Prelude
The Carises were not devouts of Selūne. Though they sought her blessings at times as most Faerūnians do, their faith lay elsewhere. Cander Caris was a woodsman, a follower of Silvanus. Elena Caris (née Blake) had been an itinerant priestess of Ilmater who retired from her active ministry to raise a family with her husband. The two somewhat settled in the small village of Northbrook, not far from the great city of Silverymoon. Though the couple were formally retired from the dangerous lifestyle of adventurers, the Carises maintained something of their old wanderlust. Travelling much of the year, Cander worked as a hunter, and Elena as a healer.
The Carises were Illuskan through and through, but Elena was said to have a Rashemi ancestor, though she knew hardly anything of that side of her heritage. The only remaining aspect of it was a family tradition, where the female offspring were given Rashemi names -- so it was that their child came to be named Anastasia 'Nastia' Caris. Despite their different faiths, all the circumstances surrounding their child's birth convinced them that their daughter was meant for the Moonmaiden. Conceived under a full moon and born under a blue moon in 1362 DR, Anastasia 'Nastia' Caris was dedicated to the goddess as a newborn babe. Her affinity to the wild and inability to sit still for long, traits inherited apparently from her parents, made her a curious child who accompanied her parents on long treks into the mountains, as far as the Spine of the World where the Carises maintained a lodge. Despite the difficult physical demands, the young Nastia would learn to love the frigid north despite all its challenges, and they would go on to remind her of the happy years she spent with her parents.
Nastia was a quiet and introspective child with few friends, a consequence of her family's near-constant movement and lack of strong roots. Nonetheless, she would come to make a lifelong friend in the young reclusive wild elf Callithyra, when she found the child obliviously lost at night in the woods. The wild elf would come to be something of a guardian angel for the child, watching her grow up and occasionally visiting her to provide much-needed company. Though Nastia never realized it and always credited Selūne's watchful eye, it was the wild elf's many private interventions that kept the child's curiosity from leading her into doom. When tragedy struck in Nastia's seventh year, it was again Callithyra who whisked her back to safety.
The Carises had planned a trip deep into the Spine, tracking a group of yetis that were harrassing local Uthgardt camps. Though they left Nastia behind in the lodge for safety, the child rather recklessly followed in secret. Nastia would slip and fell into a crevasse, where Callithyra rescued her and brought her back to Northbrook. For her parents, it didn't work out so well. They went on to find that the Uthgardt camps they were intending to help had been devastated by tribes of bugbears driven out from their lair by orcish activity. Something was stirring in the Spine and causing a chain of disruptions and displacements that threatened to spill further south, potentially threatening even the Silver Marches. Without warning, Northbrook would not stand a chance.
The Carises fled back to their lodge, which they found ransacked and occupied by an orcish warband. Assuming the worst and driven to despair, they threw themselves at their daughter's presumed murderers. only to be mortally wounded. Cander was carried off by his vanquishers, never to be seen alive again, and Elena fled down the mountains, barely able to pass warning to a frontier settlement before succumbing to her injuries. Thanks to their sacrifice, armies from the Silver Marches and their allies mustered in time to put the hordes from the Spine to rout before they could fully assemble. Though some speculated that the drow were the true masterminds, no concrete proof was ever found. The frozen, half-eaten remains of Cander Caris would only be found years later in the mountains by a traveller. The remains of the Carises came to be interred in Northbrook, where the two were remembered as heroes.
As for the newly orphaned Nastia, it was the church of Selūne that opened their arms to her. The priestesses Bethany Helder and Mara Bergen would raise her as one of their own, schooling her in their ways. They would quickly realize, however, that the child's destined path, though illuminated by Selūne, was to be a different one from that which they took. Nastia's blessings made her more suited as a champion than for the priesthood. With no suitable Selūnite warriors to serve as Nastia's mentor, the priestesses turned to an old friend of Elena Caris's, an Ilmatari paladin serving in the Knights in Silver, Sir Dimitri Duskwood. Nastia served under him first as a page and then as a squire, blossoming under his harsh but competent tutelage.
The quirks of Sir Dimitri's brand of discipline would mould Nastia in particular ways. Her curiosity would be reshaped into a keen love for learning, her wanderlust into a deep compassion for the realms. The chaste and austere knight -- it was said that he took up a vow of chastity after a failed suit for Elena's hand -- would teach Nastia the values of propriety and modesty, something that would come to play a role in her inner turmoil as they battled her youthful yearnings for something more than lifelong celibacy. Still, she never found love in her brief life in Toril.
On her eighteenth birthday, in 1380 DR, Nastia Caris was due to be knighted. Unfortunately, orcish hordes once again stirred in the north, and the knights were mobilized. Preferring a formal ceremony to an impromptu dubbing, Sir Dimitri delayed her knighting as they rode out north. What was supposed to be a weeks-long delay would turn out to be much longer than they had anticipated, as the tendrils of the Mists wove their way into Toril and snatched Nastia into their dreadful embrace...