Cecil Brightwood is a pale-skinned human with grey eyes and vividly ginger hair. He always looks like he desperately needs to eat three solid meals and then sleep for a week. He wears plain travelling clothes in the black and green of the Emerald Hounds, and unless there’s an actual fight going on he usually has a book or two tucked under his arm.

People avoid him in public because they tend to assume he:
--has suffered some tragic personal loss, and/or
--has a substance abuse problem, and/or
--will corner them and tell them in great detail how Deep Ones are living under all of their cities and they plan to melt the polar ice caps and drown all the air-breathers so that they can take over the world.

One of those things is true. The other two are not. (And even if Cecil did know the terrible plans of a dread and loathly ancient civilization, he wouldn’t go around telling people. That’s an amateur mistake, and gets you killed.)

---

Cecil was born to a comfortable and moderately prosperous family of brewers in the far north-west of Faerun. He was the youngest of five, so when he showed an aptitude for books and a fascination with magic, his family were mildly relieved and promptly found him an apprenticeship with a wizard of their acquaintance, a respectable and scholarly diviner by the name of Mistress Starag.

Cecil, being young, studious, and a bit of an idealist, took to the work like a duck to water. His teacher was impressed with his progress, and, once he had mastered the basics, she took him travelling. Cecil was fascinated by the history of magic, and devoured all the books he could find on the subject. He eventually parted ways with his teacher in order to accept a position at one of the great libraries, where he sank joyfully into academia.

He was making something of a name for himself as a scholar when a chance reference in an old text led him into a days-long research spiral, fishing out scraps of parchment from the archives and muttering to himself. He emerged dusty, wild-eyed, and obsessed with the idea that there was some great secret that the ancient wizards had known, and which they had then buried, something which let them reshape the very continents and elevated the quality of life of even the commonest peasant, and which had been lost in the intervening years.

It was in what the old books didn’t say, he insisted, something that they all knew and talked around rather than directly referencing. After a lot more digging, he found several other passing references to a book or tome that held secrets to do with some deity that was never named.

He abandoned all other work and dedicated himself to solving this ancient mystery. It was incredibly frustrating - he would chase down books referred to by other texts, only to find that the ones he wanted had been destroyed or were not available to researchers.

Gradually he became convinced that there was a conspiracy in the highest levels of academia to keep this information hidden.

Shortly after he expressed this opinion, loudly, to one of the librarians, he was given an ultimatum by the library: drop this line of research, or lose his position.

Cecil informed his superiors that they couldn’t keep the truth hidden forever, and that he would not be silenced. The head librarian, Madam Pryce, sighed. “I hope for your sake that that isn’t true,” she said. And then they fired him.


They didn’t let him keep his research, but they didn’t know he’d made duplicate copies of all of his notes and hidden them at his boarding house.

He sent a letter to his family, saying that he was going away on a research trip and wouldn’t be able to contact them for a while, and then he went travelling. He made his way to cavernous libraries and dusty archives, to crumbling ruins and bustling temples, hunting for this great mysterious power that would change the world for the better.

And finally, he found the Book. Or perhaps it found him.

He was right, as it turned out: the ancient wizards had known secrets, and they had hidden them. It just hadn’t occurred to him that they’d done so for very good reasons.

........

No longer feeling any inclination towards academia, Cecil was at a bit of a loss. He drifted about, picking up bits of scribe work here and there, trying not to listen to the Book or talk to it too obviously in public. He knew it could choose whether it spoke out loud or if only he could hear it, but that meant that he had no way of knowing if it talked to other people too. He moved around a lot, leaving whenever anyone seemed to take too much interest in his affairs.

Then he bumped into Rolan Fairweather, a mercenary who he had encountered in his travels before he found the Book. Rolan was looking for a translator and he remembered Cecil as having been a dab hand with old documents, so he offered him a few days' work.

The next time Rolan was in town, he had more documents that needed translating.

The time after that, he bought Cecil a drink and said that if he had no other plans, perhaps he would like to join them on a trip down south for a few weeks?

Several months later, Rolan handed Cecil a contract and asked him if he’d like to officially join the Emerald Hounds. Cecil blinked at him a few times, read the contract, then shrugged and signed up. Rolan Fairweather was an excellent boss and a good friend, and Cecil was feeling more like himself than he had in years.

Two years later, running protection detail for a wealthy merchant travelling by caravan, Sergeant Fairweather and his team were ambushed by a large and very well-organised gang of bandits. Later investigation would prove that a business rival of the merchant’s had tipped the bandits off, but the ensuing arrests did little to comfort the sole survivor, a dazed and blood-stained Cecil Brightwood.

When questioned, Cecil managed to explain that the merchant had been transporting some sort of priceless and highly dangerous magical artefact, which was why he’d wanted all the extra security. One of the bandits got into the wagons and opened the box the artefact was in and it… ‘went off’.

The other Emerald Hounds shook their heads, muttered about the stupidity of folks who put safety second to gold, and made sure that Cecil was looked after while he recovered.

Since then Cecil has continued to work with the Hounds, but usually as an extra to other teams when needed. He mostly keeps to himself these days, and the other mercenaries understand.