Aldric - Is This Anything?
Meet Aldric.
He turned eighteen in the dark, which is how he would have preferred to spend it – quietly, without incident, without anyone dying. He had gotten good at that. Staying small. Staying away from the edges of things. He had watched his mother go slowly and his father go suddenly and everyone else in between go badly, and he had taken careful notes on all of it without meaning to, and what the notes said was: it hurts, and it takes a long time, and it means nothing about you except that it happened.
The god did not introduce itself. It did not ask. It told him what he was going to do and it did not wait for him to agree and it did not offer him anything for the trouble and when it was done speaking the room was just a room again and Aldric was still in it, alone, the same as he had always been except now there was a direction.
He is not brave. He wants to be clear about that, in case anyone is keeping track. He knows what swords do to bodies because he has seen what smaller things do to bodies, and he is not interested in finding out what the last part feels like from the inside. But the god said go, and there is no one left to stay for, and so he is going. Quietly. Terrified. One foot and then the other, into whatever is waiting, which he is trying very hard not to think about.
Aldric is a Paladin who did not ask to be one, built along the lines of Oath of Glory less because he believes in it and more because something does, and has decided he’s the vessel. He looks like someone who has been bracing for bad news long enough that it has become his resting posture – cautious eyes, careful hands, the kind of stillness that reads as calm until you know what it actually is. In combat he fights like a person who is acutely aware that damage is real, which makes him precise and not particularly reckless, and which makes his Divine Smites feel less like power and more like desperation with good timing. At the table he is the one asking whether this is actually necessary, and then doing it anyway, every time.
#Trauma #NewAdventurer