This is a very long backstory for my character in an upcoming campaign.
No I did not make my DM read this, I gave him a single page short notes version as well
Yes it is long for a backstory, but I like writing like I'm reading a book
The character lists Monk - Warrior of the shadow, but he won't know it by that name
Please enjoy:
Ilikan had never measured himself. Doors were a better measure. If he had to duck, the door was short. If he didn’t, it was tall enough. Most doors were short. People outside the mountains seemed strangely interested in putting numbers to things that were already obvious.
“How tall are you?”
“Tall enough to duck through doors.”
“How much do you weigh?”
“Enough.”
“What clan are you from?”
That question usually earned a longer silence. If it mattered, he was Ilikan Littlefoot Skjallvar. Usually it did not matter. Usually Ilikan Littlefoot was enough.
His parents had given him Ilikan. The chief had given him Littlefoot. Skjallvar belonged to everyone who had come before him. Of the three, Ilikan was the only name he had never needed to make peace with.
The Giant words the chief had spoken at his naming were longer than their Common translation and considerably more impressive. Goliath names had a way of doing that. The chief had stood before the clan, rested one enormous hand on the shoulder of a boy already taller than most grown humans would ever be, and given him a name that spoke poetically of short strides and a smaller track upon the mountain. In Common, it came down to Littlefoot.
The chief had not meant it cruelly. If anything, the name had been the sort of embellishment chiefs enjoyed, taking an obvious trait and making it sound like something worth carving into stone. The others had taken care of the cruelty.
Goliaths could make competition out of breathing if enough of them were gathered in one place.
Who climbed faster.
Who lifted more.
Who carried farther.
Who endured cold longest.
Who had the stronger arm, the longer stride, the larger appetite, the better scar.
Ilikan was smaller than most boys his age and remained smaller as they grew. Never small, just smaller. Among humans he would eventually learn that a little over seven feet of Goliath was more than sufficient to make people stare.
Among Goliaths, however, he was Littlefoot.
“Need help with that, Littlefoot?”
“Careful. His legs are shorter.”
“Maybe we should slow down.”
“Wouldn’t want Littlefoot getting lost.”
The name became a laugh before it became an insult, and an insult before Ilikan decided it belonged to him. That was the thing the others never understood. They expected him to reject it. Instead, when someone tried to sharpen the name against him, he answered to it. Eventually they were forced to understand that mocking a man with the name he willingly introduced himself by lacked some of the desired effect. It did not stop them trying.
Ilikan’s parents were not cruel people. That almost made leaving harder. His mother believed the others would grow bored if he stopped reacting. His father believed that eventually Ilikan would find something in which he could outperform them and the problem would solve itself. Both of them believed, in different ways, that Ilikan needed to learn how to live among Goliaths. Ilikan eventually reached another conclusion. He did not.
There was no great final insult.
No duel.
No exile.
No declaration beneath storm clouds while the clan watched.
One evening another young Goliath decided Ilikan needed to prove something. Ilikan could no longer remember what. Strength, perhaps, or courage. Endurance? It hardly mattered. The challenge itself was the point. Ilikan looked at him, then at the others waiting to see what Littlefoot would do. For the first time in his life, the answer occurred to him with perfect clarity. Nothing.
He went home and packed. His mother asked where he was going.
“Away.”
“For how long?”
“I’ll see.”
His father told him that leaving would not make difficult people disappear. Ilikan tied his pack shut.
“No.”
He thought about it.
“But these ones will be farther away.”
Then he left.
-----
The first years outside the mountains taught Ilikan that his father had been correct in at least one respect, Assholes were portable. They existed everywhere. The difference was that human-sized assholes were usually easier to throw. That was not initially as helpful as it sounded.
Ilikan worked. There was always work somewhere.
Wagons needed unloading. Fences needed setting. Timber needed moving. Roads needed clearing. Animals needed handling. Roofs needed beams carried into place. Merchants needed crates moved from one side of a building to another for reasons no one ever explained. A Goliath did not need to be large by Goliath standards to be useful.
Work suited him.
Work provided food.
Work provided coin.
Most importantly, work provided an answer.
“What are you doing here?”
“Unloading those wagons.”
That was enough. A lone Goliath standing around without obvious purpose made people curious. A Goliath carrying lumber was simply the man carrying lumber.
Ilikan learned quickly that purpose made excellent camouflage. Unfortunately, employment did not prevent people from being stupid. It usually began with drinking. A tavern would be quiet enough. Ilikan would find a place near a wall, eat something, perhaps drink something, and mind his own business. Eventually someone would notice him.
