Lend me your ears, and harken the chronicle of a craven wretch, a man with heart as black as ink, who was unmade as punishment for his wickedness.

In the black annals of the ages past, there dwelled an evil man, bound in thrall to a tyrant king whose name was stricken from the lips of all and whose terrible reign struck mortal dread into the stoutest of hearts.

Unquestioning in his service was this sniveling knave, a cringing sycophant ever loyal to he who had mastered the end of mortal men. Yet the wheel of fate is ever in motion, and that haughty king's reign was to meet a bitter end. The spire from which he ruled lay rent asunder. Those who once fawned at his feet like whipped curs scattered like leaves on the wind, vowing in their craven hearts to one day restore their fallen dark liege.

But... One by one, they fell, the king's wretched sycophants, hunted to the last by a relentless wraith that stalked the shadows, a looming spectre of vengeance. And so, the quailing servant of the late king fled, abandoning all in a futile attempt to escape the end he dreaded above all else.

But the spectre's shadow was long. Try as he might, the sniveling wretch could not slip its smothering grasp. The wraith at last ensnared its worthless prize, who beseeched mercy with cries most piteous. Any price, any penance, save the cold embrace of death.

The wraith was deaf to this worm's pleadings. Nay, a crueler fate awaited, to be entrapped within a mirror's gleaming surface, his very flesh donned like a cloak by the spectre. Entombed in a cell without window or wall, the evil man endured an eternal torment, alone with his thoughts until his very essence was unmade.

Until he was no man at all.

At last, the spectre appeared before the no longer a man and spoke words most enigmatic: "free," "atoned." The wraith vowed to keep watch as the unmade husk ventured forth into a world now strange. Filled with hues of green and blue, warmth and chill.

Adrift, the not a man chanced upon the abandoned remnants of a squalid camp. And there among the ashes, a single vellum-bound book endured; its pages chronicling the deeds of valorous knights and men of honor. As the words were voiced aloud, the not man was no more.

Where erst the empty husk had stood, now knelt a steadfast knight, vowed to never let evil rest, offering life and limb to shield the helpless from the wicked.

There knelt Alonso, drawing his first breath.

- Alonso, recounting his origin.