Dean, Headmaster and Professor of the Occult

The Steinhardt family is headed by a lesser lord who maintains a handful quaint but profitable vineyards to their name along Taldor's coastline. The elder of the family- Principus- had maintained a degree of respect in the human-dominated countryside because of the pedigree of his sport, and sought an heir to overtake his estate in his advancing age, to be able to enjoy the fruits of retirement. Aldwyn was to be such a son, after three sisters born before him. Truthfully, he'd never much cared for any aspect of running a business. In his childhood, he had done as many boys his age had done: played Soldiers with wooden sticks and makeshift shields assembled from the slats of discarded wine barrels grown too old for further use. However, as time passed, he aged slowly and watched his earliest childhood friends grow old and get drafted into foreign wars, from which they'd never return. In this, Aldwyn cursed human mortality and Elven longevity, and would become withdrawn through his adolescence. While other children eventually lost their taste for the games of war, Aldwyn's fascination only grew, causing him to pursue wargames in his youth and battlefield tactics and history as he grew into an adult. While his father would want the young elven man to take an interest in winemaking, tensions within the family eventually rested this fate onto his older sisters instead, leaving him to turn his fantasies of being a knight-errant into reality.
On the onset of his career, Aldwyn was tasked with commanding the night watch of nearby Ridonport, owing to his ability to see better in the dark, his high-born lineage, and a number of scheming nobles attempting to set the man up to fail. Aldwyn met a group of rowdy, insubordinate, and corrupt guardsmen and floundered at first, only to inspire them by leading a charge onto the ships of pirate skirmishers who had docked onto the piers in a raid. While his men had grown to respect him, powers at work in the supremacist bureaucracy would see him stripped of his rank, and cast out from the guard for the disorder of that night.
 
Aldwyn would take this as an unshackling of his duties, and used the allowances from his father's wineries and stipend as captain of the guard to fund personal archaeological expeditions, which later attracted the attention of universities within Oppara itself, where he would undergo tutelage and further his understanding of magic as well as the world at large. It's here that his thirst for knowledge of the world and its history would only grow to be unquenchable, and where his beliefs in the tenets of Shelyn would be cast off for those of Nethys's simple pursuit of knowledge in all forms in an almost-transcendent epiphany while abroad in Osirion, on an archeological dig