The Helders Samuel and Cassandra were a highly skilled hunter and trapper team. They disappeared one winter while out hunting and their bodies were never found, leaving their only daughter, Alyxandra, behind. She was taken in by Mother Gram, who quickly put her to work.
Originally, Alyx was the town’s unofficial delivery girl whenever someone needed one of Mother Gram’s treatments. One of those was Malik, a boy not much younger than her who was under the care of Father Dake and his acolyte Amatus. She would often deliver his medicine and then sit with him and talk.
As she grew older, she began to chafe under Mother Gram and started to look elsewhere to live and work. She ended up following Branigan around for three days until he finally let her come on a hunt. After returning, the old dwarf told her that she had “her father’s eye and her mother’s memory” and allowed her to join future hunting parties. She eventually became one of his best tree mappers, a subset of the hunters who spend more time in the trees trying to keep tabs on the migration patterns of the forest's denizens than actually hunting. They also serve as forward scouts, though the need for that skillset hasn’t arisen in decades. It was here that she met Kevin, a lumberjack turned hunter. They get along well, trading barbs about him cutting trees and her being an orphan. Both of them understand what it means to not have a "real" family. Together, are one of the first pairs Branigan calls when he needs something done.
There are three days in her life that she will never forget. The first is the day her parents vanished. The second is when she was 7 and playing hide and search with some of the other village children. Thinking she was very clever, she decided to hide in the abandoned temple. If everyone thought it was cursed, no one would ever look for her there. When she snuck in, it felt like there was a different energy inside. Old stone was completely overgrown with vines and other plant life. It felt like the forest itself was trying to claw back what had been taken from it. While hiding, she stumbled upon an old necklace with a bird’s skull on it. It wasn’t until much later that she discovered if she focused on it, she was able to cast magic. While the spells aren’t anything like what’s in Father Dake’s sermons, it made her feel special and she began learning as much about Koed, God of the Forest, as she could. The third day was when she was 17. A noble was passing through town during a festival and decided to spend the day in Corkirk. Alyx had just returned from a hunting trip and saw the young man lambasting the innkeep about the quality of his stew. She walked up to the noble, dropped her bloody kill onto his lap, and said that if he was going to complain about it, he might as well make his own meal. It was after this that she learned the man was a noble, but she didn’t back down and wondered out loud if he could cook, or if he had to order his servants to do everything for him. The noble stood up and drew a sword, and that’s when Alyx realized just how big a mistake she made. She sprinted out of town and hid in the forest for two weeks just to make sure the noble had left. Since then, she’s gotten better about choosing her words, but sometimes she still doesn’t think about who she’s talking to before saying what’s on her mind.
While not a regular patron, she's known by face and by name at the tavern for its regular fight tournaments where she consistently makes it to the later rounds and has occasionally won against opponents much bigger and stronger than her.
