I was born the son of a military officer, Vask Rylas and his wife Ronya, during a cold winter in the Aestivan town of Laydall. The season was so bitter that I became sick. : Very sick. The illness almost overtook my small body, but the healers were able to bring me back from the edge. However, the cloudiness that had made me almost completely blind was left behind. It took years before some of the milkiness went away and I adapted to using my other senses to compensate. I would never be military quality merchandise and my father realized that right away and so he and I never had a good father son relationship. He never treated me bad, but he blamed my mother for being weak and producing a sickly boy. I was teased a lot as a child for my appearance and bullied to tears more times than I can remember. My father would punish me for being a sobbing little weakling and make me stay in my room without supper. He and my mother would always fight after that and it would end with him storming out of the house and usually being gone for a day or two. My father was a great axe man and though he did not love me I had always wanted to be like him so that he would come to see that I could amount to something. I watched when the soldiers would train with their massive weapons of destruction and then later practice in an abandoned shack with a small axe I had taken from my father's workroom. No one knew about my secret haven for honing my fighting abilities, though I really had now idea what I was doing at the time. One day my father got a notice of transfer to Iridine and so he packed his
things and left my mother and myself to got to the city. My mother took very good care of me after that, even though we didn't have many things, we had a decent life. The community pitched in a little here and there which made things a bit easier. After a few years, when I was fourteen, my mother met another man. He was very kind in the beginning, but after he and my mother became wedded he changed. He became an angry man and he began beating my mother and me. I
could stand the beatings for myself because this man was not a large person, but I couldn't stand it when he would do it to her. He would take her in the bedroom and beat her after he would tie me up so I couldn't help. He loved to hear her scream in pain and he would laugh and say, "Yes let me hear the music." Music he called it. On a certain occasion he came home drunk, not uncommon, but more drunk than usual. He tied me up and took my mother into the room and began his ritual. The agony of my mother's cries drew my darkest hatred to the surface and I struggled against the bindings he had put me in. He had not done a good job this time and I freed my self. I grabbed my hand axe and crept to the door of the room. I was terrified. Not so much of him, but of what I was feeling. I threw open the door and saw him standing over her with his barbed whip, she tied to the rafter naked and bleeding. I sprang at him as quickly as I could and threw my weight into him. We both tumbled to the floor and pummeled each other for a few brief moments before I struck him in the skull with my axe, splitting his head open. My rage at seeing my mother in this state pushed me over the edge,
"Listen to this you filthy maggot," I screamed at him and I cut off his ears so he could never hear the music again and just to make sure I ate them. My mother died from her wounds that night and so I went into the city to try and find my father. I wasn't sure if he would care or not, but I was going to tell him anyway. I was in the city for a couple of weeks, living on
the street and fending for myself. One night while roaming through some of the back alleys, I came across two
drunken thugs. They saw my eyes and started calling me names and making fun of me. I threw my axe and it hit one in the arm, leaving him with a nasty gash. They started chasing down the alley and I ran as fast as I could, but when I rounded the corner I ran smack into something. I looked up and saw the largest man I had ever seen,
"Fancy yourself an axe man do you?" he asked, but I was to stunned to answer. The two thugs flew around the corner after me, but came to a screeching halt when they set eyes on the big man.
"The boy owes us old man," the two taunted.
"No he belongs to me," the large man replied.
"Don't make me knock you out," they threatened him.
"Bring it," the man answered and pulled free from a belt hook a huge fighting axe. The two thugs came on and a small skirmish ensued. They three fought back and forth for what seemed to me for ten minutes, but was in reality much shorter, with neither side gaining any ground, when the big man lunged at one of the thugs, but didn't actually strike. The thug fell back and then
the big man lifted his axe above his head and brought it down with a powerful strike. The thug suffered a devastating puncture to his head and fell over, unconscious. The other continued his attack, but the big man kept dodging his strikes. "Can you evade this!" the thug shouted and made a quick jab at the man with his knife. The big man gracefully swayed to the side to avoid the attack and then smashed the thug in the head leaving him with an ugly bruise and unconscious also. Then he helped me to my feet and threw a big arm around my shoulder.
"We need to teach you a few things," he said to me as he chuckled,
"names Protarian," he added. I told him who I was and we went off to his training center to begin my training as an axe man.