@gracebroken asked for this....
“I don’t know whether to ask more about the eagles and his clan in general because they sound fascinating or cry over the fact that he lost them. I have so many additional questions, too dsfgjh Like — How did he survive the loss of his clan? Are there any other survivors? What’s his outlook after Ostagar? Like just how does that impact him and what direction is life taking?
I’d love to hear more!”
ok so! his clan was called the Talat clan; they were matriarchal and matrilineal. Temir’s grandmother was the clan matriarch when he was a child; his mother, as eldest daughter, had inherited by the time he came to adulthood. he had no sisters -- the clan would have passed to his mother’s sister’s daughter instead of to him. women, as the bringers of life into the world, were the holders of all clan property (other than personal property; I’m talking about things like the buildings and the livestock, the Big Stuff, all owned by the women.) they were also the keepers of clan lore, and generally the shamans and healers as well.
men were mostly the hunters and herders; unusually, the clan’s shaman at this point happened to be a man. clan Talat, like some other Wilder clans, hunted using conventional weapons but also a kind of falconry using basically this kind of eagle; it was this path that Temir had chosen for himself.
when the darkspawn horde rolled through the part of the Wilds where clan Talat made its home, Temir was out by himself in another part of the Korcari with a juvenile eagle he was training. he returned to find the darkspawn gone and his clan decimated. his mother was still alive, but suffering from the taint already; she requested that he kill her for mercy. he then went through the rest of the area and gave the mercy-strike to anyone else still alive he found; of those, all of them were Blight-tainted already.
so he released the juvenile eagle and he took his flatblade (one of the famous Chasind grey iron flatblades, from which he takes his sobriquet among the ‘drylanders,’ Temir Greyblade) and headed after the darkspawn, winding up joining with Cailan’s armies at Ostagar. he figured he’d be likely to die in the assault too, and when he didn’t, he wasn’t sure what to do with himself at first. there might have been other survivors of his clan; maybe some of them were able to flee and hide in the Wild and survive. but after what he’d had to do, and after having not been there when it happened in the first place, he felt as though he’d already killed the heart of his clan and would never again be part of it, even if he was able to find survivors and rebuild.
instead, he understood that the drylanders would look at a man of his size and only see a warrior, so he started hiring himself out as a mercenary and bodyguard to various nobles, etc. never the chattiest to begin with, he was at first taciturn from a lack of facility with the common tongue, and then later just by habit and by nature, his losses making him reluctant to let himself close to anyone again.
in the verse shared with @inkapacitated, he eventually pairs up with another mercenary, a nevarran mage named Iskender, and things between them are.... well, uh....