Artemei is an oddity: a guardian whose original charge died, yet who continues to live rather than withering away from shame.

To be fair, the odds were not on his side from the start. He was a very young adult, barely bearded and with feet he hadn't even started to grow into. His charge was a sickly young Plague fae, barely out of the egg and not well-suited for the harsh realities of the plaguelands. Artemei mostly kept the youngling's clan leader at bay by being large and intimidating and bringing in a great deal of food, while making it very-- if unstatedly-- clear that he was doing so solely to help his young charge.

However, when famine struck, Artemei no longer brought in enough food to satisfy the clan leader, who in the brutally matter-of-fact manner so common among the plague leaders, decided the easiest solution to the problem of famine was for the stronger clan members to eat the weaker ones. Artemei did not arrive in time to forestall the slaughter of his charge, but upon realizing what had happened, he went completely and understandably berserk.

In the aftermath of his explosive rage, most of the plague clan was dead, and Artemei himself was half-dead. Following his instincts and exhausted determination not to die in the place he had come to hate, he slowly, raggedly dragged himself through the wastelands of plague, over the scarred plains and steppes of Dragonhome, and into the Viridian Labyrinth where he had been born.

Artemei dragged himself a good mile and a half into the forest before collapsing-- his assumption and hope was that he would simply die there, but, of course, that is not what ended up happening.

He regained consciousness on a bed of moss, and immediately noticed a stern-looking Pearlcatcher with a scroll of healing runes draped over her shoulder doing something extremely painful with the broken bone of his shoulder. His yell was enough to shake the trees, but she looked entirely unimpressed.

"Well, for someone who kept muttering for me to kill him in his sleep, you seem to have a decent amount of will left in you, so I'll just keep setting this, then, won't I?"

He gradually learned that she was the healer, and that she was not going to take his requests for death with anything other than scorn. That, oddly, kept him going much more strongly than if she had plied him with sympathy.

Eventually, she lost her temper with his pleas:

"All right, so you failed, and now you want to die for it. Yes, I'm sure that's extremely helpful. Do you think dying will bring back your charge? Do you think it will do anything remotely constructive? Or have you just decided that your self-pity is more important than actually accomplishing anything else?"

He took that about as well as a slap in the face and wouldn't speak to her for three days. However, it did make him wonder....

He's still wondering, even now that his physical wounds have mostly healed. However, he's wondering, rather than seeking death. He has found himself oddly drawn to the nesting grounds, and has been known to stand vigil there-- carefully guarding something else instead of succumbing to a death from shame.