User:Thomas Monk IV/sandbox

= Thomas Monk IV = Thomas Monk IV (607 - 689) was a writer from the Eastern Mountains and a monk. He is best known for A Brief History of Known, a collection of works concerning the history and culture of Known. These books helped and continue to help hundreds of historians, students, and teachers learn about previously unexplained phenomena, such as the Skinchangers. This is considered one of the most accurate and unbiased books about its subject written in recent history.

Early life
Much of Thomas' earlier years are debated, as not much of his childhood and teenage years were undocumented. Born in 607, Thomas spent the first years of his life in an orphanage in Port Dimitri. When he turned seven, as was tradition in the order for the time, he was sent to the Eleventh Monastery with a small group of other young boys. He was described as a curious boy that loved learning new things and generally loved to explore. He was gifted with a special talent, Oculis Vera. This talent made it very easy for him to read people’s emotions by looking at them. This talent was described by the interviewed monks as a form of “Chaos Maji” and was considered very rare.

Due to the very secretive ways of the Monks of the Eastern Mountains, much is unknown about his adolescent years except that he was raised as a monk in the Eleventh Monastery and that he loved exploration. Even at the young age of four, he was most commonly found flipping through pages of books, or taking maps and tracing roads and shapes. In one of the few known interviews with Thomas, he cites this as what kindled his love for drawing and creating.

Adult life
When he came of age and had to choose his area of study, he chose to leave and study the different people of Known. His first accounts were of the humans of Centra, and he lived there for many years. After he left, he moved through many different locations such as Roc, The Dry Lake, Côte Rouge, The Eye of Known, The Emerald Isles, and many more.

Death and afterward
When Thomas was made aware of his imminent death in 681, He decided to forgo the path typically taken by monks. Instead of the usual "exiting of creation" ritual normally used by the monks to pass into the afterlife, he took his remaining savings and went south. The last time he was seen in public was in 683 in a Midland village by the sea. It is unknown where he went after that, but it is theorized that he continued moving west along the southern crags to a secret island somewhere in the unknown lands.

Published works
Glass in Grey, poem written 620

Centra and Its Peoples, a novel about the variety of cultures in Centra, published 627

A Brief History of Midland, a novel about the history and founding of Midland, published 640

A Brief History of Known, a series of short stories and a collection of essays on the various cultures and species of Known, published 682

please be mindful that this is both fictional, and a work in progress.