Born in Marton to proud parents Haugin and Eilen, Aodhred grew up watching his father tend to others. A traditional healer, Aodhred’s father was somewhat of a rarity among his people.  People from the smaller settlements nearby came for his expertise and salves when their need was great but the family patriarch cared little for fame and found his goals closer to home. As much as Aodhred's father wanted to pass down his profession to his son, Aodhred never cared much for it and allowed inexperience and impatience to dismiss his father’s craft as unworthy of his attention. He learnt how to identify ailments and mix salves well enough, but his heart was always yearning for the greater lands outside of his small village and for a life that mere medicine, no matter how famous, could provide him. Aodhred spent his free time in the local alehouse where he made friends with a local skald who fed him tales of adventures and glory, but more importantly, taught him how to play the lute. That is where he eventually decided his future would lie. While many other young boys his age wanted to be the one the bards wrote ballads about, he wanted to tell the legends and sing the ballads.

Wanting to takes his life onto the road, he knew he had to learn to survive it. Accompanying the local huntsmen into the woods near Marton, Aodhred learned how to track and kill his prey, making him a valued hunter much to his father’s chagrin. For a time, the young man edged closer and closer to achieving his dream of finally being able to set out for good, until a twist of fate tore everything from his grasp. Upon being ambushed by a group of Dunlendings who had journeyed over the mountains to the north, he along with some of the other hunters were captured while the rest were put to the sword, found unworthy to sell or make use of. Caught, pacified and shackled, the group were herded north over the mountains, a journey so dangerous and taxing that several of the hunters from Aodhred's group failed to survive it. It wasn’t long before Aodhred learned that the men who had ambushed them were slave hunters coming from Galtrev to the north and every attempt to secure his own freedom ended in grisly failure. After an arduous but uninterrupted journey, the slavers finally made it into Dunland and joined up with a larger caravan to head even further north, dashing whatever hopes Aodhred had of escaping into the mud beneath his bare feet.
Spending several years as a slave in Dunland among those he had no hope of rising up against, Aodhred tried a total of seventeen times to escape. A few of them succeeded but he was always hunted down as the brand on his forearm made it all too clear that he was not a free man. Bought and sold over and over, time eroded what resistance he’d grounded in his dreams of glory and he slowly grew accustomed to the tedious and harsh journeys forced upon him by the slavers. Eventually he was sold back to a slave hunter caravan to be shipped onwards towards the southern parts of Dunland, for the mining work. At his lowest point when freedom was a hollow memory fading into shadow and his new role in the world usurped his hopes for adventure, Bema finally smiled on him. A rival tribe of Dunlendings ambushed the party made their way through riskier territories, and in an ironic twist of fate Aodhred and a few others of the slaves managed to slip away. With his captors killed it was finally time to return home, his slave brand forever remaining as a reminder of what he had been through. Seing his homeland once more he returned home to find his family gone, fallen to illness. Struck by sorrow, Aodhred found his lute having been left in his family home and with that he set out in for an attempt to restore a dream long since shattered.