Hannelore Windvale-Lancaster, Human Barbarian

Sent to squire for a Grey Knight at eight years old, Hannelore Windvale-Lancaster was trained in the rudiments of battle and planar knowledge from a young age. This was a common practice in her family at the time, which she claims was a minor noble family of pathological demon-killing lunatics with more sense than money.

jk it was the family duty

At thirteen years of age, she accompanied her master on a sortie against a known necromancer along with several other Grey Knights. Despite her rigorous training, she was only just beginning to be able to swing a longsword with one hand. Thus, she had the duty to watch the party's rear as they hacked their way through the necromancer's tower.

On reaching the summit, the party made the error of underestimating and cornering the dangerous foe. In a last-ditch attempt to take the party with him, the necromancer detonated a powerful artifact called an Erkydian Hourglass, containing sands whose grains are said to originate from a multitude of planes. The blast knocked Hannelore unconscious, and her body was swept into one of the various ephemeral portals that formed in the chain explosion of energetically decaying arcane sands.

When she came to, she found herself lying beside her master’s dead body in the shattered remains of an abandoned apartment. She was unscathed, but her master had faced the brunt of whatever they had been through -- his mangled corpse was peppered with huge fragments of splintered wood and miscellaneous shrapnel. Horrified, she fled the scene and did not return until much, much later to retrieve his greatsword and bury his remains.

Lost and alone in the streets of Korvosa, she barely scraped by as a menial laborer, until she was offered a steady job as a hired hand for a dwarven merchant. While making her daily hauls from his warehouse by the docks to his shopfront, she was frequently joined by a high-spirited and industrious dwarven lad named Iosef Loukas, who turned out to be her employer’s son. Hannelore, wary of strangers, gradually warmed up to him, and he became her only friend in Korvosa.

She eventually settled into a routine. Her days were spent hauling goods and tending to the beasts of burden - an ox and a horse. Her nights were spent training, performing the exercises she had used as a squire, and trying to find a way home. She would listen in to the talk in pubs and inns from outside windows, hoping for some rumor of a way to return home, but she heard nothing.

In her third year in Korvosa, she noticed a problem with Iosef. During their day work, he began to seem more and more distant, always itching to be elsewhere. Sometimes he would skip days, and simply shrug it off if she asked where he'd been. Eventually, he stopped coming altogether.

Confused and abandoned, she began scouring their usual haunts for some sign of him. Two days later, she found him, lying in a back alley in a fit of convulsions. Panicking, she hauled him onto her shoulders and ran to his father's doorstep.

She was hurriedly ushered inside by an ashen-faced Loukas the Senior, who tried his best to tend to his son. He had seen such symptoms in the community youth before, knowing they could only be the result of a drug overdose. Try as he might, the overdose Iosef had suffered was too great, and he passed away in the early hours of morning. Hannelore, driven by shock and grief, flew into her first true rage and burst out running into the night. A fire had awakened in her blood where before there had only been diligence. A blinding anger consumed her mind, as she took out years of pent-up rage upon all nearby inanimate objects. Fortunately, she was unarmed and still young, and nobody was killed.

Loukas was never again the same man. He managed his business in a semi-conscious stupor, keeping it afloat through sheer robotic work.

Before he died, Iosef managed to divulge the name of the man who had sold him the drug: Gaedren Lamm. Thirsting for revenge for the death of her only friend, and still longing to find her way home, Hannelore set forth on her journey as an adventurer. A year after she was finally able to lift and swing her master's greatsword, she joined a guild which sent her out as an escort on contract hire for merchants. She donned his armored coat as well, although she had had to pay an armorer to add another length of leather and scales, for she had grown into her full height. Everywhere she went, she looked and listened for signs of Gaedren Lamm and maybe even a way back to the land of her childhood.