A Quick Glance
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Tall and only a little muscular, most times Arthur looked like a man who had gotten his build by both work and luck. With hair that seemed to flash every color but black depending on the light, and a smile that showed teeth only a little crooked, many mistook Arthur for a lawyer or entrepreneur of some sorts. Possessing a wardrobe as varied as any other, Arthur was inclined towards a more classic look, more frequently seen wearing tweed suits in subdued colors that he would shorts and a t-shirt, though he owned a few of those as well. His eyes, however were of an odd sort of flat gray, as if they absorbed the light instead of reflecting it, seeming to remove him from interest, his eyes rendering him drab and dull as soon as they were met.
Just before the dawning of the Ninth century, Arinbjorn, the second son of Steinthor and brother of Geirmund, was cursed.
A loyal and ferocious soldier, Arinbjorn sought glory, riches, and conquest for his brother and himself, often behaving as his brother's executioner as Geirmund rose to power. As Geirmund's power grew, however, Arinbjorn began to grow wary of his brother's orders, suspecting that his elder sibling would eventually seek to have him delivered to Valhalla.
Geirmund indeed wanted Arinbjorn dead, the elder brother intent on there being not possible successors save whom he named himself, and sent Arinbjorn to capture a witch, telling his brother that she could commune with the Norns and read the tapestry of Fate. Arinbjorn, who still longed to know what name he would leave behind, agreed to his brother's wish.
The witch, Yrsa, could not speak to the Norns, and screamed at Arinbjorn, refusing to back down from the hot-blooded Norseman until, at last, Arinbjorn struck Yrsa down. With her dying breath, Yrsa cursed Arinbjorn to die over and over, until his death was the last death of Man.
Six days later, Arinbjorn was assaulted by his brother's men, stabbed several times and cast over a waterfall. When he emerged from the water upon the shore of the sea, the Norseman coughed and sputtered from two weeks spent drowning over and over.
As the years turned to decades, the decades to centuries, and the centuries added up into over a millennium, Arinbjorn eventually became Arthur, taking the name Step from himself as a private joke, as he 'stepped' from one life to the next, though he learned to avoid attention, having spent too much of the days of the Wild West hanging from a gallows, accused of witchcraft. Eventually, he created a artifice of the Step 'Family', allowing himself to regain control of his properties after each time that he died.