Born in AD 58, Ryland — known then as Rilander — was from a tribal people soon swallowed by the expansion of Rome. Whether it was in the forests of Germania or the highlands of Britannia is lost to time Ryland no longer remembers. What isn’t lost is the moment his village burned, the scent of ash and screams, and the Roman chains that would bind his childhood. At eleven, he was sold to the arenas and given a Roman name, Rullianus — a boy remade into spectacle. Before the arena, Ryland — then Rullianus — spent years in the villa of Lucius Varinius Pollio, a Roman master who prized intellect as much as dominance. There, under the stern tutelage of a Greek slave named Aniketos, he was taught to read, write, and argue like a citizen — even as he was beaten like property. Philosophy and poetry were forced down his throat alongside discipline and pain. By eighteen, cruelty of the Colosseum became his forge. He was a silent killer with no name, no family, and no tears. The people cheered for him, called him Canis Ferox -- the Fierce Dog.
In AD 86, at twenty-eight, he was betrayed by the one man he trusted — a fellow gladiator, a brother in all but blood. The knife in his back ended one life and began another. When Ryland awoke, gasping and unmarked, his world ended again. Alone, terrified, and cursed, he fled the sands with nothing but rage. It was an older Immortal who found him. A Roman General, Marcus Constantine. Under this mentor’s hand, Ryland learned the Rules and the blade. He learned how to survive. It was the closest he would ever come to a father.
In AD 93, Ryland crossed the Rhine disguised as a Gallic mercenary and made his way into the frontier towns of Germania Inferior. Rome’s legions were spread thin, and the provinces bled under corrupt governors who sold justice to the highest bidder. Ryland became their shadow. In the years that followed—through Domitian’s assassinations, through the brutal suppression of Dacian rebels—he hunted warlords, tax collectors, and slavers who preyed on the vulnerable. He fought not for countries, but for the voiceless. When Hadrian built his wall in Britannia in AD 122, Ryland was already on the other side, teaching villagers how to gut a legionnaire in the dark.
By AD 117, the Empire had reached its greatest height under Trajan, and Ryland wore a soldier’s armor again. He enlisted under a false name in the Legio III Augusta and marched east during the Parthian campaign. He thought the discipline might dull his fury. It didn’t. The conquest of Dacia, the siege of Hatra, the endless butchery done in the name of Rome’s glory — none of it filled the hollow in his chest. When civil war erupted after the death of Commodus in AD 192, Ryland fought for neither claimant. He slipped away from the ranks before sunrise and left his armor in the dirt.
By AD 211, Rome had split under the joint rule of Caracalla and Geta, and in the cracks, blood flowed freely. Ryland resurfaced in the eastern provinces, fighting in underground arenas near Antioch. Wealthy elites paid fortunes to watch “the Red Wolf” spill blood with nothing but knives and fury. He didn’t lose. Not once. But victory tasted like ash. In AD 235, after the assassination of Emperor Severus Alexander, Ryland vanished into the Armenian highlands with a band of tribal fighters. For decades, he trained them in Roman tactics, leading raids against imperial supply lines. By AD 260, when Emperor Valerian was captured in Persia, Ryland had already become myth in the mountains.
Exhausted by war and haunted by violence, Ryland disappeared into the Alps in AD 290. He built a cabin above the tree line where no roads reached. One bitter winter, in AD 297, he found a child wandering alone — barefoot, frostbitten, the last survivor of a burned-out village. Ryland took him in. Over the next thirty years, they lived by the rhythms of the wild: trapping, forging, surviving. It was the quietest Ryland had ever known. In AD 327, the boy, now a man, died from a fever Ryland couldn’t fight. He buried him beneath a cairn of stone and ash, burned the cabin, and walked back into the world with a blade and nothing left to lose.
Ryland wandered the splintered remnants of Rome, fighting as a mercenary in the Germanic wars, the Saxon conquests, and Viking raids across the North Sea. In 360 he met a young slave of about nine or ten years old, Naphtali the boy was pre-immortal, and Ryland protected and mentored him for a time before the need to move on arose. He was present during the sack of Rome in AD 410, and again in 476, when the Western Empire fell for good. By 620, he’d fought alongside Visigoths in Hispania, Franks in Gaul, and Slavs along the Danube. In 732, he witnessed the Battle of Tours. In the 800s, he drifted between warbands, skirmishes, and abbeys.
In 1096, Ryland fought in the First Crusade, crossing into Asia Minor under the banner of Christendom. What he found was senseless slaughter—whole towns put to the sword, children trampled beneath horses, women begging for mercy from men who fancied themselves righteous. The cause he’d taken up with solemn conviction quickly revealed itself as a blood-soaked farce. Disgusted, he turned from it before reaching Jerusalem, abandoning his rank and disappearing into the wilderness. He carried the stench of that failure for decades, the cries of the innocent haunting even his immortal sleep.
In 1120, Ryland infiltrated the Knights Templar, drawn to their sacred vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—ideals he still clung to in the aftermath of the Crusade’s horrors. At first, he believed he’d found purpose among them, a disciplined brotherhood that might atone for the chaos he'd witnessed. But the deeper he rose within their ranks, the more he saw the rot beneath the armor: secret dealings with nobles, hidden wealth, and brutal suppression of anyone who questioned their growing power. One Templar in particular—Sir John Mauteby—embodied everything Ryland came to despise: cruel, ambitious, and utterly without honor. When Ryland discovered John abusing his authority and executing prisoners for sport, he confronted him. The clash that followed was swift and savage, but John fought dirty and fled before Ryland could take his head. From that day on, Ryland swore that if he ever saw John Mauteby again, he would finish what was started and leave no part of him to bury.