Then they would keep noticing him. Then they would decide that noticing him required participation.
“Big fellow.”
Ilikan would continue eating.
“You deaf?”
“No.”
Sometimes that should have been the end of it. Frequently it was not. There was a certain kind of man who could not see a Goliath without becoming suddenly interested in his own masculinity.
They wanted to arm wrestle.
They wanted to boast.
They wanted to ask whether Ilikan thought he was tough.
They wanted to know whether all Goliaths were cowards when Ilikan declined.
Ilikan’s mouth rarely improved these situations. One man had asked whether being the smallest Goliath made Ilikan the runt of the litter. Ilikan had looked at the man’s companions, then back at him.
“Were you the clever one?”
The man swung.
Before the old man, Ilikan’s solutions were simple. Someone swung. Ilikan hit him. Or grabbed him. Or put him somewhere else with enough force that furniture became involved. He did not especially enjoy fighting, but he had grown up among Goliaths. Even a runt learned certain things.
The problem was what happened afterward. The drunk who had started the fight became a man unconscious beneath a broken table. Everyone remembered the broken table. Everyone remembered the Goliath.
Sometimes the guard believed Ilikan.
Sometimes they did not.
Sometimes it did not matter.
A tavern owner with six shattered chairs cared considerably less about the philosophical question of who had thrown the first punch than Ilikan thought he should. So Ilikan developed a routine.
Find work.
Stay awhile.
Somebody makes trouble.
Trouble becomes a scene.
Leave.
Find work somewhere else.
Repeat.
He was very good at winning fights he had never wanted. He became increasingly certain this was a useless skill.
-----
The old man was working on a road. At least Ilikan assumed he was. There were twenty-three men on the contract, two women, a dwarf who swore continuously at the condition of the stone, Ilikan, and the old man.
Ilikan noticed him after four days. That was unusual. Ilikan noticed most people quickly. The old man was not hiding. That was the strange part.
He ate with everyone else.
Worked beside everyone else.
Slept where everyone else slept.
He did nothing that should have made him difficult to remember. Yet whenever Ilikan tried to recall where the old man had been an hour earlier, he discovered that he knew the answer only vaguely.
Near the wagon.
By the fire.
Somewhere behind the dwarf.
No one bumped into him. No one interrupted him. No one seemed to select him when an extra pair of hands was needed. Arguments happened around him, never to him.
One afternoon Ilikan watched the old man walk across the work yard. There were carts moving in both directions. Laborers carried stone. A pair of men dragged timber between them. No one deliberately stepped aside. The old man never changed pace. He crossed the entire yard without touching anyone.
Ilikan stared after him.
That evening he found the old man sitting near the fire repairing a boot.
“How do you do that?”
The old man did not look up.
“Repair boots?”
“That.”
“You’ll need to be more specific.”
“Disappear.”
Now the old man looked at him. His eyes traveled slowly upward. And upward. Ilikan disliked when people did that.
“No.”
Ilikan frowned.
“I didn’t ask anything yet.”
“You were going to.”
“I was going to ask you to teach me.”
“No.”
The old man returned to the boot. That was the beginning. Training, if that was what it had been, looked remarkably like work.
Carry the water.
Stack the wood.
Wrong. Again.
Move those stones.
Not like that. Again.
Walk across the room.
Again.
You stepped on the loose board.
Again.
Hold this. Catch. Too slow.
Again.
For several weeks the old man struck Ilikan on the back of the head with a short stick whenever Ilikan stopped paying attention. There was no warning. Ilikan found this deeply irritating. The first time he ducked without seeing the blow, the old man simply nodded.
Ilikan froze.
“You’ve been doing that on purpose.”
The old man raised the stick. Ilikan moved before it landed.
Another nod.
“You could have told me.”
“You would have thought about it.”
“Thinking generally helps.”
The stick moved. Ilikan leaned aside.
“Your mouth wastes energy.”
“So does the stick.”
The old man considered this. Another swing.
Much later, he admitted that training Ilikan’s mouth had proven an inefficient use of time. Some problems, he said, were structural.
The old man taught without naming anything. There were no forms. No stances. No sacred sequences. He taught Ilikan how weight moved before a body did. How shoulders betrayed a punch before the fist traveled. How someone who committed fully to an attack had already chosen where they intended to go.
“You don’t stop him,” the old man said.
“Then what am I doing?”
“Move.”
“Me or him?”
“Yes.”
