The Story of Arnaldo Guillero

As told to the Thanes of Order by the Tala’aga 
She grasps an old dagger, the gold blackened with age, the pommel with the typical 6-pointed star, but the guard is forged of a crimson metal in the shape of a crescent moon.
“The man who you are interested in I met twice. The first time I met him, he exchanged this, his story, with me, for the True story of Kui’s disappearance. He told me how he grew up as a child, indulged somewhat by his family but always at a distance. His childhood in which he felt alone, even surrounded by his brothers and peers.
Then, one day, a strange, darkly clad half-elf had appeared at his father’s door. Arnaldo heard a heated argument in another room, before his ashen-faced father appeared and told him he must pack to leave the family home forever.
He told of the others he met, he trained in the arts of hunting, tracking, fighting with. The first true friends he’d made in his short life.
He told of the night they’d all been raised from their beds by their masters and taken to a chamber deep in the Crimson Keep. The eldritch fumes of the Hunters’ Bane, how it burned as it passed his lips, how it had torn through his veins like fire and ice, turning his muscles to steel and his bones to rock. How, through vermillion-tinged eyes he saw his friends writhe, contort and scream.
He told of his sorrow of the following days, how the Order rebuilt his mind just as the foul draught had rebuilt his body. How with them he’d found a purpose – to seek the greatest dangers of Ara, defeat them and return with his conquests to further the knowledge of the Order.
It was with this purpose he had set forth to these islands, recently ‘discovered’ by his countrymen, deemed unexplored with great adventure to be held. The young fool failed to realise that, to those who make these islands their home, the were not a mystery. However, I told him, to his great excitement, of a land lost to time and to the knowledge of those who walk the surface of this world. He begged to know of it, and gave me this valued item and his story to know of it. And so I told him the true story of Kui & the Creation of the Islands and the Path of his Followers.
He then bad me farewell and made it clear he would seek this land. I warned him many had, and, like Kui had forewarned, those that had sought it had never returned. He was - perhaps in confidence, ignorance or arrogance - unperturbed.
I saw him one more time, months later. He was a broken man. His mind was disturbed and at times he little recognised me. He begged me to tell him how to regain what he had lost, that he would trade any story or possession for it, but I sadly told him I knew not such answers, only stories. He fled.