[b][center][url=http://oi61.tinypic.com/5v4ujd.jpg]Colten Gilles[/url][/center][/b] [center]Twenty-six year old male Commoner, coven grave digger and crypt keeper Grave robber, body snatcher, and cat burglar[/center] --- [center][b]Appearance[/b][/center] Before you stands a nervous looking man, restless, paranoid eyes constantly shifting between invisible enemies, smiling that queer kind of smile when it'd be right to frown. His face is sharp enough to remind an onlooker of a rodent, and is a sort of boarding home for dirt: You see, even after washing, the grime never truly seems to leave this odd man's face, instead just drifting to the other cheek, or up to his forehead. Accompanying the nomadic mud is a migratory flock of bruises and black eyes that are as regular as the sunrise. His prematurely greying black hair is slicked to the rear and held too tightly in a short ponytail, and his unimpressively patchy facial hair is tamed to three days of growth. He is shorter than average and skinny, teetering on the edge of unhealthily so, and adorns himself in a wardrobe of mismatched clothing that does not fit. Interestingly, he tends to dress more akin to the privileged than his native peasantry, and he can typically be found going about his daily tasks while improperly wearing fine jackets and trousers that are just out of fashion, and have long gone without proper washing or care. To dissuade the brisk night air, he dons a patched cloak of poor quality pelts made from raccoon, squirrel, and other varmints. A pair of brown, knee-high leather boots are buckled onto his feet and are, like everything else about the stranger you see, caked with dried mud. The man known throughout the D'Cerf coven as Colten Gilles even smells of freshly turned earth on most days, and you can find the gritty stuff in his hair and on his hands, beneath his nails and on his face: But it's to be expected, you realize, as you watch the grave digger maneuver his rickety wheelbarrow down the narrow dirt path towards the coven's graveyard for the lower castes. --- [center][b]Interests[/b][/center] Colten keeps to himself for the most part, outside of his duties he can rarely found away from the quarters bestowed to him in the lower dungeons of castle D'Cerf, from which the crypts are easily accessible. He takes his work very seriously, paying impeccable detail to the preparation of funerals, and cares deeply for the remains of the deceased, which is ironic, because within a few days he typically unearths the same bodies in search of jewelry and other rarities, which he obsessively collects in secret. He keeps a small collection of books, and excepting work, can almost always be found with his prized possession, an ornate and hand-engraved fiddle which he plays, admittedly, with a masterful beauty. He enjoys playing his music to commoner children, likely because they are of the few who do not judge him for his occupation. He has an obsession with and love for the dead, and in private, holds lengthy conversations with corpses before their burial. Having been caught doing so more than once in the past, some speculate whether magic allows him to truly do so, though this rumor is neither confirmed nor denied by the earth mover, instead opting to dodge the question entirely. --- [center][b]Skills[/b][/center] It should not be forgotten that, regardless of his office in the coven, Mr. Gilles is truly no more than a peasant himself. He is entirely untrained in swordsmanship, and his words, spoken through a poor man's dialect, are crude and far from the moving rhetorics of noblemen. This isn't to say that coming of age amongst the rabble is without its benefits. He is a hard worker, and no stranger to difficulty. The man is a natural sneak, floating through crypts and midnight graveyards like a lantern lit specter. He is an adept pick-pocket, and all but the most masterful locks can be defeated given enough time. His time growing up as the son of a poacher learned him basic bowmanship, hunting fundamentals, and a knowledge of pelting. He is unversed in most forms of magic, save the most common spells, though his true arcane talent comes in that he does indeed have the power to speak to the dead. Through his own personal experimentation and experience, far from the scientific proof of the phenomenon that surely exists in apothecariums, Colten has found that the soul can linger in and around the body after the spirit has left. Some are as fleeting as the smoke from an extinguished candle, slipping into the void mere seconds after death, while others are stronger, holding their grip for hours, maybe even days afterwards. Others still, for whatever reason, are seemingly trapped, left behind. --- [center][b]Personality[/b][/center] Gilles is by all accounts a strange man. Numerous incomprehensible habits, introversion, crude and inappropriate behavior stemming from what could be a lack of practice, paranoia, and a jittery sense of nervousness are all qualities that could describe the typically solitary grave digger. He is a greedy, shifty man who, though coveting no life other than the one he lives, takes advantage of the misfortune of others and hoards a surprisingly large collection of valuables. For all of his shortcomings, however, he is a man who possesses a truly good heart. Disregarding the fact that he is avoided by many due to wives' tales regarding his profession or because of his admittedly awkward personality, he does his best to care for the community by sparing no expenses in his profession, comforting grieving families, and he has taking a keen liking to the coven children, who know him only as the funny music man in the fur coat. --- [center][b]Biography[/b][/center] Raised in a rural village far to the south, Colten Gilles' uneventful birth was that of but another serf. He lived with his mother and father in a modest home with their ever growing family. His father served as a groundskeeper for the nearby castle, ordained by some minor, insignificant nobleman, and his mother served no purpose but the care of her children. On the night of his eighth sibling's birth, his mother passed away in childbirth, which hit his father hard, considering that the man hardly seemed to care for her in her life. With an excuse to turn to the bottle, a series of derelictions caused his father to lose his employ, casting the house into a time of great hardship. Several of his brothers and sisters passed, either from malnutrition or disease, and Colten himself nearly succumbed to an illness that would stunt his growth and leave him with a gauntness that would last a lifetime. The lord of the castle was an avid hunter, and reserved great expanses of harvestable land for his sport. There had been rumors spread amongst the peasantry of poachers claiming mountains of meat and huge, valuable coats in the lord's forests, and in time his father tried his hand at this, quite successfully for a time, even bringing his eldest son along for a few poaching trips. Colten Gilles was sixteen the day his father hung. His family taken in by foster parents, he roamed the countryside for several years as a member of various musical troupes, pelting companies, and at one point as an apprentice to a traveling taxidermist, never caring to take the time and think of his separated family. By chance, he found himself in castle D'Cerf, where a nobleman was so impressed with a stuffed fox, nothing more than a novelty, that he requested his presence at the funeral of his deathly ill daughter, so as to make her appear more alive. The girl spoke to Colten for a short time, as he prepared her corpse for display. It was the first time that he heard the dead, but far from the last, and as time went on and he officially assumed the role of the D'Cerf mortician and grave digger, his conversations grew longer and at times he was even able to see the souls, faint outlines and shadows of their former selves. It wasn't until years later, when an old woman asked to be buried with her prized necklace that he began to steal from the dead. In a faint whisper, her last words to him were instructions on where it could be found inside of her home, and then she was gone. He fulfilled her last requests, but when a particularly wealthy and notably greedy nobleman requested to be buried with a large sum of gold, Gilles assumed it would hurt nothing if he took some for himself. It then became almost routine for him to ask the typically weak and malleable souls if they'd like to be buried with any of their jewelry or keepsakes, which, upon learning the location of that pearl or those antique earrings, he would simply burglarize and keep. And in time he had amassed a fortune worth of jewelry kept hidden away in his modest chambers, some of which stolen from the estates of the deceased, some more simply disinterred and robbed from their corpses. It wasn't hurting anyone, he smiled that crooked smile to himself as he lit his loosely-rolled cigar out of the fireplace, clenching it between his teeth. The dead went to their next lives happy with the knowledge of their last wishes, he thought to himself, raising his bow to the strings of his fiddle. The children's faces beamed up at him in anticipation, lit by the stone inn's hearth. And goodness, if he didn't love the way that gold glittered in his hands.