Kaelen Stark

A man built lean rather than broad, moving with the deliberate economy of someone who's drilled every motion until it's habit rather than thought. His skin is pallid, chill to the touch even through cloth, and doesn't flush or warm the way living skin does. Auburn hair, threaded through with grey that has no business being there given his apparent age, worn practical and unadorned. His eyes are a pale blue-grey, and if you look too long, they don't quite catch the light the way they should.

He wears scale armor, worn and well-kept rather than polished, plates dulled from use rather than neglect. Beneath and around it, layers, wraps at the wrists and throat, more coverage than the weather or the armor calls for. Not for warmth. Concealment, worn like a second discipline. Beneath it all, when the cloth and metal fail him, is the truth: wounds that don't bleed red, but weep something closer to smoke, an absence of light rather than a color, cold and faintly wrong to look at.

He carries a single longsword, kept simple and well-maintained, no ornamentation beyond what function demands. At his side, a monster hunter's kit, practical and worn from use he doesn't remember accumulating. Among it, a holy symbol he has no memory of choosing, carried out of habit rather than belief.

He looks, at a glance and if you're not careful, uncomfortably like the thing he has spent his existence hunting.

Kaelen Stark died when he was 34. He was a Blood Hunter, sworn to the Order of the Ghostslayer. Trained by his masters to seek out and destroy the undead in a world that still had the luxury of treating undeath as an aberration rather than the rule.

He died walking the Ethereal. The Rite of the Dawn had pulled him half out of the world. The Ghost pulled him the rest of the way through, and closed the door behind him. He doesn't remember the fight. He doesn't remember that the Ghost was, once, his friend.

Kaelen was suspended in the Shadowfell for more than a century. The Shadowfell took from him his memories, his family, his world, and eventually, his mortality. And having taken all, with the rustle of raven wings, disgorged him into a world that had moved on from all that he once knew.

Whatever he was in life had faded. Piece. By piece. The way the sun bleaches the color from a banner flown too long past its season. Eventually, he was left an outline of a man. A name. A purpose. A handful of faces and phrases with no context left to hold them together. His sword, he knows. His tools, his bag, and even the achingly almost familiar holy symbol that hangs from it. Maybe something watches over him, or maybe not. It all seems so distant now, like the rustle of those raven wings.

He came back looking uncomfortably like the things he'd spent his life hunting. Pallid flesh, chill to the touch. No blood flowing through his veins, instead shadow-stuff. And so he hid himself, disguised as best he could. Caught between hunting the all too populous undead, and wondering if he should hunt himself.

Taciturn, kill the undead