From 1347–1352, he witnessed the Black Death’s devastation across Europe. Ryland lost lovers in Florence, comrades in London, and whole towns he’d once called home. Streets he’d walked were emptied of life, laughter replaced by wails and silence. He buried mortals he’d cherished and watched others turn on each other in fear. Immortality became an unbearable distance—he could not die, could not grieve properly, and could not stay. By the time the plague waned, Ryland was a ghost among ruins, more alone than ever.
He turned vigilante in the late 14th century. Between 1370 and 1450, he targeted slavers in the Mediterranean, warlords in Eastern Europe, and abusive lords in the Holy Roman Empire — petty kings who fed on the poor like wolves. Ryland struck from the shadows, his sword a sentence, his silence a warning. He asked no forgiveness for the blood he spilled it was never penance he sought. Justice, he’d learned, had no saints — only men willing to do what others wouldn’t.
Ryland adapted as the world changed. By the 1520s, he had mastered arquebuses and pistols, trading swordsmanship for gunpowder with the same deadly precision. In the 1530s, he fought against the Conquistadors in Peru, appalled by their slaughter of native peoples and driven by a need to resist cruelty masquerading as conquest. Through the 1600s, he roamed the Ottoman frontiers and the fractured Balkans, drawn to places where the lines between justice and savagery blurred, where war was constant and morality gray.
In the early 1700s, Ryland found himself once more in South America, this time in the sun-scorched jungles of colonial Brazil, drawn not by empire or trade, but by the scent of cruelty. The Portuguese slave trade thrived in the region, and Ryland hunted its architects with the same cold precision he once brought to the arena. He posed as a mercenary, a deserter, even a priest when it suited him, but always with one goal: to dismantle the networks that trafficked in flesh. He was known among the quilombos -- escaped slave communities -- as “o ceifador mudo” — the silent reaper.
In the 1830s, Ryland fought in the Texas Revolution, drawn not by patriotism but by a personal vendetta against a corrupt Mexican officer who had trafficked enslaved people. He rode with revolutionaries, fought in skirmishes along the Rio Grande, and helped fortify key positions. He tracked supply lines, disrupted enemy patrols, and worked quietly to protect civilians caught in the crossfire. His focus was sharp and unyielding—each battle bringing him closer to the man he sought, fueling a relentless pursuit that went beyond politics or cause.
The 1850’s in the filthy underworld of London, and later New York, Ryland found a new kind of crucible — bare-knuckle boxing. In the ring, he became myth: Tom Stone, The Butcher of Bowery. He let the fists fall like penance, took punishment until he could feel something again. In back alleys, he hunted the men who profited from pain — fixers, slumlords, predators.
In New York in 1885, Ryland met Aoife Brennan, a widowed Irish nurse with a quiet strength and hands that healed more than just flesh—she eased the ache of his endless existence. Over four years, she became his anchor, a rare light in his shadowed life. But in 1889, illness claimed her Ryland watched helplessly as she coughed blood into a worn handkerchief, the life fading from her eyes. When she was gone, grief overwhelmed him. He sank heavily into drink, drowning his sorrow in dark whiskey and restless nights, seeking out fights in smoky taverns — each brutal brawl a desperate attempt to numb the pain that no wound could ever reach. In 1905, he met immortal, Jeremiah Weiss, just after the other man had taken his first head.
In 1920s Chicago, Ryland worked as a sharp, relentless private detective hunting down organized crime figures, his immortal instincts giving him an edge in the city’s violent underworld. He met immortal Rory Greene during this time — newly married to Johnny, a rising mobster with a dangerous reputation. Though their worlds barely crossed, Ryland recognized the danger Johnny posed and warned Rory to be careful, but it was too late barely a year into their marriage, Johnny was killed in a brutal gangland slaying, leaving a trail of chaos behind.
During World War II, from 1941 to 1944, Ryland operated deep within occupied France, aligning himself with the French Resistance. He specialized in sabotaging Nazi supply lines—destroying railways, derailing convoys, and crippling communications to disrupt the German war machine. On numerous occasions, he carried out targeted assassinations of high-ranking SS officers. He meets immortal Rebecca Kirk at this time.
In 1968, Ryland embedded himself with U.S. Special Forces deep in the jungles of Vietnam, navigating a war that felt both alien and hauntingly familiar. The relentless chaos and moral ambiguity of the conflict twisted something inside him, dredging up old scars and bitter memories. Amid the haze of gunfire and uncertainty, he met and became friends with immortal Merrick March, and a young soldier named Judah Cyrus -- a fierce, determined kid who carried the same look Ryland had seen once in the eyes of a brother who had betrayed him centuries ago. When a sudden burst of enemy fire tore through the undergrowth, Ryland acted without hesitation, throwing himself between Judah and a bullet, saving him.
In the 1980s, Ryland returned to New York City. He kept to the shadows in Hell’s Kitchen, working nights as a bouncer in dive bars and backroom clubs, settling scores with quiet force and watching the streets change beneath neon and crack smoke. He didn’t speak much, but people knew not to cross him. Sometimes he walked the old neighborhoods where he'd loved Aoife, though the buildings were different now. Her ghost stayed with him. In a city full of noise, Ryland moved like silence. He runs into Jeremiah again, and also meets immortal Paige Brewster.
In the 1990s, Ryland drifted west again, chasing shadows and silence through dusty border towns and dead-end roads. He worked odd jobs — ranch hand, mechanic, night security at a roadside casino. But the world was getting louder, faster, crueler. He started gambling, not for the thrill, but for the momentary numbness. By the end of the decade, he’d landed in Las Vegas, a ghost among ghosts in the city of sin, working backroom gigs and keeping his sword under the floorboards of a trailer off Sahara Avenue. When the Captain Trips virus hit in 2002, Ryland didn’t run. He watched the city rot, and he watched the man who rose in the city, gathering people around him.
