You’ve just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As you look around, your gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. You duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? she begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
((How do you respond?))
Barnabas sits down and thinks for a few minutes before responding in a thick accent, "I suppose I don't rightly know. I've taken to wandering between growing seasons, and this time I may have wandered a bit too far." He speaks directly, and stares forward at the hag with a somewhat dull expression on his face. "I don't know if I have much of what you'd call a story. Me and all my family are farming folk, through and through. I've not seen any of them in some time of course, though I still write to my cousins." Barnabas pauses for a moment, a slight furrow in his brow, "You know, I think to myself sometimes if it was smart of me to leave them. Maybe it wasn't worth it to follow my wanderlust after all, what with all the odd places I've been ending up lately." His voice drops to a near whisper as he continues, "Speaking of, where am I? It's not that I don't like the place, and I appreciate the welcome kindly, but I'd like to be heading back to my shack. I never sleep quite as well away from home."
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Raised by farmers, on a small farm outside the main center of Haense, Barnabas lived a peaceful and fairly uneventful life spent mostly tending to his parents' cattle. Near to his twenty-fifth birthday, Barnabas left the family farm, with the hopes of staking out his own claim and living out the rest of his days on a farm of his own. Settling near Númendil, Barnabas had some luck with his small farm, and lived a decade in modest comfort. Despite this, he felt unfulfilled, as though there was something missing from his life, some fire in his heart that had been left unfueled. Walking into town one day, he spoke with a purported mystic. Barnabas was told by the mystic that he had a greater destiny than that of a humble farmer, and must go out and claim it, lest it slip through his grasp. Having always had a tenuous relationship with the concept of destiny, he took her words with a grain of salt, but reasoned that he had little to lose. He took to making small ventures away from his farm during the cold seasons, with these ventures getting longer and longer as the years marched on, but still he had not truly found anything to latch onto, leaving him still unsatisfied.
With the quiet passing of his parents over the winter, Barnabas felt his last ties to the farming lifestyle he had taken part in for his entire life up to that point snapping. Shelving his grief, he resolved to try to pick up his roots and see every corner of the world, and to heed the words of the mystic he had spoken to years before, certain that somewhere out there must lie his destiny.
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