Thistle Willows

Thistle Willows grew up in a small village, Arsten, nestled deep within the Southern Ledonir Tree Sea between the Gahlt Mountains and the Wall of Solitude. Life in the village was simple, but Thistle had a natural knack for mischief and deception, often finding herself on the wrong side of minor trouble. Though she was an only child, Thistle was surrounded by extended family and friends. As she grew, her pull towards mischief and others perception of her spiraling into a directionless life, led to her spending a handful of months apprenticing in different professions under different family members, none of whom quite knew what to do with her. Despite their best efforts to steer her toward a more respectable trade, Thistle grew more and more set in the idea that her real talents lay in thievery, trickery, and just a touch of magic.

Following the Cinderfall, her village prospered and became a bustling traders outpost, as it sat along one of the shorter routes leading out of the Illistrian Empire and into the Lenurian March. This only increased during the Korseph Rebellion, with the army using the settlement as a staging ground to plan movements south. But as the army left following the rebellion's end, and the trade boom from reconstruction from the Cinderfall slowed, times got harder and people became on edge.

Thistle made due despite the hardships, taking what was needed in the way she knew best and slipping away just in time to avoid getting caught. At the end of Thawwatch, 6027PB, a grab just like the others occurred, only this one didn't go to plan. Her attention was caught by an ornate necklace on display in the home of a merchant who had became wealthy from the trade and soldiers that had become the temporary normal of the village. She grabbed it, on impulse, as if it was calling out for her to do so, along with the other small trinkets and items were normal for her on jobs like these. She thought she had pulled of the perfect heist. She thought she had escaped undetected. But the glyphs on its stand were not visible at the time of the grab, nor noticed by her as broken when she left with the necklace hidden in her satchel. With the Merchant beginning a witch-hunt for the necklace the following morning, and Thistle worried about being caught due to the vast connections the merchant both in town and well beyond, she fled, hoping to outrun the consequences of her impulsive actions.

While moving north, she moved just out of sight of the road in an attempt to hide from any potential allies of the merchant, improving her skills taking from passing by caravans or by conducting small cons at camps and other villages along the way. Managing to keep a step ahead of her past, she worked her way across the border a year following the outbreak Illistrian Civil War into the Lenurian March, and eventually heard rumors of a group of mercenaries in a nearby village who planned to take down a dragon that had set up in the region. Thistle jumped on the opportunity to follow them and potentially join then, grab some loot, a gain a group to cover for her in the event she ever fell back into the merchant's web