Seraphine was born in a hunting lodge on the borderlands, the daughter of an unlikely union. Her father, Aldric Dawnhammer, was a human ranger — a weathered, patient man who knew every trail, every animal track, and every danger of the border forests. Her mother, Vaelith, was a silver-haired elf from a distant realm across the sea, a woman of quiet songs, old lore, and gentle hands. Their marriage scandalized neither family so much as it surprised them both, and their daughter was raised in the overlap of two worlds: half her childhood spent on her father's patrols, learning the bow, the trail, and the hard honesty of the wilds; the other half at her mother's side, learning elvish verse, the names of stars, and the long memory of a people who measure time in centuries.
When Seraphine was still young, Vaelith fell to a wasting illness that no healer or herb could touch. The elves of her mother's people came quietly for her, and she departed for the Undying Lands — the elven realm beyond the sea where their kind goes to end their days in peace. Seraphine has never learned whether her mother still lives, and the uncertainty aches in her like an old wound. She stayed at her father's side afterward, and the two grew closer than ever, two hunters keeping watch over an empty lodge.
Then came the night that shattered her life. A powerful vampire descended upon their home in the dark hours. Aldric fought bravely — Seraphine still remembers the sound of his war-cries, the flash of silver, the terrible confidence of the thing that came for them. But her father did not die. The vampire took him, and turned him. Seraphine fled into the night with nothing but her life and the knowledge that the thing wearing her father's face now walks the earth as an undead horror — a mockery of everything he was, bound in servitude to the monster that made him.
She wandered, grief-mad, until she found a shrine of Gorm Gulthyn, the guardian god of defense, vigilance, and the shield-wall that holds against darkness. Something in the Firelord's creed — that walls are built, that watches are kept, that no darkness is suffered to pass — answered the scream in her heart. She swore her oath upon the altar: no undead creature would know peace while she drew breath. The priests trained her in hammer, shield, and holy word, and she took to the paladin's path with a convert's ferocity.
Now she walks the borderlands as Gorm's vigil, seeking the vampire who stole her family — and her father with him. She knows the confrontation may one day demand she put a hammer or a silver dagger through the heart of the man who raised her. She has made her peace with that, or tells herself she has. Until then, every crypt cleansed, every ghoul destroyed, every spawn dragged into the sunlight is a payment on a debt she intends to collect in full. She carries her mother's armor and her father's memory in every blow, and she does not rest.
