Syr Volmar zu Astenvale

[Volmar]

Syr Volmar zu Astenvale

Age  ~32

Gender  Male

Origin  Altalusia

Occupation  Knight Pursuant of Flame, Sanctum of Dawn

Born as fourth son to the von Liesenbourg line, Volmar isn’t just a spare heir twice redundant. He’s a bastard to boot, the spawn of a castle maidservant who’d had the bad luck to be refreshing the old man’s bedchambers when Lord Helmut returned earlier than expected from a fruitless hunt, only to find his game had come to him instead. Nine-ish months and a lot of whispered gossip later, little baby Volmar was born.

Maybe things would have been different if everyone could just… pretend. But as the boy got older, as he came to resemble his father more closely, as the whispers lingered year after year, his very existence became irrefutable proof of Markgraff Helmut von Liesenbourg’s indiscretions. Once other lords and ladies visiting the manor began asking why Helmut’s youngest was running around in servant’s rags, there was no hope of pretending any more.

Volmar was six years old when he was packed up and shipped off to Astenvale Monastery. He remembers his mother wailed for him while towering figures carried them further and further apart, until he couldn’t hear her any more. And he recalls that the journey after that was long and bumpy, though he has only a couple vague snippets of it in his memory: half-eaten maslin in his tiny fingers as he cowered in the shadows of big men, sat aback a simple wagon. He didn’t understand any of it — why he’d been taken, where he’d been taken to, what he was expected to do there… and why his mother suddenly wasn’t around any more.

Astenvale Monastery. Took him a while to realise it, but that was his home from then on.

An heir and a spare, and a spare, and a spare. An inconvenient bastard, a blemish on the house’s name and a troublesome wrinkle in the line of succession. The Liesenbourgs knew all that when they ‘gave’ him away. What they didn’t know was that Volmar had the gift.

Quite a hefty dose of it, in fact. His arrival at the order might have happened just in time, because a six-year-old who can fire off lightning from his fingertips and make knives fly through the air tends to require specialist handling. Or maybe it was the stress of separation which forced his latent power to manifest in response. Either way, the Knights of Anathaeum suddenly had an upset, confused, and frightened little weaver on their hands.

Life became terribly strict for Volmar. It had to be, so he could come to control his magic before it caused real harm. But that didn’t mean he understood the why of it any better. Just as the world became a severe and demanding place, so Volmar turned into a serious, unforgiving little prospect. Then a squire, and in time, a true knight.

He never returned to Liesenbourg. Too much risk of causing some sort of political incident; there are always factions vying for clout behind the scenes, and even if Volmar had no interest in competing for position of heir apparent, the risk that someone might try and use him as an asset in their own game was too great. And when he learned his mother had passed after taking ill, there simply wasn’t any reason to spare another thought for the place.

Now Syr Volmar dedicates himself to Astenvale Monastery and its cause. He’s known little family besides the order, nor any other way of life, and he’s content enough with that. It pleases him to be pledged to an ideal rather than a crown, to be freed from the pathetic machinations of Altalusia’s self-serving, short-sighted aristocracy. In fact, it pleases him greatly to so often be such a thorn in their side; to be the bramble patch which shreds apart greedy hands when they reach to claim what isn’t theirs. Strangely enough, it also pleases Volmar to have just enough breeding and formal upbringing to move through high society when the job calls for it, wooing and charming his way along one moment, then in the next, skirting the boundaries of etiquette to leave a trail of red-faced, indignant nobles in his wake.

And it pleases him to have such power, by sword and by spell. He had everything taken away once before. Had been helpless to stop it back then. But now, woe betide anyone who dares try that shit again — or who gets between him and that which he desires.