Tycho Sandalwood was born on one of the great cattle ranches of western Molthune to parents secretly involved in seditious activities designed to undermine that nation’s government. Their motives were religious—his father was a cleric and his mother a ranger, each of them members of the priesthood of Milani, the Everbloom. As the goddess of hope, devotion, and uprisings, Milani’s faith was spreading rapidly across the plains when the Sandalwoods were named outlaws.
Fleeing with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and the babe in their arms, the couple crossed the Marideth River into Nirmathas seeking the aid of a mysterious fellow follower of Milani they knew only as Frater Cobb. The Molthuni army caught up with them in the shallows as they forded their way to a new life, however. Tycho’s mother was killed by archers, and his father grievously wounded.
Grief-stricken, Tycho’s father was forced to abandon his wife’s body and flee into the prisoning trees of the Fangwood. Lacking the woodcraft of his late spouse and burdened with an infant, the cleric quickly became hopelessly lost, only to be rescued at the point of starvation by Frater Cobb. That worthy proved to be a faun bent on bringing the faith of the Everbloom from his native Verduran Forest to the fey of the Southern Fangwood.
The faun took the widower and his son north through the dangerous woodlands until they came close to the banks of the Tourondell in the environs of the village of Kassen. There, man and child set out to make a new life for themselves, with Tycho’s father aiding Frater Cobb in his evangelizing and the rapidly growing youngster quickly adapting to life in the woods. Raised as much by Cobb as his father, each of those priests provided tutelage in the ways of Milani, investing young Tycho with a life-long ambition to join the Everbloom’s church. But not as a cleric. The priesthood of Milani also numbers rangers among its ranks, and it was around his twelfth year that Tycho made the acquaintance of Kassen’s resident expert in those ways, Arnama Lastrid.
Herself orphaned by the Molthuni military, Arnama overcame her usual brusqueness to befriend the boy who had begun clumsily following her on her patrols of the area. The two discovered they had more in common besides a shared tragedy—they each had an abiding love of wild places, and of the plants and creatures that live in them. With his father’s blessing—and the somewhat more grudging approval of Frater Cobb—Tycho was eventually formally apprenticed to Arnama, who has spent the last several years training him in the arts once practiced by his late mother.
A stocky young man with a quick smile that never fails to reach his green eyes, Tycho Sandalwood looks forward to the day when he’ll be anointed as a clergyman of Milani. Her tenants of optimism and resolve have much to do with the makeup of the young man’s personality, as he is always ready to face any task with both the will to complete it and the firm belief that resolution is possible. Though he does not remember his mother, he has benefitted greatly from the tutelage and examples of three parental figures now—his father, Frater Cobb, and, most recently, Arnama Lastrid. Now in his 20th year, Tycho stands ready to put his skill with a bow and his training in woodcraft in the service of any who need them.
