Cedric Locke

**Main Background:**

A human of uncertain origin, but forged in the streets of Celadon and in service of the Solemn Crane Company. After years, he rose from a common foot-soldier to a trusted member of the company’s war councils; planning raids, attacks, battles, and all manner of the company’s business with the other senior officers. He has a sword with the appearance of magical runes written as if in melted emeralds and sapphires, and chainmail with details in the same colors. There is no evidence yet that these runes *do* anything. He has runic tattoos on his wrists deep ruby in color, almost maroon.

It was while leading an attack on a party of dissident, fanatical druids that Locke was captured as his party met with slaughter in the darkness of those woods. For 34 days, the druids held Cedric, subjecting him to torture and magical experimentation. The sect hoped to cleanse him of the taint of society: to remove the desire for gold from his mind, to return him to the primal days of the wilds, when men communed with nature spirits and the forests reigned supreme. Their experiments failed. Locke escaped, cutting down dozens of the druids in the process. But, with each slice of his sword, he assumed more and more of their magic. The ties that weeks of spiritual torment had left remade Locke. Gone was the plain—if cunning and bright—sellsword whose ambition had led him to the top of the Solemn Cranes. Instead, there was a new wildness, and new power lurking in the fibers of Cedric’s being.

After a further 17 days wandering the fierce wilds, Locke rejoined the Solemn Cranes in a sort of trance. The commanders who had relied on Locke for so many years found the man who came back changed. He was unruly, prone to fits of rage and melancholy and joy, even showing touches of madness at times. But, the company came to further depend on Locke for his prowess in battle. More still, they came to see that Cedric brought a magical edge, a chaos in his soul that could turn the tide at the battle’s center, or flank, or else allow the company to slay enemy commanders in the fray. They pressed, and pressed, and pressed on Locke to develop and refine his power, but the wilderness was too ingrained, the forest too deeply rooted, for any amount of training, discipline, or torment to enclose.

After another year with the company, being pushed and prodded and manipulated, Locke broke. The captains had pushed him too far, and he no longer felt the pull for prestige, or rank, or power within the company. Instead, Locke felt a deeper call: a yearning for freedom and peace that transcended what had once been so easily been found in the routines and rhythms of life as a mercenary. In a trance not unlike the one that had led him back to the Solemn Cranes, Cedric gathered the most crucial of his things—his sword, in which the blood of the druids had fallen and inlaid with mystic runes, but with a hilt hewn from the great tree upon which his torture had taken place; as much gold and silver as he thought he might need; a book he had stolen from the leader of the cult that had held him; his fine light chainmail, with runes from the same source as those on his sword; and sets of clothing enough to pass should he ever find himself in a place like Celadon again—and left the rest for the greed of whomever might desire them.

**Secrets:**

It wasn’t by random chance that Cedric was captured and his men slain. He had waited for the chance to make this strike; the leaders of that druid cult having been the parents who abandoned Cedric to the streets of Celadon at the age of roughly 10. But, Locke had been overconfident in the ability of talented, albeit ordinary, mercenaries to handle a hardened sect adept in the use of woodland magic and in a place of their natural power. The fears that had driven his parents to abandon him stemmed from their desire to connect to the natural world by giving up a child who had already begun to rebel against the strictness of his parent’s fanaticism led them to seek to cleanse his blood of, in their beliefs, sin and impurity. The process failed—if it ever could have worked—but left Cedric with gifts and power (the *Path of the Wild Soul*). At midnight on the 34th day, after a day under a solstice sun followed by a night under the full moon, something awoke. Using a strength that he should not have possessed, Cedric shattered the arms of the tree that had been grown around his body, grabbed his sword, and in a rage slaughtered every person at the cultists’ camp.[1]

Every person, save two. In his rage, Cedric beat his parents into submission. For each, he removed their arms at the shoulder, shoving the limbs of the tree that had bound him into the sockets, before attaching their hands back on to the limbs, and binding them to each side of that tree. From his mother’s blood, tears, prayer, his sword took on a series of runes down the fuller of his sword, green as emeralds and blue as sapphires, where once blood sat. From his father’s blood, tears, and prayer, the edges and details of his chainmail took on similar runes, but almost as if written in a different hand. When Cedric joined his parents’ hands to the trees they had idolized, his own wrists became ringed in runic script, but these in an almost maroon ruby color. These runes are not in a script that the druids knew; the tome Cedric stole from the camp after putting it to the sword has no recollection of these runes, and nowhere in the world that Cedric has seen is there any knowledge of this language. Even in this time of interest in past ages, no one can yet answer what these runes mean.

Cedric is almost entirely certain that his parents survived. He doesn’t know where, he doesn’t know how, but he can feel their presence on this plane of existence. As a result of his experiences as a child and later as an adult, Cedric has a deep distrust for fanatics of any type, but especially for those that are so devoted to magic and visions for how the world must be. This distrust borders on pure hatred, though this ability to hate comes mostly from the changes he underwent in the woods; hate, like loyalty or love, is a luxury that mercenaries can ill afford.

***M’kaba’s Truth***.

In dry earth it's roots shall twist and suffer. Under burning sun its grey leaves will shrivel into wretched bloom. In a place no tree should grow, Vasanis the Wracked Oak will herald the Torment's return. And under it's shade the tenders of its garden shall eat of it's fruit and inherit its pain.

[1] Not just the men, but the women. And the children too. They’re like animals and I slaughtered them like animals. I HATE THEM.