Jackson Swift

Born into a world at war, Jackson did not remember much about the town where he had grown up. He had been no older than four when they had been attacked, and his parents had both been killed while trying to protect him. He had a hard time remembering their faces sometimes. That night was rather fuzzy for him. He remembered that there was fire. Sometimes when he slept he could swear that he felt it on his face still.

"Stay quiet, and don't come out until we come back, okay?"

Those were the last words he heard from his mother before he never saw her again. They had put him under the floorboards of their small home. They had been carpenters. He remembered that. His father had a workshop, that always smelled of wood. He had been under there for nearly two days, his poor stomach was growling. When he finally decided to leave his hiding spot, he found the home that he had grown up in had been burnt to the ground, and the town was no better. There were still bodies everywhere, and in vain, the young boy called out for his mother and father. So worried and scared, he ignored the sound of horses as they thundered to a halt behind him. "Child!" someone called out behind him, and the sound of a rider dismounting followed, before he was taken into the arms of someone.

He asked, begging to know where his parents were to the person, his eyes as wide as saucers as he beheld the dead bodies. The next few days went by in a blur. The boy was numb at the knowledge that his parents were gone. They reported that they never found their bodies, and the boy was placed in an orphanage in the inner kingdom. The years there were... rough, to say the least. Never fully getting over the loss of his parents, Jackson was a bit of an outcast, keeping mostly to himself in the orphanage. When he was fourteen, he saw a man standing off to the side, wearing a cloak and sporting a quiver of arrows and a bow. Deciding to see what the man was up to, he followed him through the shadows, only losing him once, taking the exact same path that he did, keeping to the shadows and out of sight. It wasn't until the man went into a room that he discovered the man knew he had been there the entire time.

Noticing the talent he had for stealth, the man took him from the orphanage to be trained as a ranger. Jackson took to it quickly, it seemed he had found his calling. Years later after graduating to a full ranger, Jackson found that he had purpose in his life, serving the king as a spy and often times a diplomat as well. During one mission deep into the territory of the very enemy that they had been at war with years before, Jackson came across a slave quarry, and found a woman there, who seemed to know him. She seemed... very familiar, to say the least, and she soon revealed that she was his mother. Finding the woman he thought lost to him long ago, he freed her from her bonds, and when his mission was complete, he brought her back with him to their home country.

His mother told him of how she and his father had been taken during the raid, and his father had been forced to work for the army, and they worked him until he died of exhaustion. Happy to have at least one of his parents, he allowed his mother to stay in his home while he did his service to the kingdom, keeping the land safe and preventing another war from breaking out. If there was one thing he knew, it was just how terrible war could be, and he did not want another child going through the same things he had. Even if it had led to him being the person he was today