Nobody knows where Bleak came from. Not even Bleak entirely. The first confirmed memory anyone has of him begins inside a ruined chapel during a storm. Black rain. Flooded stone. Bodies everywhere.
By the time the Marauders found him, the massacre had already ended. Priests dead at the altar, blackened blood across flooded pews, ritual ash soaked into rainwater, signs of violence too strange to fully explain. And in the middle of it sat a half-dead young man refusing to stop breathing. That was Bleak. Most people would have left him there. The Marauders didn’t. Bleak still doesn’t fully understand why.
Before the massacre, his life becomes uncertain even in rumor. Some believe he came from a religious order. Others think he belonged to a noble family. Some insist he was part of the ritual. Others think he caused it. He never confirms anything. His recollections exist more like sensations than stories: church bells, cold rain, smoke, prayers, blood, broken stone, voices, black water.
The emotional center of that night never left him. Nobody came. No god answered. No miracle intervened. No salvation arrived. Only silence. That realization hollowed him out permanently.
He traveled with the Marauders mostly because he had nowhere else to go. At first he barely spoke, barely slept, barely reacted to danger. Lich thought he was insane. Hexxie thought he was dying slowly. Boots thought he looked abandoned by something larger than physical injury. All three were correct in different ways.
He adapted to the crew strangely naturally, not socially but emotionally. The Marauders never demanded explanations. They accepted silence as easily as conversation, and never asked him to become clean, holy, optimistic, or redeemed. That made staying possible. Still, the massacre permanently altered his relationship with faith, meaning, intimacy, hope, and self-worth.
Over time he developed self-destructive habits, not to escape pain, but to suppress the lingering possibility that something inside him still wants redemption. That is the part of himself Bleak hates most. Hope irritates him. Healing disgusts him. The idea that he still matters feels invasive.
And yet he never fully leaves the Marauders. Because no matter how much he tries to disappear, one truth keeps haunting him: they stayed.