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Wilvin Hightankard was the third and final son of his father Arfeld and his mother Gamah. She was killed in a mining accident when he was still young, and after that coins were even fewer among his peasant family. His brothers Duror and Narvi considered him little more than a punching bag, so Wilvin spent as little time as possible at home, preferring to spend time in the clan library, or gathering mosses, lichen, and fungi from the wilder caverns.

In both of those places, he sometimes encountered Danace, an older female dwarf with long tangled black hair. His study of the history of martial arts made him of interest to her. She got to know him for a few years, and eventually enticed him as both a tutor and a lover. Her tutoring was not without a price, though. She needed Wilvin's help to bring down a dwarven noble.

This noble had seduced her mother, whom he then abandoned when she became pregnant. When his daughter was stillborn, he forced her mother to become his indentured servant before he would pay to have the baby Danace returned to life. Presumably due to this trauma, Danace had always been able to see the spirits of the dead. As she grew, she eventually met the ghost of a dark elf, slain by her father years before. This ghost offered to train her as a killer, and to lead her to a cache of treasure it had hidden in life (including martial arts manuals), enough to free her mother from servitude, in exchange for murdering her father.

No one besides Danace, Wilvin, and the ghost ever knew who killed the noble, and Danace had deceived Wilvin about the brutality of the revenge she was planning. He was furious with her, and broke off the relationship, but couldn't reveal what he knew because of his involvement in the crime.

Besides this unofficial apprenticeship, he was also officially apprenticed to a Holfo Olger, a halfling brewer. When Holfo's home settlement in the plains of Rhoth was evacuated during the Gnoll wars, Holfo sneaked back in, and set out again to make his fortune with the help of some valuables that the gnolls would have almost certainly seized for themselves. He now moves from settlement to settlement every few years, making friends of all races, and avoiding anyone who might remember him from his hometown.