Ambrosius Background

From Ars Magica

Current revision as of 10:33, 16 March 2006

Born to a farming couple on a fiefdom west of Shrewsbury, Embrys was a quiet, unassuming child who did as he told and struggled to stay out of trouble. Trouble followed him, though. As he grew older, people began to react strangely to his presence, to a point where even him parent’s relationships with others was strained. By the time he was five, it was clear to everyone that something was just not “right”. So frustrated with the impact that this unexplainable reaction was having on Embrys and those around him, his parents took him to the abbot of the Shrewsbury Abbey seeking help.

Friend of the Hermetic Order, the Abbot summoned a hermit mage he’d taken confession from, Ishachus ex Miscellanea and arranged for Embrys to apprentice to him. Ishachus took Embrys under his wing and began to instruct him in the ways of the Hermetic Order, but always focused some on the importance of faith and the church. When Embrys was still a boy, Ishachus vanished without a word, rumors whispered that he’d given up his gift and joined the Crusade. Embrys waited for weeks for a new master, trying in vain to contact another from the order and living off the stores of food, but never having visited any covenants, he didn’t know where find any help from the order, so he left a carefully scribed note on the table of Ishachus’s sanctum and set off for the farm on which he was born.

Embrys, nearly a stranger to his old home returned and took up the role of smith on the farm, filling in for his ailing father. Waking up each morning, looking down the path hoping to see a new Parens, he would set about a life of monotony and tedium as a vale farrier. Though he practice his lessons daily, the life of magic and mystery seemed far away for Embrys when his father died and his brother was born during his 16th summer. Suddenly an impromptu father, Embrys took on the role and responsibilities of the lord of his house as the family struggled to plant and harvest the crop for years. And each year, Embrys and his brother grew closer and closer together, part father-to-son, part brother-to-brother.

In his 21st year, Embrys had never forgotten his days as a magus’s apprentice. Though he had been practicing his lessons for the seven years he’d been back with his family and without his parens, he had long before given up any hope that another would come to finish his training, or that he’d ever find a link to another hermetic mage. It was even further from his mind the morning that he and his brother sat at his mother’s bedside as she lay near death from the Cough. It was as her last breath escaped that a rap at the door heralded the arrival of Embrys’s Parens.

Galfridus ex Verditius was as much a godsend as he was unexpected. Galfridus had been notified by the resident Quaestior nearly six months earlier of Embrys’s situation and would have claimed him sooner, but wanted to observe the young man in his daily work. It was only once he was satisfied that he had come to know Embrys that he finally approached and introduced himself. Sympathetic to the need for Embrys to care for his orphaned brother, Galfridus took up the yoke for a few days at the farm as Embrys made the arrangements for the house and fields that his family had tilled for generations. Once affairs were settled, and the 5-year old Lewys was released from his family’s responsibility to the land, the three set off to the covenant of Spiritus Draconis where Embrys, so long away from the domain of magic, returned to his training under the tutelage of the firm but kind Galfridus.

In the spring of 1213, Embrys, now Ambrosius, walked his gauntlet and claimed his sigil, the inverted horseshoe transected by the farrier’s hammer. Ambrosius took up residence as a junior sodales among the magi of Spiritus Draconis and began to seek a niche for himself. Though not all that uncommon, his situation was made more sensitive by his responsibly to school and raise Lewys, and Ambrosius knew that in order to truly find his place in the Order, he and Lewys must leave and join a spring covenant.

It was as he thought on this one day that a folded parchment, bearing a red wax seal and the sigil of a sodales that Ambrosius did not know what delivered to him...