“You’re not from around here.” It was a statement he had become accustomed to hearing since he had been abandoned at the stoop of the monastery. Edan shook his head, his fiery red braid dancing across his back. He gave a weak, tight smile that did not meet his jewel-bright green eyes and handed the vintner a tightly rolled list. 

A few minutes passed while the wine seller tallied his bill, wrote a receipt and took his gold. As he accepted the receipt, he stopped himself from thanking the man and instead bowed. He had mere days left of silence and this small, annoying man would not be the catalyst for his broken vow. Said rude man eyed his ears again, not bothering to hide his uncouth staring and nodded once. Edan felt his anger and embarrassment rising. 

Once out in the bright late spring sun, Edan wished he had not worn his cloak over his robes. Sweat began to trickle down his back as he rolled his shoulders and shifted uncomfortably. It was nearly noon and if he was lucky, and the vintner packed his wagon quickly, he could make it back to the monastery before midnight. 

When he had been taken in as a small child by the monks at the monastery, he had been told to never expect special treatment because of his heritage. Far from ever wanting to capitalize on his half-elven lineage, Edan formed a certain disdain for his unmistakable deformities. Teased by the other boys for his flame-red hair, his slightly smaller build and his unmistakably eflin ears and beaten by the elder monks for his lack of respect for authority, Edan struggled with his temper and an intense urge to abandon the teachings of his monkhood to find what else the world had to offer. While his brothers brought their differences to him to help with resolution, his own problems were impossible for him to solve and he often relied on physical violence to speak for him when attacked by others.

Following a very un-monkish brawl with his brothers, a fight in which he broke three noses with his mean left hook, he was approached by a tall, broad monk he had never met before. The blond man asked what Edan thought he wanted out of his life. After admitting that he was unsure but that he did, indeed, feel out of place in the bookish life of the other monks, the Highlord led Edan to the secretive halls of the paladin order. 

Finally feeling like he belonged somewhere, to some degree, Edan began training under a sworn paladin, learning things the monks would never have taught him, namely how to wield a weapon properly and effectively. They maintained their pious and devotional duties but instead of hiding in his room with a book, he was instead learning how to adapt his smaller frame to the weapons of his new order and how to use this specific set of skills to uphold Justice.

After a couple of years with the paladins, the Highlord approached Edan once more and told him that he should start to consider his oath. Knowing that this meant he was soon to be sworn into his order as a full-fledged paladin, he took his vow of silence, one that he would uphold until he had decided on his oath, and set off to perform his last act of duty to the monastery. 

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Now, he returned home and as he came up over the last hill, his horse struggling in the rainy, muddy track of a road, he felt his heart stutter. Before him, the monastery was all but razed. His elfin eyes could discern shapes leaving the ruins, their backs laden with their ransacked treasure. Rage, cold and icy, filled Edan. 

He stole into the ruins as quietly as he could and descended the stairs into the hidden halls of his order. He found the corpses of his brothers, men he had both loved and hated. As he searched through the despoiled halls, he finally came across the Highlord, alive but mortally wounded. Too shaken to remember his vow but too shocked to speak, he knelt beside the man that had saved him from the boring and depressing life of a monk and had given him a fist full of steel instead. 

The Highlord offered to hear and accept Edan’s oath if he was ready to swear himself to the order. He removed his left gauntlet. Edan nodded, readying his oath in his mind, his mouth open to speak the words. The arrow that erupted out of the Highlord’s neck came from nowhere and the pommel that found the top of Edan’s head was also not expected.

Noting that he was not human, but never having actually seen an elf, the raiders took him captive and Edan ascertained that he was to be sold to slavers or ransomed if the raiders could find the right market. The anger and rage that had simmered in Edan his entire young life appeared to die out and he retained his silence. He passively followed orders but deep in his mind he was calculating, remembering, planning. 

One day, Edan happened to notice a rather nice gauntlet on the left hand of one of his captors as it was used to slap him. The fire flared in him and he lashed out blindly, killing the guard that had been abusing him seconds before. Edan’s panic set in and as he removed the gauntlet from the fist of the evil-doer, he enacted his plan of escape.

He fled into the nearby forest with only a small bag of provisions he had managed to pilfer and the Highlord’s leather gauntlet on his dominant left hand. He stayed in the forest for as long as he could, surviving on the plants and small animals he caught but eventually, the injustice that he had endured caused him to search out people once more.

In the first town he encountered, he made a small amount of gold selling his writing skills, transcribing things for the local merchants that were not as educated as he had been. The first thing that he spent a large potion of his gold on was a blacksmith. Edan instructed the man to attach steel spikes and studs to the leather, transforming the gauntlet into a weapon. 

With his newly weaponized fist at his side, he sought the local priest and, breaking his vow of silence for the first time in over two years, Edan gave his Oath of Vengeance. 

“I shall never rest until the injustice wrought upon my brothers is corrected. If I am struck down before I can accomplish this task, may God reject my soul and bid it to wander the earth until each wrong has been righted.”