Pyre

General Information
Pyre is a 22 year old, Fire Genasi, level 9 Artillerist Artificer/Gunslinger Fighter.

Before meeting Zarah
Pyre grew up with his human grandmother who made very little money fixing things and creating helpful trinkets but nonetheless lived carefree and happy. He didn’t understand that he was different from most kids until he was about 5 years old and some kids ran away from him when he tried to join in their fun. As he grew older he found himself the target of taunting and bullying so he stayed inside when possible.

One day when he was about 9 years old he was running an errand for his grandma, and some older kids started to throw rocks at him. At first, it didn’t hurt that bad until they started throwing bigger rocks as hard as they could, Pyre curled up into a ball as the got closer and began kicking him. Then it stopped. A half-elf boy no older then himself started running at the 3 or 4 older kids yelling at them, his face red with fury. They took off leaving behind Pyre, bruised and bloody but mostly intact. The boy helped him up, unbothered by the fact that he was a fire genasi and introduced himself as Bastian Cross, his new best friend. Despite his initial confusion Pyre and Bast did grow to be best friends and often spent as much time with each other as possible over the next few years.

But then the war started getting worse and the drafting started dropping lower and lower until it finally reached age 12, mere children forced to become soldiers. A couple of months later, Pyre and Bast were those children. They survived 2 years on and off in the trenches and fought in countless battles, the two of them were barely in their teens but they were battle-hardened killers. One particular battle changed everything. It had been a little over two years since they were drafted and because they had survived so much longer than their fallen comrades, both had moved up in the ranks. Pyre served as junior Artificer, learning the ancient art of mixing magic and technology while Bast remained on the front line. The tide had been turning in the past year or so and their armies had been pushing farther than ever before, this battle however they lost substantially with heavy casualties on both sides. And Bast hadn’t returned after a few hours of complete silence on the battlefield.

Despite it still being a hot zone, Pyre went searching, sifting through miles of bodies some already being picked at by vultures. He spent at least a day or two looking when he finally found Bastian’s dying body, riddled with stabs and covered in blood and dirt. As he held Bast in his arms he did not cry as the 14-year-old boy wheezed and coughed up blood. “I… I never got to tell you-” he coughed and blood sprayed onto Pyre’s uniform. As he anxiously waited for Bast to finish his sentence, it became apparent he wasn’t going to finish it. He still didn’t cry as he dragged his friend's dead body for miles until he found a large oak tree to bury Bastian under. He didn’t cry as he did his best to clean him up, removing only the metal insignia of rank and name from around his neck and then he buried his best friend. He cried as he put the necklace around his neck and he walked away from the battlefield.

For the next few months, he scraped by scavenging things from the dead bodies on the many battlefields stretching for hundreds of miles. Before long he had an expansive collection among his belongings, all of it meticulously organized to his liking. Eventually, he was recognized as a deserter by someone from his battlement over 200 miles from Bastian’s grave and he was forced to escape by smuggling himself onto a merchant ship.

He spent a few years at sea working for various captains of varying moralities. He was working on the Triton’s Bane a huge transport ship on which he simply did minor repairs. Then came the storm. He woke in the middle of the night to the wind howling and the crack of thunder, he made his way above deck only to find the main mast broken and sheer panic around him as the ship lurched back and forth. He didn’t see it until too late, the huge wave-- triple the height of the ship-- crashed into them and he was knocked overboard. And then he woke up coughing up sea water, his back on the sand, and the bright sun above him occluded by a face hovering right over his peering curiously down at a drowned fire genasi, ah the irony. And that’s how he met his second best friend, Zarah.

After meeting Zarah
The two got to work after the first day on the island, building a boat big enough for Pyre, to be dragged by Zarah. After a week of hard work on the island the pair set off for the mainland reaching it within a few hours and they settled in a cave nearby to a fishing village. The two grew close, almost inseparable both of them eventually not even needing to speak some of the time because they knew each other so well. Three years passed until the domestic routine they had developed had to be broken when Zarah’s grandfather emerged from seemingly nowhere in town after apparently hunting her down for years. They narrowly escaped her homicidal grandfather and journeyed west knowing he couldn’t follow for long.

Along their journey, they stayed with a druid grove where Zarah began to access her powers as a druid. They spent about a year traveling, stopping in different places for various amounts of time, learning from many different cultures. Until the reached the west and a port town called Respite.

Respite
After arriving in Respite, Pyre and Zarah made friends with a few of the locals such as Franz, Therai (deceased), River, Raloran, etc. while going on a multitude of quests for the Adventurers Guild. About 10 months into Zarah and Pyre's time in Respite they bought a home with Franz and were joined by Tcaaw a little while after it was built.

He has been in Respite since the 28th of March 1180AR.