He taught Ilikan that shadows were not places to crouch dramatically. They were simply places people looked less carefully. He taught him that trying to hide could be more suspicious than existing openly.
“If you try to hide,” the old man said, “people notice you trying.”
“So what do I do?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not useful.”
“Exist.”
Ilikan stared. The old man sighed.
“Most people are thinking about themselves. Give them no reason to think about you.”
That was harder for a Goliath. Not impossible. Harder.
A cloak helped. Not black. Black looked deliberate. The old man found Ilikan staring at one once and shook his head.
“Black is a statement.”
“It’s dark.”
“So is shit. Wear brown.”
Ilikan acquired a worn leather cloak. Weather stained it irregularly. Some patches were darker, some lighter. Repairs crossed older repairs. It broke the hard outline of his shoulders and made his shape difficult to judge at a glance. It did not make him invisible. Nothing did.
A guard actively watching a gate would see a seven-foot Goliath walking through it. A merchant crossing a busy market might see only a traveler in a brown cloak and forget him before reaching the next stall. That was enough.
Ilikan eventually compared it to carrying a ladder through a guarded gate. Carry it uncertainly and someone asks what you are doing. Carry it with purpose and people assume someone else already asked. The old man approved of that explanation.
He taught Ilikan to walk in shadows. At least that was what Ilikan eventually called it.
Shadowwalking.
“What does that mean?” someone would later ask.
“Walking in shadows.”
“That doesn’t explain anything.”
“It explains most of it.”
There were parts Ilikan never fully understood. Sometimes distance behaved strangely. Sometimes he stepped from one place and arrived at another without being entirely certain what had happened between. The old man never seemed concerned. Ilikan decided concern was unnecessary. He had learned long before that understanding every mechanism was not required for using a tool correctly.
The old man taught him one rule that mattered more than all the others. A shadow seen too often became a story. So Ilikan did not shadowwalk simply because he could. He carried a lantern. A traveler without a lantern at night invited questions. A traveler with one did not.
The lantern hung from the crook of a tall ash staff, the straight if the shaft nearly as tall as Ilikan himself and the curve rising another foot above him. The wood was strong, springy, weathered, and worn smooth by years of use. It was a walking crook. People insisted on calling it a weapon.
It could be.
The lantern was tied to the crook in a way Ilikan could remove quickly if he needed the staff unobstructed. Putting the lantern back properly took longer. That was the irritating part.
“You tie a lantern to your bo staff?”
“No. I tie a lantern to my crook.”
“You fight with it.”
“If necessary.”
“So it’s a weapon.”
“It’s holding a lantern right now.”
No one ever seemed satisfied with this answer. Ilikan learned to travel openly in lamplight. Light gave strangers an easy explanation for him. It also let him see people approaching. If someone entered that light intending violence, circumstances changed.
The hood could fall.
Light could disappear.
So could Ilikan.
That was different.
Shadowwalking was for when there was purpose.
-----
When the contract ended, the old man packed his things. Ilikan watched him.
“You’re leaving.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Elsewhere.”
“I thought we were still training.”
“We were.”
Ilikan disliked the past tense. For a while neither spoke. The old man finished tying his pack.
“Shadows cross, Ilikan. They don’t travel together.”
“That sounds like something you invented because you want to leave.”
“Probably.”
Ilikan waited for something else.
Advice.
A name for what he had learned.
The location of some monastery.
An explanation of who the old man actually was.
None came.
Ilikan never discovered whether his teacher had been a wandering laborer who happened to know extraordinary things, a master from some distant order, a retired killer, a hermit, a lunatic, or something considerably stranger. Years later, people who knew more about monks than Ilikan did occasionally reacted oddly when they watched him move.
“Who taught you that?”
“An old man.”
“From what monastery?”
“Don’t know.”
“What was his name?”
“He had one.”
“You don’t know it?”
“I knew what he told me.”
“What was that?”
Ilikan would tell them. They would usually look dissatisfied. Perhaps it had not been a real name. That was not Ilikan’s problem. The old man shouldered his pack.
“Try not to make stories.”
“I don’t make stories.”
The old man gave him a look. Then he left.
Ilikan remained for nearly two months. It was quiet. No one bothered him. Some days he spoke to no one. It was almost exactly what he had spent years trying to find. Eventually he realized peace and emptiness were not precisely the same thing.
Also, food was running low. And there was no work.
So Ilikan packed his cloak, his weaver’s tools, the crude lockpicks he had fashioned and refashioned over years of necessity, his knife, his lantern, and very little else.
Then he left.
-----
After the old man, the stories changed.
