I didn’t start out to be a rat hunter, or a sorcerer at all. The first goal I had in life was to have webbed feet. All of my friends had webbed feet, and it seemed like a reasonable aspiration. It wasn’t, but it seemed so to a small child.
I have no idea how my infant self ended up nearly dead in the bottom of a troll‘s lunch sack. The part of my story that I know began when the troll came upon my foster mother’s village, and offered to trade me for some multiple of my weight in fresh fish. I am not sure of the multiplier; it varied with Kolchan’s mood. If she was angry with me, it was two, and she had been cheated; if she was proud of me, it was four or five, and the best deal she had ever made.
Kolchan named me Zhanhtar, which quickly got shortened to “Zhanh”, which translates, more or less, to “Pinky”. When you are an elf living among frog-goblins, the color of your skin is your most obvious characteristic. Well, that and the lack of digital webbing, but they called me “Klytohn”, “Webless”, too.
My childhood was… Well, it was. I had a foster mother who liked me well enough, most of the time, and plenty of playmates who were only moderately abusive in response to my ineptitude. I have since learned that I was, by most standards, an exceptional swimmer, but I lived among goblins who could literally swim like fish.
I was not yet an adolescent when my life among the frogs came to an end. Grezhakh, an orcish sorcerer, had heard a rumor of an elvish child who lived among the frogs, and came looking for me. He must have liked something he saw, because he offered Kolchan an ounce of gold for me, and she took it. It was more money than she, or anyone else in the village had ever seen before.