Before he was He-Who-Hunts-With-Wind and before he was Subject 067, the being who would call himself He-Who-Mourns-Silently was named John - lacking a last name thanks to his low birth. When Reillys was much smaller, less sophisticated, and still filled with Grave-Laboring Corsemen, children orphaned or abandoned and unlucky enough to run into some official institution were never officiated with the legal gift of a last name, until they became of age and could petition to acquire one themselves.

John was never so lucky, and by the time he turned fourteen and could legally interact with the government, he had acquired his next name. So he spent his childhood and preteen years squabbling in the dirt and mud, in what would become the poorer outer ring of modern day Reillys. The other street children spent their lives in equal parts playing in the streets, collaborating to steal for sustenance, and jostling for ownership of whatever they stole. In such an environment, John leveraged his inborn height, acquired martial skill, and innate cruel cunning to acquire a position of elevated respect and even leadership amongst the gutter rats, organizing them into a gang beneath his authority.

John enjoyed the security his position gave him, and took cruel pleasure in beating the boys and girls who stepped out of line with his gang. But there’s always a bigger rat. When he was 11, an older boy named Willard Brawm, an orphan from one of the official institutions, took to the streets to stake his own claim in the community. John contested this claim, but soon found himself to be utterly outclassed. Willard was older, stronger, and smarter - and on top of that, he had charm where John had none. The brief “gang war” between them was marked by initial enthusiasm from John’s fellows, slowly subsiding over a half dozen encounters as Willard trounced them and their leader, and then extended his hand to them in friendship and open cooperation.

Willard, He-Who-Mourns-Silently remembers fondly, always had big plans. Contrasted against his new leader, John was frighteningly blind to a world of future possibilities. Willard put his troupe through a ringer of stringent improving actions - more ambitious “heists”, interactions with “gangs” from other city districts, a stratified hierarchy, payment - he even had John and a few others take up necromancy in an attempt to create their own Corsemen. John had been given a position of importance in Willard’s little empire, and thanks to the older boy began to feel genuine affection and camaraderie for his companions. For that, He-Who-Mourns-Silently would always forgive him what happened 2 years into Willard’s employ.

John was well into his studies as a necromancer - in a few more years, he might even produce a rudimentary Corseman - but more importantly he was one of Willard’s prized thieves. He-Who-Mourns-Silently can still remember the conversation that preceded his final “mission” with Willard’s gang. It was absurd, even then - but in a charming way now - the heights to which his supreme orphan leader thought they could reach.

“John,” Willard had begun: classic Willard. “Check this out for me. You see this?” John’s boss was gesturing to a piece of parchment scrawled with ink - a crude blueprint, with notes scribbled in the margins that John could honestly barely decipher.

“Yeah… what am I looking at, here?” John asked.

“It’s a map of the inside of this funky magician’s place. I convinced his apprentice to draw it out and slip it to me - she says he’s got some pretty sweet stuff in there,” Willard answered.

“How did you manage that?”

“I’m smooth like butter.”

“Yeah. Sure. Anyway.”

“So here’s the deal. Yuen says her boss has this slick magic machine, eh, cutting edge, you know? Don’t ask me to get into the specifics, because I don’t know for sure, but apparently if you feed a piece of paper into it with a geometric design, along with some raw material like stone or metal, the thing will shape it into that design. Oh, and it needs power too. Vim.” Willard blusters with a glint in his eyes.

“Yeah?”

“And I think that’s your next mark. See, if we get that machine, we can start making our own products, mass production-like. Maybe you won’t have to steal so much, unless you want, of course. Focus on your studies. Make our family a real official-like business, you know?”

“Mmm. What’s it look like?”

John had been sold. By this point, he was surely the best thief he knew - he wasn’t as small as some of the younger boys, but he was by far the most experienced, patient, and cunning. He’d stolen items from displays in broad daylight and broken into the richest houses in their district, and never got caught. He’d never broken into the house of a wizard, though, but the thought excited him more than it scared him. He’d gone from stealing to survive to stealing for the thrill, and for Willard’s gang’s ambitions. So he found himself casing the home/workplace of Blizzark the magician, preparing to steal what would become one of the big breakthroughs in automated magical production in the 37th century.

Perhaps if he had succeeded, things might have turned out differently - for himself, for Reillynd, and for the area that would become the Depleted Lands. But given the results of the operation, and the aftermath, he wasn’t really around to witness developments as they occurred.

John, a totally magically inert thief at the time, was totally out of his depth attempting to rob a magician. He had no way to pass through the wizard’s hidden security system, or prepare himself from the glowing magical cage that grew around him when he failed to display the proper magical signature upon passing the house’s threshold. Trapped, he waited for hours until Blizzark woke up to find him lurking silently in the cage, and had him arrested.

John spent several days in the local jail before the men in sweeping grey labcoats showed up to spirit him away, as the other inmates’ eyes glazed over and they stared at nothing. He was brought to a secret facility deep underground, kept in a lab cell and surrounded by men in labcoats with high turtle collars and opaque visors.

In the bowels of the Ascension Institute, his very nature would be altered by magic, and he would become of Twisted Writ.

He-Who-Mourns-Silently slowly regains consciousness, dragged out of his past and into the present. His hunter’s eyes snap open, and he regards his surroundings cautiously. He’s encased in some large, glass tube, filled with dully glowing orange liquid. His mouth is fitted with a malleable mask, stuffed between his mandibles. Through it, he draws oxygen - strangely, the only wind he can sense right now. His hands and feet are bound to the back of the chamber by metal cuffs. Well, hand and feet. His right arm, he realizes with a sinking feeling, is vaporized at the elbow, the flesh still a blistered mess. His right flank is scorched and gnarled with matted fur and melted chitin, but strangely, he feels no pain. He assumes this to be some property of the orange fluid he floats in.

Outside the glass, to his coiling rage, he sees a half dozen Staves scurry about what seems to be some sort of lab, fiddling with the machine he’s entombed in, making notes, and examining other devices. He’s a test subject, again. It’s been a while. It doesn’t feel good.

Why didn’t they just kill me? He-Who-Mourns-Silently thinks of his new captors.