Arin Veldrak was born beneath a curse. His mother, Aeliana of Silverdeep, had once been a knight of fierce renown—devoted to keeping the shadows from swallowing her homeland. But in her final campaign, when faced with a horror no mortal blade could withstand, she reached for a forbidden current of power. The victory was hers, but the stain of that choice clung like frost. When Arin came into the world, he bore its echo: a restless pulse in his veins and an unnatural glint in his eyes, as if something watched the world from behind them. Fearing what might take root in her son, Aeliana entrusted the newborn to an old comrade—Thane Veldrak, a hermit who had withdrawn far from Silverdeep’s walls. Thane had once served in the **Order of the Shadehunters**, a secretive brotherhood devoted to hunting spirits, revenants, and veil-born horrors that slipped through the cracks of Solare. Years of battle had carved him hollow, leaving him with more ghosts than breath. Yet when Aeliana appeared with her child and her shame, Thane could not refuse. Arin grew beneath Thane’s harsh, quiet discipline. He learned to move without sound, to read the stillness of a room, to treat blood as both burden and strength. Thane taught him the Shadehunter creed: that life and death were threads of the same weave—and that courage, sacrifice, and loss bind them together. As Arin matured, the corruption in his blood began to stir. Fever dreams haunted him. Shadows whispered from corners that should have been silent. Graveyards pricked at his senses like someone tugging on an invisible thread. When the signs grew too strong, Thane revealed the truth of his order. The **Shadehunters** were the watchers of the Veil—warriors who bound their own life-essence into sacred rites, granting them the ability to sense, resist, and banish the restless dead. Through bloodbinding, they became living lanterns in the darkness, their veins carrying the power to cut through the immaterial. And they paid for that power with pieces of themselves. Arin embraced the path. He endured the ritual of silver, salt, ash, and agony. His blood was awakened—sanctified, bound, and forever altered. When he rose from the ritual circle, trembling and pale, the air around him shifted like breath across a tomb. The whispers that once haunted him fell silent. Years passed. Thane’s worn body eventually succumbed to age. Arin buried his mentor beneath a cairn of iron and stone, marking the grave with a single line: **Bound by blood. Freed by will.** Then he took up Thane’s weapon, its runes carved to wound both flesh and spirit, and set out along the same lonely road his mentor had once walked. Now, Arin Veldrak wanders the haunted places of Solare as a **Blood Warden** of the **Order of the Shadehunters**—a hunter of specters, revenants, and veil-born nightmares. The corruption in his veins still burns, but he wields it with purpose, turning inherited darkness into a blade against the shadows. Where the Veil grows thin and the dead rise unbidden, a whisper follows him through graveyard fog and broken crypts: