Kai had a beginning, but the clarity behind it has bled away from him as all elvish memories were cursed to fade as the Memory Tower had fallen innumerable years ago. He does not regret this; instead, he chooses to hold tightly onto his human ones even more so.
Once, he had a father, though it is all now just vague glimpses of a tall human male that proudly carried a bow. The man had died sometime during the first few years of his life, perhaps around four or five, but it was with his death that spurred his own curiosity with humanity. It was with that drive to understand and comprehend the vastness of the human variable that enabled him, many years later, to learn how to adapt – the most underestimated source of power within the arsenal of man. Human tenacity has served him well, so far.
He, too, had a mother – wraithlike and as silent as the western winds – that had been one of the hunters for her tribe. She had been his primary caretaker after his father had died, and the tribe was his second. It was from her that he learned what it had meant to be a cursed desert-roamer, an elf. The traditional bow became not only a weapon, but an extension of his being. The tribe's endless sands and the towering mesas of sandstone were his training grounds, and it was there that he learned how to shoot, when to jump, and where to aim. It was there that he became an archer not just in title, but also through his athleticism and accuracy. He was not a simpleton that had picked up a bow for fun; he was, effectively, a killer.
Of course, this was not all there was to him. Rather, far from it.
Once, he had a brother – a twin, actually. Elvish culture oftentimes considered such children to be a single soul residing inside two bodies, and he and his brother were treated as such. They had similar names and were trained together on the bow, but somehow they had ended up different. Too different.
These differences put both he and his brother at odds with the rest of the tribe, who had taken to their cultural beliefs like fish to water. In spite of supposedly being one soul, Kai had ended up as the distant, cool-headed, and reserved child that preferred to study tactics, whereas his brother had diverged onto the road of the well-liked, charming, and impulsive hellion that dabbled in magic for both amusement and explosions.
Their lives had more or less been predictable until the point where the Fomors invaded sometime during their early adulthood and crushed all evidence of elvish life deep into the sands, including that of his tiny tribe.
Kai had watched with bloodshot eyes as the Fomors ripped off his brother's legs and left him scrabbling through the dust as he cried out for their long gone Mother. When his brother's lucidity returned for a brief moment as he bled into the sand, he cried out for their younger Sister; this was futile, however, as Kai knew that the Fomors had hung, drawn, and quartered her a few scant minutes before. He knew, because he had watched as her thin little neck snap into an impossible angle before her tiny body was torn apart by hungry mouths.
He only dared to crawl out from his hiding place once the monsters had left and dragged himself over to the mangled body of his other half. He could hear the Elder now, screaming at him for being a spineless coward, a faithless coward, such a coward he was because he could not even save his own sister!
His own face (his brother's, his own, it was impossible to tell in the dying light of the burned out husks of sand-stone dwellings) staring back, frozen into an expression agony and fear, would stay in his memory for the long years to come. It would never leave, and Kai had spent many sleepless nights wondering what if…
From his brother's grave of ashes as his life burnt into the sands around him, Kai rose into being like a phoenix reborn. No longer could he consider himself to be half of an ill-fitting whole, but rather a half-life that gained awareness of his individualism through a painful transformation. Perhaps he believed he deserved this not-life, his punishment for his cowardice, but most times he simply felt regret and an urge to atone.
After the massacre, he closed that part of his life firmly behind a door and picked up his bow. He travelled through the desert in hopes of becoming a Desert Ghost, but once it was apparent it wasn't going to happen to a half-breed like himself he turned his attention back to the Fomors. He would always turn back to rage against the Fomors.
Years had passed since he last seen the Fomors on such a large scale, but the threat of the Fomors hovering over the humans was too similar to that of his own race's annihilation. He would not stand idly by, like he had with his brother and sister. He would have his revenge by slaughtering his fears into utter submission, just as the Fomors had done to the elves.
He would have his vengeance and Goddess help whoever thought to stop him.
On the first day Kai had arrived at the nearest outpost for mercenary work in Colhen, he was overwhelmed by the continuous noises coming from the humans and the occasional giants. It seemed like there was no room for silence, which was a strange concept to hold. Kai never quite got over that barrier, as to give up his silence would be giving up one of the few things that he ever truly treasured about the elf culture.
Within time, however, he learned that he wasn't so much different from the rest of the humans and giants. His silence and his skills then became not what he had learned, but rather a part of who he was. A grain of truth in a scattered sea of sand, as his Mother once said.
His anger at Fomors, however, grew into a true flame as he became ensnared between the affairs of the Royal Army and the Crimson Blades. With every arrow he put into a Fomor, he is reminded that his brother was no longer by his side, shooting his own arrows and silently laughing at the antics that his comrades find themselves into. He has carried the gnawing sensation of emptiness for a long part of his life by now, but sometimes Kai selfishly allows himself to think that the tightly-knit group of mercenaries might as well be his brothers and sisters in everything but blood (and younger by several lifetimes, perhaps) so the emptiness would fade from his awareness for a brief, weightless, freeing moment.