Appoline Whitethorn knew death before she knew her own name. In the height of Harvestmath, one moon too early, her mother was stricken with the pangs of childbirth. For half a day, the midwife and her mother struggled, until at long last she was delivered. When she pressed for details growing up, her father always said that something had "gone wrong." That something deep within Clara Whitethorn had been torn, and the selfsame blood that gave Appoline life had wrested it from her mother. 

In absence of her mother, Appoline, quickly given the pet name of "Aplin," which persists to the day, was raised by her father, Bill Whitethorn, her uncles, and her grandfather. Growing up in a taxidermist's workshop, she inherited her family's peculiarity of meeting the dead with fascination, rather than disgust. It is hard to be unnerved by glassy-eyed beasts when they are all you've ever known. All that remains to fear are the living ones, and Bill quickly taught her how to dispatch them cleanly. As a child, she would accompany him on expeditions far out into the wilderness surrounding Bree, and all the crumbling ruins of the Breefields, to make camp with him, and learn to hunt big game with tact and cunning. As she reached adolescence, she began to head out on her own.

At first, she would venture out for only a couple days at a time, but as she grew older, and more reckless, those days turned to entire weeks. She grew tired of the Breefields, of the boars and brown bears and stags that roamed outside of the city walls, and it was not long until she tried her luck in the Old Forest. But the true temptation set in when she stumbled upon the pass into the Barrow Downs. Long she had heard the tales spun by the old men in the hunting lodge, and barkeeps bent on entertaining travellers. A trophy from such a place would surely fetch a pretty price, and the arrogant blood running through her urged her to try her luck. It began with merely looking, with camping at the Old Forest's edge, and spying on the monstrous beasts lurking among the hills and stones. But looking can only stifle ones hunger for so long, and little time passed before she took those hapless first steps into a place she would never again escape in full.

Image Citations:
1. Instagram user thescottishcollective
2. "The ancient center of Cardolan"