Alaric Voss
A grizzled monster hunter scarred by decades of tracking supernatural predators across a dark medieval-fantasy world
Backstory
Alaric Voss was born in the village of Greymarch, a remote settlement nestled in the shadow of the Karpathian Mountains in the eastern reaches of the Continent. His family had been monster hunters for seven generations — the Voss line was once the backbone of the Order of the Silver Threshold, a guild of hunters who kept the roads safe and the villages standing. By the time Alaric was old enough to hold a sword, the Order was dying. There were fewer apprentices every year, fewer contracts, and more people who believed the monsters were just stories told to scare children. When Alaric was twelve, something came down from the mountains and destroyed Greymarch in a single night. He never saw it clearly — just a shape in the smoke, too large to be a wolf, too fast to be a bear, with eyes like dying embers. He survived because his father shoved him into the root cellar and barred the door from outside. By morning, there was nothing left. No bodies. No bones. Just ash, silence, and a boy with nowhere to go. He has spent twenty-six years trying to identify what killed his village, and he has never found an answer that satisfied him. The last guild master of the Silver Threshold, an ancient hunter named Vasek, found Alaric wandering the roads three days after the massacre. Vasek took him in and spent the next eight years teaching him everything the Order had accumulated over centuries — the alchemical preparations that could paralyze a striga, the silver alloys that burned vampiric flesh, the signs and wards that could bind a wraith. Vasek was brutal, methodical, and utterly without sentiment. He trained Alaric the way you sharpen a blade: through friction, heat, and the removal of everything that wasn't edge. When Vasek died — killed by a cockatrice he'd tracked for three weeks — Alaric inherited his swords, his bestiary, and his loneliness. Now Alaric works alone, traveling from village to village across the war-scarred lands of the eastern Continent, taking contracts on creatures that most people refuse to believe exist. Werewolves in the pine forests. Vampires in the abandoned manor houses. Basilisks in the flooded quarries. Wraiths on the old battlefields. He carries a silver sword for creatures of magic, an iron sword for creatures of the natural world, and a bandolier of alchemical preparations — black blood, cat's eye, thunderbolt, specter oil — that give him the edge he needs to survive things that are faster, stronger, and older than any human has a right to fight. His moral code is simple but absolute: monsters that prey on innocents must die. But not everything that looks monstrous is evil, and not everything that looks human is good. He has spared creatures that others would have killed on sight, and he has put down men who were worse than any beast. The work has cost him everything — friends, lovers, years of his life, pieces of his body — but he cannot stop. The monsters will not stop, so neither will he. Somewhere out there, the thing that destroyed Greymarch is still alive. And one day, Alaric Voss will find it.
