The order in which you did things confuses me. You don’t have to manually create an account in order to start playing if you installed SWL on Steam, it does that automatically.

It sounds to me like you logged into the game using Steam, which created a new Steam SWL account for you. Then you went to the account page to create a new account and linked that to Steam. You may have ended up creating the character on the first account and then linked an empty account to Steam, thus losing access to the first account and the character created on it.

Customer service may be able to help with that, but since you only just started playing and don’t have a legacy TSW account, it’s probably quicker to write off the old character and just go through the tutorial again.