ALL OF THEM I mean your fave three?
DANG you’re making me pick favorites!
Okay let’s see, your question (before I asked who you wanted <3) was "What’s your characters earliest childhood memory (or equivalent)"
Path: Oh that’s painful. The smell of the ocean and the steady breeze rolling into the coast off the Cyurian plains (an arid desert environment like Ruanhai leaves much to be desired, that would be one of the images of “home” she would keep). Her and her brother would snag books, scrolls, and even giant codexes out of their parent’s study (or the city archive) and drag them out into the farmland along the plains to study and mess around when their parents’ backs were turned. Her and Brenth used to be inseparable as kids. I guess you could say a childhood memory for her is something she misses from an era of innocence. So yeah, the earliest thing she can remember before things turned to shit? Looking out for her baby brother.
Tanuth: The first time Maegolian was assigned to him as mentor. Everything before then would be rather vague reflections of him constantly being handed from one teacher to the next because his mother (being the matriarch of the city) had her hands too tied with political matters to actually oversee his development herself. So he had to rely on a handful of Gairainian lesser elementals to teach him vastly different areas of his craft. But when Maegolian was appointed as High Mage, he was assigned specifically to Tanuth as his master and mentor. Let’s just say Tanuth, so used to getting his way with past coaches, didn’t really see Maegolian coming. As a councilman, to him Tanuth’s status as Oriancarus was null, and he made it clear on their first meeting he wasn’t going to take any crap from him if he didn’t follow instruction. But yeah, to get back on topic; getting the fear of god struck in him by a man he would eventually come to admire and rely on as a father figure. That would have happened before Karjia was old enough to start learning her element, so Tanuth was the first of Mae’s two charges.
Yeisinderin: I guess this is when I talk about bro times with Yei and Arron, right? He didn’t just become Arron’s advisor figure on a whim, the two of them grew up together as friends. So one of his earliest childhood memories? “Watching” the sun rise over the eastern side of the mountain range from a favorite spot of theirs. Back when Arron had sustained a series of concussions from training and became understandably ill in the weeks following, as his health improved, Yei would drag him out to one of the nearby mountainsides for some fresh air where they would sit and chat. Arron enjoyed it for the view and Yei for the subtle warmth of the sun as it climbed in the sky that winter and heated the valley below. Sometimes they would talk about a variety of things, and other times they’d sit in mutual silence, and Yei would have held onto those moments.
I have other favorites, so it’s hard to choose between them, but these three are just the right age for remembering childhood. Some of my other characters are either so old it’s a revelation they even had a childhood or so young they’re technically children xD SO THIS WORKS.