Aen was a special boy in a very spiritual sort of measure. As a child growing up among the clan spaces of the then-budding kingdom of Ragnivan, he was the oft-humored talk of the towns that he and his merchant family frequented.
The matter with Aen was that he held such an exceptional sense of honesty and legalism that it would commonly drive his family, his father especially, right out of their minds.
An alert and studious boy, Aen was keen to learn the most accurate local pricing for everything the family sold in their covered wagon, the problem being that he would never use this to his advantage. Regularly he would catch overpriced offers made by his father, correcting him on the value of a sale just seconds before it was made, and almost always with the buyer in front of them. This, understandably, led to more than a few lost sales once the buyers learned of what something was really worth, which led to the rather spurious task upon his family to find various things in order to distract him from any overtly honest deal-dashing.
Aen’s parents enrolled him in a charter school in Frau, a new-at-the-time academic town of low import. It was their understanding if their boy could not be a good merchant, then he could at least be an civic administrator, and perhaps even a certified mage. It just so happened that around this time Lord Knight Order had in fact set her sights on the town as a vacationing destination for some years by this point, preferring the mild, warm climate and workable soil for her gardening, paired alongside the quiet nature of the people there, which benefited her when she didn’t want people asking too many questions about strange goings-on – more on that another time.
The two of them met there during a seasonal festival, which brings into focus his other notable trait: Aen was, from a very young age, helplessly obsessed with The Royal Knights of Reinen.
Seeing such a high-ranking knight visit during the warm seasons, Aen’s love for the chivalrous code of The Knights drove him to antics of such embarrassing qualities that Order, a person that appreciates her space, let alone a woman living alone, began to push back vigorously on his constant visits to her manor, which at times bordered on breaking and entering. Aen did win out in the end; however, as Order realized what the young man saw in her.
She was the first Knight he had ever met, and in her he saw the noble hope of not only his country and people, but a way of life entirely apart from the material-possessed lower masses of the common people.
It turned out that Aen never thought of himself as the heroic material that The Knights call out for in their sparse recruitment efforts. In fact, Aen was under the impression that recruitment was only opened to the children of nobles and those with exceptional talent. Despite it all, Order encouraged him in his sprouting dream. She assured him that he did, in fact, have great talent: simply in an area that is not often celebrated.
Aen was physically unexceptional, mind-bendingly dense, and ill-educated. Even so, Order realized she was dealing with a Knight of the absolute-highest caliber, on the justification of his willpower and moral strength alone. She recommended the idea of knighthood to the boy after an especially drawn-out discussion on Rayda’s plan for Reinen, as well as for the human race. He not only had mature insights to give, but would often catch her off guard with an uncharacteristic wisdom hidden under his goofy facade.
Reassured in her assessment, Order recommended the idea in an officially-worded letter to the dean of Aen’s school who, with the utmost respect given to her constituting the first two paragraphs of his response, left the final line with his answer:
“In regards to the young Mister Aeswalt, only a man like Rayda could find a place for him to be of use.”
At that, Aen alerted his shocked but overjoyed parents at the decision, and he set out to Reinen with Order at the end of the warm season to the even warmer North provided by Reinen’s Planar Sphere.
The rest, historians might say, is history.
Kindled endlessly with an enthusiasm of living up to King Rayda’s standard for a “self-defining human life”, Aen utterly crushed his academic and magical tests starting as soon as the first semester of his attendance to the academy of the Knightholds.
It was there that his now years-long relationship with Order came in great hand to him, for despite their separate and consuming businesses, Aen was always keen to make time, early or late, to hunt her down with questions.
Before long, he excelled in every practical area befitting a knight: an outspoken, legalist lad transformed into a man capable of cripplingly powerful magic… and who was also just as peculiarly prudish as he was in his boyhood.
Nearly a half a century down the line, at the ripe old age of ninety eight, Aen was dubbed by Rayda himself with the knightly title of Justice, in reference to his at times obscene uprightness, though balanced and eased with his constant, considerate tenderness toward his fellow man.
He served loyally and capably near the tail end of the woefully-long Extermination Wars, earning him a high rank among The Knights and consideration as a fellow to even the Millennium Knights, who considered him a fun person to be around, if only for them to derive more humor from the peculiar way he saw the world, if not his infectious can-do energy.
