Samothes was not born into solitude. He once walked openly among villages as apprentice to a traveling physician — a quiet man who treated farmer and lord alike. From him, Samothes learned the properties of bark and bone, root and resin, water and metal. He studied not only herbs, but soil, air, rot, and mineral — everything worldly that shaped the body of man and beast.

He believed knowledge was meant to serve. But service has a cost.

When a prosperous settlement fell to a wasting sickness, panic spread faster than the fever. Crops blackened in their fields. Wells soured with metallic bitterness. Livestock weakened and died. Fear demanded a face.

Samothes had spoken of unseen spores in the soil. Of strange minerals leaching into water from newly cut stone. Of the consequences of waste cast into river and earth. It was easier to call him corrupter than to admit corruption. They burned his satchel of notes — years of careful study reduced to drifting ash.
And when fear still demanded blood, they tried to burn him too.

He survived.

Fleeing through the marshlands, flesh blistered and lungs raw with smoke, he clung to what remained: fragments of journals, half-intelligible formulas, memory etched deeper than ink. In the wetlands, alone and fevered, he treated his own burns with poultices drawn from peat moss, resin, and mineral ash.

He healed. But the healing was not without change.
His once-dark hair grew back as fierce, unnatural red — like embers that refused to die. His skin bears pale rope-like scars across shoulder and arm, twisted reminders of flame and accusation.

The villagers tried to make him ash. Instead... they forged him.