- Heritage -

In the wind-scoured hill-forts of Anórien, where the beacons of old stand sentinel over the Eastemarch, beneath the arched boughs of the Leaf-Gate of Calenannon—a stone portal of the elder days, its beech leaves carved in enduring relief upon the lintel—was born Lastor son of Lastron, of a line that traced its blood unbroken to the founding of Gondor. The Dúnedain of the South, they called themselves, guardians whose sires had ridden with Ecthelion against the Corsairs' black sails, and whose watch at the Gate had turned back Easterling spies since the Watchful Peace. From his youth, amid the rustling canopy of those beeches, Lastor learned the first arts of vigilance: to read the wind's shift and the earth's old scars, as befitted the Wardens of the Gate.

- The Scholar -

Yet the call of deeper lore drew him southward in his twentieth summer, to the musty halls of Minas Tirith's King's Library, where the Steward's distant gaze held sway. There, amid vellum bound from distant lands, he mastered the tongues of the Eldar and the sigils of forgotten kings, poring over maps of Arnor's fallen realms till the stars wheeled above the White Tower. But the vellum could not bind him; by his thirtieth summer, he had forsaken cloister for road, earning the name Lastron-en-Annon—the Grey Wayfarer of the Gates—through ventures that carried him from the vine-clad vales of Lossarnach to the salt-sprayed havens of Dol Amroth.

- The Wanderer -

Now in the mid-vigor of his years, nigh on fourscore and five, with hair silvered at the temples like frost on the Mindolluin's heights and a faint scar from a warg's fang across his knuckles, Lastor returned ever to the Citadel's councils, his counsel prized for the keenness honed on distant trails. Denethor II, that lord of piercing sight, marked well the noble's unyielding tread and eye for hidden truths. "Thou hast walked the wide earth, old friend," spake the Steward in the year of the White Tree's waning, "from Rohan's thunderous plains to the shadowed eaves of Ithilien. Fare now north once more, to the forsaken ruins of Arnor, and pierce the mists 'round this 'Strider,' chieftain of shadows, whose rangers stir as leaves before the storm. Ride swift, and let not the road's old lures blind thee to peril." Thus charged, Lastor departed the Pelennor under a cloak of grey loden-wool, weathered as his own hide, his steed bearing the Star of Eärendil, bound anew for the crumbling watch-stones of the North.

- The Steward's Charge -

Through Rohan's grassy plains he pressed once more, bartering old tales for bread at Edoras' gates where he had feasted in younger days, and into the wilds of Eriador, where barrow-wights howled and the Rangers' horns echoed faint as half-remembered songs. Whispers he gathered afresh—of a tall man in weathered grey, bearing a blade like broken starlight, who walked the wilds as one born to thrones long lost. Yet the road, ever the faithful companion, wrought its subtle changes: the vast emptiness of Arnor mirrored the quiet ache in his chest, a longing rekindled for seas uncharted and glories unclaimed, tempered now by the weight of years and the Steward's fading light. Returning south ere the new year broke, his satchel heavy with riddles and ruin, he found Minas Tirith stirring to war's drum. There, in the Steward's council, his words would weigh as gold—or as the first shadow of kingship's return.