A monster's backstory

He was born beneath silver leaves and soft songs, where elves believed time, itself was a gentle thing. His family were wardens of a forest pass, keepers, not warriors. They taught him names of birds, not names of blades.  When the pass was breached, the world proved them wrong.  He watched from the roots of an ancient oak as firelight broke the night and steel answered song. His family did not die heroically. There were no last stands worth singing about. There was only confusion, fear, and the sudden ending of voices he had known since birth. By dawn, the forest was quiet again, too quiet, and the boy learned his first true lesson: the world does not reward gentleness for existing.

The elves found him days later. They mourned properly, spoke the old words, and told him time would smooth the wound. Time did not. It sharpened it.  
He grew, as elves do, slowly, painfully aware of every year. While others learned art and history, he learned patterns of cruelty. He listened to travelers' stories, to whispers of wars and monsters, and noticed how often evil survived because it was useful to someone powerful. He stopped asking why the attack happened and began asking how it had been allowed.  When he left the forest, he did not carry a banner or a blessing. He sought teachers who did not care about honor: mercenaries, assassins, outcasts who understood that some threats cannot be reasoned with or redeemed. From them he learned efficiency. From himself he learned restraint, because rage used carelessly is just another weakness.

He did not become a hero. Heroes are meant to be seen.

Instead, he became a shadow that followed disasters before they happened. He poisoned war before it could bloom. He erased leaders whose cruelty would have cost thousands of lives. Villages slept safely, never knowing the price had already been paid elsewhere. Mothers thanked the gods; kings took the credit.  Among elves, his name became a warning. Among enemies, it became a rumor. He accepted both. Monsters, after all, are convenient things to blame.
He still remembers the sound of his family's voices, though centuries have dulled their faces. He does not seek forgiveness, because forgiveness is for those who believe they had a choice. He chose what the world required, not what it would praise.

Why does he hide the lower half of his face:
There is something corpse-cold about that part of him, not in color but in presence. It feels removed from the living world, as if it never fully returned after the destruction of his home. When he is silent, his lower face looks sealed, not calm but contained. When emotion breaks through, anger, fear, exhaustion, the scars tighten and distort, briefly revealing how close he always is to unraveling.

What lingers most is the sense that his lower face remembers more than he does. It carries the imprint of hands, restraint, and unspoken commands, preserved in flesh that healed but never forgave. It is a reminder that when his home was destroyed, something else was taken with it: the simple certainty that his face belonged entirely to him.

Looking at him, one cannot escape the feeling that the scars are not finished telling their story, and that they might still be waiting for the chance to open again, not in flesh, but in memory.


"Mercy don't hold back the flames;
You pray for peace, but bleed for war.
I gave my soul to end the fight,
a beast born from dying light.
A world doesn't need another hero.
It needs a shadow in the smoke.  
           A monster."