Jutse Aldwyn is a calico and healer who was born in 514 GD.

He is trans, heterosexual, and polyamorous.

Jutse was born in the city of Hesilen in Bachi, deep within the Great Blind Desert. He is the identical twin sibling of Cleo Aldwyn. He has a sphinx father and a calico mother.

The aftermath of the Adenian-Tethish War took a toll on the global economy. As Hesilen is primarily a trading village, this meant that fewer and fewer traders came through Hesilen, so more and more of their parents' savings was consumed merely buying the bare necessities to survive.

At a very young age, Cleo was handed over to a group of traders, leaving Jutse behind with his parents. Jutse's parents trained him as a healer. His parents were the only healers in Hesilen. Because the city was hundreds of miles from any other settlements, they could not leave the city without a healer.

Most of the village’s economy was in hospitality, as there were little to no natural resources nearby, and no respectable business would attempt to set up shop there. Nearly every family in the village ran an inn which housed weary traders who were halfway through their trek across the desert.

The Aldwyns were the village doctors, going back for countless generations, and quite possibly to the very founding of the village. The innkeepers saw to the travelers, and we saw to the innkeepers. There were a handful of other tradespeople in the village, naturally. Cobblers, builders, chefs, carpenters, masons… As long as we had a steady inflow of goods and materials on the backs of traders, then the village could persist.

The traders got an absolutely necessary rest point, and in exchange we got what we needed to survive the harsh climate. It was a good trade.

But after the war, usage of this trade route plummeted. Our village sat upon a trade route from the southern coast to the northern coast by the Magmaen Sea, and after the war, it became more economical to simply ship goods by boat around the whole of the subcontinent rather than to send hapless people through a hostile desert on foot. While the influx of traders did not immediately hit zero, it was enough of a drop that we sorely felt their absence.

Without traders bringing us tanks of water, the village gradually disintegrated. One by one, the villagers left, joining the traders on their way out and seeking their fortunes elsewhere. But his parents refused to leave. As long as there was a single person left in that village, they would stay to ensure their health. His family had been in that village for millennia.

Hesilen was where we lived. It was our home. We had never known anything else. No one in our family had, for thousands of years.

Jutse was born an identical twin. His sister is named Cleo. When both of us were three, his parents made a decision. Knowing how hard life in the desert would be, and how little hope there was for the future of the village, his parents asked a group of traders they knew well to take Cleo north and see that she was adopted.

When Jutse learned of this, he was incensed.

Furious.

Jutse was so lonely that he had resorted to making up an imaginary friend called Boulder who lived on a rock outside my village. When they told me what they had done, he resented them heavily. He could have had a twin, a best friend through the good times and bad.

When Jutse was eleven, his father made a house call for the head of one of the oldest families in the village, apart from our own. In that house, he found the man unresponsive, with cold, hard skin. His father, with all his expertise, could not accurately determine when the man had died, only that he was certainly dead. No pulse, no breathing. His father worked tirelessly to discover a cure, to work out some combination of poultices and restoratives, some application of physical therapies, some surgical method that might reverse the hardening process.

His father named this disease “Stoneflesh” for its peculiar impact on the skin and soft tissues. The disease gradually desiccated the flesh of the afflicted and robbed it of its pliability. The end result was that the body would no longer absorb water effectively, and there was a gradual loss of mobility. The loss of mobility was for two reasons. Firstly, the muscles would gradually lose strength and induce intense pain in the afflicted when contracted. Secondly, the tendons and joints would gradually stiffen until they could no longer function, again accompanied by extreme pain.

The disease had a 100% mortality rate, and it was extremely contagious. Jutse was forbidden from leaving the house, and his father quarantined himself. He, of course, had already contracted the illness. He managed to slow the progression of the disease by increasing his fluid intake, which was only possible because the population of the village had already dropped so drastically. His mother began to wear gloves and a mask, and she never touched patients any more, for fear that she might catch the disease and leave me an orphan.