Cinammon
Many years ago, a wandering mercenary band from Anwer, called the Bones of Effandi, found a baby dwarf on the side of the Severnt Trail. The leader of the Group went to kill the babe immediately for fear that it could somehow give away their position to others1. Despite its young age, the dwarf struck the leader and broke his nose. Amused by such a display of strength the leader decided to spare his life and gave him to the slave woman, Sannoya, they kept as a cook.
Despite their difference in race (she was a halfling) she decided to raise him as her own child. He spent his formative years learning to cook from her, and he proved to be quite adept at it. It was there that they discovered that he loved cinnamon, which is where he got his name from. He also developed a deep affection for halflings as a race since he sees them as having saved his life. As part of his training as a cook, and as a way to learn basic control of a blade, he also learned to carve wooden cooking utensils and other useful implements. He proved quite skilled at this and has become a skilled woodcarver.
The mercenaries also knew that his heritage as a dwarf could make him a formidable fighter if trained. From a young age they taught him to use weapons and hand to hand combat. Cinammon demonstrated great skill with many weapons, in particular a poleaxe2.
When he was a young man he was off foraging. He returned to find his entire band of mercenaries slaughtered, including the kindly halfling woman who had raised him. Devastated, Cinammon grabbed a few possessions and began to wander. He worked for many years as a wood carver or mercenary never staying long anywhere or making close friends. He tried to learn who, or what did this to the people who raised him, but had very little success3.
How Cin Arrived in the Bandit Lands
Bad CoinFootnotes
1 Dwarves often lived to 300 years old, so young was relative, but the baby had not yet reached 3, when it would have undoubtedly known how to speak. 2 The poleaxe in question, they one Cinammon first tried, belonged to one of the Tsrachian brothers, known as Dunwad. Dunwad was loathe to give up his weapon (though he had many more) and Effandi was not keen to give the young dwarf a weapon of his own, and so Cinammon made himself a training weapon out of wood and bone. He had cleverly made the handle in several sections so that the weapon could be stowed away in small spaces, which was necessary given the relatively little space Effandi afforded Cinammon on their caravan. 3 Though Cinammon did not stay in Anwer long after the Bones of Effandi were killed, he managed to ask a few people he knew if they had heard anything about a bounty on the group or any grudges between Effandi and other mercenary leaders. While it had long been rumoured that Effandi was rivals with the Aztan of the Anwer village of Vanaha, named Deirza, few would speculate whether he had anything to do with it. Some, instead, guessed that the group had been killed by Tsrachian slavers when they refused to comply, but Cinammon had a hard time believing that given the presence of the Tsrachian brothers in their group, and their distance from the border when they were killed. Others still theorized that Effandi had offended some powerful recluse or a Xzonic Competitor. On the day he found their bodies, Cinammon had managed two solid clues in all of his searching: a strange black-blue shard of a weapon blade (he guessed) that he found lodged in Sannoya’s back, and the fact that all of the Bones’ weapons and other metal items has been turned to ash. In the years since, he had not managed to learn anything else about the shard or the ash, though he kept both (the ash in a small vial).
Children
Comments