01 - Hitting the road...

Alfonse Kalazorn's shadow stretched across the long path that lay in front of him. He patted his new revolver, freshly crafted by his own hands, only his second attempt and it turned out quite fine, and fired much straighter than the first one (before he fixed his mistakes). He liked feeling the weight of it on his hip, how it balanced out his first attempt at a pistol, trustworthy but definitely a first draft. This was his masterpiece, and he was ready to use it.
 
He had grown up on the frontier, in a small elven village, just outside a larger human settlement. Alfonse had spent his childhood among the woods and waters that made up this frontier land, and except for a few rough patches here and there his life had been idyllic. One of the roughest of those patches was the tragic loss of his little brother, Reynard, to a zombie horde that invaded the village long ago, when Reynard was a young boy. Alfonse fights back the memory as he pulls the gun from its holster, checking once again that it is fully loaded, and his hands absentmindedly take stock of the various "monster hunter" gear he's stashed all over his person. A holy symbol here, a flask of oil there, here some wooden stakes, just in case. Feeling something unfamiliar in his pocket, he pulls out a black leather pouch containing 8 more bullets, one last reload from Maw and Paw. A curt smile crosses his face, and then quickly vanishes as he pockets the bullets and steels himself for the road ahead.
 
Alfonse turned and looked one more time at his childhood home as he crested the hill. He feels ready to take on the world, and at the same time terrified to take another step. He's left home before, he's traveled many leagues in this world; but he's never left like this before, and he wasn't sure he was coming back. This time was different. This time, he was heading into the Mists.