Cold. He remembered the cold. The cold grip of ice… and of the dark. The darkness between existence. He hated it. More, he hated what the chill and the dark represented, and the horrors that often manifested within. He’d lost friends, allies, to the monsters before, and it stoked an eternal flame inside his core - what some might call a heart. He sought vengeance against the sinister, flickering tides of darkness for stealing from him, and made a silent vow that he would always fight against it, wherever it manifested.
The idea that he might ever lose more, or that there would be others who may lose to the dark, was one he couldn’t abide.
Over the course of many years, fire and carnage followed wherever he found the forces of the dark, and he often went out of his way to hunt them down and eradicate them. Chimerae, manticores, basilisks, even dragons, and more, fell to his ferocity. Sometimes, his actions resulted in the salvation of a settlement, and the citizens thanked the mysterious, fiery spirit, and honored him as a hero, even though they usually couldn’t see him.
He wasn’t interested in being a hero. He had a job to do, and he would do it for as long as there was fire burning within him.