to follow in the previous (and now deceased) elderboy's footsteps, Gyldyr Oussani showed some promise. He wouldn't ever be an Archmage, but he was creative and intuitive and surviving. He was also polite enough to get out of some of the trouble his ever-inquisitive and questioning nature got him into. The elderboy, Ardulaonar, kept a close eye on his younger brother. The former patron, Rilimar, had been similarly troublesome, and soon after his son's birth had died in an ill-advised attempt at the Matron Mother's life. Everyone in the house was careful to never mention Gyldyr's father.
Adrulaonar had been noticing Gyldyr sneaking off to the summoning circles whenever he could. At first, the elderboy suspected his brother was summoning demons or even (and here he was delighted at the idea of such a mistake) devils to tutor him in his true passion, the dance of battle- certainly, Gyldyr was doing ever better in his sparring matches against his close friend, a common named Halor. Instead, Ardulaonar found that the secondboy was summoning eladrin, simply for conversation. Having a quiet word with the younger drow's instructors, the elderboy arranged for Gyldyr to be assigned to binding a particularly dangerous planar entity, a great astral beast. The instructors returned, expecting to find Gyldyr dead- instead, he was comatose, the beast nowhere to be seen. It was quickly found that the secondboy's spirit had followed the astral panther into its home plane. Gyldyr's Matron bargained to have her son's body returned to her. When he was finally brought back to the Material, he was assigned to the Garrison and never returned to the University.
Ardulaonar had argued to quietly kill the secondboy (most had assumed the great beast had killed him anyway)- if the dominant houses learned that the promising young drow, whenever his weakened spirit could summon magic, no longer summoned arcane spells but divine, and not by the patronage of any vile power, what could the repercussions for House Oussani be? The Matron, with so few sons, refused.
Where Gyldyr had been competent among the young spellcasters at the University, during the patrols in the Underlands, surviving by sword and wit and teamwork for weeks on end, he shone. He seemed to have an almost supernatural sense for the lay of the land, and fought viciously against any threats to his homeland or his house.
He was present when Halor was killed (slowly) as a spy. It had been around the time Ardulaonar had, in a fit of temper, told the Matron about his brother and the eladrin- it's likely he had waited this long as he wasn't above using Gyldyr as an ally against the increasingly mad females of his house. Fortunately for Gyldyr, he'd aquitted himself well since, having been the one to officially reveal Halor as a spy (he'd been unaware that anyone else in the house knew). In a rare moment of magnanimity , the elderboy took his brother aside and explained as best he could exactly what could and couldn't get you killed in Arkentghrym. With his youngest sister, Micardiira, gone to the Temple School, Gyldyr was increasingly considered the most unstable and most promising young noble in the house. The Matron and his captain were both tolerant of this, as for every lost commoner child he returned with after voluntary patrols by himself, he brought back the heads of three dangerous monsters. However, for obvious reasons, he was sent on increasingly dirtier missions- and the house wizard kept asking for his help in summoning demons, which annoyed and confused the young drow to no end.
A few days before he was to be included in the ranks of Black Strand, the elite fighting school in Arkentgrhym, he was included in a patrol to the surface. They found an elven town and descended upon it, silent as the grave, slaughtering those not worth the effort of dragging them back into their lightless hell. Gyldyr stumbled across crying elven child. She was crying for her mother. While the battle bought him some time, he covered her in the blood of her dead mother and hid her as best he could among the carnage. At the back of this massacre, Gyldyr made the most pivotal decision of his life. He turned his scimitars against his comrades. It was a smallish patrol, and many of the fighters didn't recognize this blood-covered demon until he'd thrust a sword through their heart. Before he'd completely lost the element of surprise, Ardulaonar turned on him and soon enough it was evident that for all Gyldyr's promise, Ardulaonar had decades of experience and knew how his brother fought. The duel drug on- Gyldyr put up a good fight, and in the last moment the elderboy overeached. The two brothers fell in the same moment. The battered drow band brought Ardulaonar's corpse with them as they returned to the Underlands, leaving his traitor brother for the crows.
A few days later, Gyldyr picked himself up and staggered to the nearest cave he could find. The remains of those killed in the attack and any survivors had long since been removed by their living kin. In the following months, the former secondboy tried to orient himself in this strange new world. Caught in a winter storm, he was saved from dying of cold by an old hermit, and stayed with the old man to learn Common and the ways of nature and enough to get by among the itinerant adventurers of the surface world. He would've been quite content to live with the old hermit indefinitely, but a band of orcs, the druid's long-time enemies, attacked- Gyldyr and the druid defended themselves effectively enough, but the old man was wounded, and died by the beginning of summer.
Armed with the old man's books on heroes and the world, the former Oussani secondboy packed up and tried to find a path where he could mold who he was based on who he wanted to be, instead of the monster he looked like, which people feared and the things that lived in the shadows were only too happy to manipulate for their own ends. Living as an adventurer for a bit over a decade now, Gyldyr is learning that shades of grey kill idealism faster than a void of black. Walking the line between knight errant and mercenary, his greatest solace is the bond with nature that was first forged by his contact with the great astral panther in the Underlands.