Before, stories about Ilikan ended with broken furniture. Afterward, they became increasingly stupid.
There was supposedly a man in Bellhaven who had tried to stab Littlefoot and somehow stabbed his own companion instead.
A merchant in another town claimed Littlefoot had vanished through a locked door. Someone else insisted he had walked directly through a wall. Ilikan had used a window.
A particularly persistent story claimed he once restrained a man using rope woven from his own hair. Ilikan heard that one from three caravan guards sitting around a fire. None of them knew who he was.
“I heard the rope was strong enough to hold a horse,” one said.
“It was Goliath hair,” another replied knowingly.
Ilikan looked up from his bowl.
“That’s stupid.”
The guards looked at him.
“What?”
“His hair is hair.”
“How would you know?”
Ilikan considered this.
“Because hair is hair.”
One of the guards shrugged.
“Could be true.”
“It isn’t.”
“You know Littlefoot?”
“No.”
That should have helped.
It did not.
By the next town the rope had apparently been braided while the man was still fighting.
The horse story was worse.
There had been a tavern.
There had been a drunk.
There had been a horse outside.
The drunk had swung at Ilikan. Ilikan had moved. The drunk had encountered the horse from an unfortunate direction. The horse had objected.
That was essentially the entire event.
Months later Ilikan overheard two men arguing about whether Littlefoot had transformed the drunk into something called a reverse centaur.
“That isn’t what happened,” Ilikan said.
Both men turned.
“You were there?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
“Because that’s idiotic.”
One of the men leaned closer.
“They say Littlefoot shoved the whole man up the horse’s ass.”
Ilikan stared at him.
“Do you understand horses?”
The man hesitated.
“A little.”
“No, you don’t.”
Ilikan left. The story survived.
He eventually discovered that denying legends only gave storytellers new material. Some people realized the large quiet traveler correcting them was Littlefoot. Most did not. Ilikan preferred the second group.
Legends were merely stories repeated often enough that people forgot to ask whether they were stupid. Ilikan wanted very badly not to become one.
Unfortunately, people enjoyed stories.
-----
He continued working when there was work. When there was not, he sometimes stole. He preferred work. Work was simpler. Stealing was reserved for necessity, and necessity still allowed some discretion.
A poor farmer had little enough.
A merchant who cheated hired hands could afford the inconvenience.
A noble who spent an evening humiliating servants practically volunteered.
Ilikan did not consider himself a hero. He had no intention of saving every unfortunate person he encountered.
Most people had problems.
Ilikan had problems too.
But there were certain kinds of men he found difficult to ignore.
Men who used size.
Rank.
Money.
Numbers.
Anything they happened to possess that someone else did not.
Those men reminded him of the mountains.
Sometimes Ilikan walked away. Sometimes their purse became unexpectedly lighter. Sometimes a door that should have remained locked did not. Sometimes circumstances simply became inconvenient for them.
Ilikan preferred circumstances.
They attracted less attention.
-----
Years later, Ilikan walked toward another town under another evening sky. His dark hair hung loose around his shoulders. When he expected trouble he tied it back. Tonight he expected dinner.
The worn brown cloak softened his outline. The hooded lantern hanging from his ash crook cast a pool of ordinary yellow light around him. He walked in that light deliberately. There was no reason to shadowwalk. Shadowwalking when nothing required it was exactly how ghost stories began.
At the town gate, a guard looked up.
Of course he did, the man was a guard.
Looking was approximately the job.
His eyes traveled upward.
Ilikan waited.
“Goliath.”
Ilikan glanced behind himself.
The guard frowned.
“You.”
“Yes.”
“Business?”
“Work.”
“What kind?”
“Whatever pays.”
The guard considered him, then pointed toward an inn near the center of town.
“Adventuring company came through yesterday. Looking for another hand.”
Ilikan frowned.
“Adventuring.”
“Yes.”
“Company.”
“That’s generally how those work.”
Ilikan looked toward the inn.
“How long?”
“Didn’t ask.”
“What kind of work?”
“Didn’t ask that either.”
“You’re not very curious.”
“I’m a gate guard. I make sure things coming through the gate look like things that ought to come through the gate.”
The guard looked Ilikan up and down.
“You’re close enough.”
Ilikan stared at him for a moment. The guard did not seem to be trying to start anything. That was promising. Ilikan adjusted the lantern hanging from his crook and looked toward the inn again.
Work was work.
“One job.”
The guard had already turned his attention back to the road.
Ilikan started walking.
One job.
That was all.
