Do you have any thoughts about who Uldred was before being taken to Kinloch Hold? Was he a transfer from another circle? Was he loved by his parents? That sort of thing?
Warming up my tippy typy fingers. oh boi. I've got that thing woven in my mind better than a grand medieval tapestry.
My idea is that Uldred was given to the Chantry by his parents when he was 4 or 5. He was the youngest of his siblings, and was already strange (hearing voices, talking to the walls, etc.), and his parents felt he was only going to bring them trouble. So they met their local priest on the doorstep of their village's Chantry, and took money in exchange for their child. They didn't care what the church would do with him, as long as Uldred was off their hands.
He grew up in a Chantry orphanage, which was more or less a natural prelude to the Circle. He was repeatedly told he should be grateful, that his parents could just have abandoned him in the street, and that many other children didn't get the chance to have a roof on their heads and food in their belly.
His upbringing was of the most strict kind, with daily chores and long hours of prayer and a single, very small, daily meal, and the bare minimum of general comfort. That's likely when he first got sick, and it stuck with him his whole life. The Chantry people believed in a modest education, as to shape children into hardened adults (and maleable future scholars or Templars).
The other kids weren't kinder to him. The way he looked made him more vulnerable to mockery, with his crooked face and creepy habit to stare at people with those bulging eyes of his - and talking to invisible things at night, too. The Chantry people didn't know where to put him or what to do with him; his body was in-between male and female, which got him his lot of humiliation and abuse. Later on, he would understand to take pride in it.
Magic awoke in him when he was around 10. A Terror demon was the first one to manifest. It let him sleep peacefully, while it gave nightmares to all the other kids in the dorm.
Then, it was Pride that showed up, one day when he was beaten up bloody by a Chantry sister, who pushed him to the ground and kicked him in the face, breaking his nose in the process. She said he couldn't be any uglier than he already were, that he were so useless he should just die here and now; he was too weak to become a Templar, and too absent-minded to study as a Chantry scholar.
He saw his own blood glow, heard a voice seeming to come from within himself, and blacked out. Blood was the way through which magic manifested for him first, but fire came second, so the Templars didn't look any further when they found him in the middle of the charred remains of the local Chantry.
And so he was brought to Kinloch Hold, where he stayed mute for over a year but otherwise well-behaved. The more time passed, the clearer it became he had broken free from one prison to end up in another, but now he knew how he should behave.
....And here you have my vision for him :3
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