NPC Glossary

A running who's-who of the dramatis personae, as the chronicle introduces them. Maintained through the stylistic rewrite — add each named NPC (with first appearance) as sessions are rewritten.

The Grove-Warden — the articulate tree that spoke for a blighted grove on the mountain road; its kin move still, but are worn thin, caught between the living and the dead. (S1)
Ugg & Grug — two giant brothers, once muscle for a rival crew; four eyes between them. Heyou could cheat Ugg blind at cards, and never once fooled Grug. (S1)
Kelbar — the giant chef of Ulmira's Step, who feeds the town from a great firepit. (S2)
Borek — a dwarf Syndicate fixer at Ulmira's Step; deals in lost limbs and Askavir eggs. (S2)
Gala — a dwarf fence; named the goblins in the deep. (S2)
Yol — an old giantess who keeps a spark of Splendor and has learned not to use it; explained the town's stigma against it. (S2)
Tamros — a famed ribbit guide, lost in the titan's ruins. (S2)
Mellon — a delver, survivor of the tunnels, bound to return to them. (S2)
Sarru — dwarven keeper of the Sacred Pyre at Ulmira's Step; can point the way to Ygva. (S2)
Oshel — the older witch, Ygva's teacher. (S2)
Ygva — the present witch of the mountain; ~7.5 feet, Oshel's apprentice. Ambushed the party at her peak rather than parley, tore out Sylvie's heart, and took every Blessed Branch. Holds that the world is a spent egg and the departed gods are monsters she means to force back and bind. (S2, S6)
The Ghostly Specter — an eyeless, half-there sentinel on the last bridge to Ygva's Peak; it stepped aside without malice when Sylvie asked it, courteously, for passage. (S6)
Kelun — an old talking construct-statue from before the gods left, long inseparable from Ygva; a mouthpiece for Caranthalis and others, who can take a mortal shape (Mellon's, near towns) as a mercy to living eyes. (S2, S5)
Savel — a giant sorcerer of Ulmira's Step, arcane gauntlets; had delved the titan's tunnels with Mellon before. May carry ties of his own to Ygva. (S3)
Yuki — Mellon's snow leopard, who would not leave the stone he passed into, and stays now beside his ghost. (S3)
The Guardian — a tethered demon in the shape of a many-eyed purple cat, keeper of Caranthalis's tree, ringed by the corpses of all who reached for it. Killed with goblin powder; bled gray and cold. (S4–S5)
The Ancient Spirit — a spirit that wandered the golem-shells near the tree for thirty years and warned the party off the Guardian. Not the mountain's own spirit, it insisted. (S4)
The departed gods — named at last by Kelun: Tlellic (the long night, predation), Kreth (false visions, the moon), Brathis (feral survival, the loss of self), Mollthain (the rampart), Caranthalis (the tree of light and its blessed branches), Ossa (wanderer atop the peaks), and God-King Otheidas (revenants, the arrested cycle of life and undeath). The door to them seems shut from this side. (S5)
Tamber — a human Celsian itinerant, tutor to the children of Verrow's Span; keeps books and a great map, and points toward the Celsian Athenaeum for what she cannot name. (S7)
Akiri & Janzi — simiah of Verrow's Span who greet Draz as cousin. (S7)
Draz's great-aunt (a Village Elder of Verrow's Span) — recognized his candle-flame birthmark; told him his mother is dead and that he was given up to the Wilds while his father and twins went west. Later named Lila. (S8)
A grim pyromancer — a skeleton crowned in a burning skull, at Ygva's side; hurled fire and hovered over the void, destroyed by Jamal's strike (robes fell empty, skull went out). A description, not a named entity. (S8)
The eye-patch katari — a broad-shouldered feline katari, a freelance operator once tied to the Dimmers, among the Dolm's Break refugees; Heyou marked him as suspicious. (S8)
The Living Fortress — a walking stone elemental with the ruins of buildings on its shoulders, bound by Sylvie's Stoneweaver pendant and driven by Heyou from hiding; goes inert when the link severs. (Later named "Bob.") (S9)
Astral assassins — swordsmen flickering between there and not-there; struck only when solid. One nearly killed Heyou before his heart-smite unmade it (S9); more recur at Grithmaar Deep (S15). A description, not a named entity. (S9)
Valghast — a great winged lion of the World Below, woken by Ygva ("its mistress, come from the sky"); it ferries the party up and down the hole but is not theirs to keep. (S10)
The titans — vast beings labouring in the World Below, clearing the dead city and raising Ygva's ring of eight altars and her pyre; woken, like Valghast, by the witch. (S10)
Lila — Draz's great-aunt at Verrow's Span (the elder who named his blood in S8); Draz grows close to her. (S8, S11)
Bufa — Lila's far-ranging grandchild, who knows the ruins and holdout places and may guide the party. (S11)
You Bastard — a great moose-like beast (a kalisk), fungus-terraced and arrow-wounded, that Jamal collars with the Guardian's collar as a mount. (Named later.) (S11)
Borek — the flashy Syndicate/Dimmers fixer of Ulmira's Step (first met S2); a hoarder who holds pieces of Heyou and claims an essence of him. Burgled and routed by the party; now their enemy. (S2, S11–S12)
Sylvie's Umbral Raven — a smoke-born corvid larger than a crow, coalesced from the Umbra, that heeds her thoughts; her emerging familiar. It speaks in her mind (S13, a young man's voice) and is destroyed by Mollthain's Warden while scouting (S14). (S12–S14)
Mollthain's Warden — the colossal ancient monster beneath Grithmaar Deep, Mollthain's pet/avatar; annihilated Sylvie's scouting raven at a glance. The party seeks its power for Ygva's pyre. (S14)
Pinchie — a great crab of the Stoneheart Peaks crater lake that Jamal fought, declawed, and collared with the Guardian's collar as his new mount, in drowned You Bastard's place. (S17) — Bonded to Jamal now (a sheet bond): not by clear memory but by an accumulation of good will — it takes his commands readily and once stepped in to save him. Rideable over broken ground; can Charge as an attack. (S27)
Kaelyn (male) — Sylvie's former fellow stone-weaver, met again on the torn peak; holds the leash of a vast eldritch creature (which blasts him, not Sylvie, when it turns) and coaxed the Runt God into coexistence above. The Midsummer rite between them turned violent. (S18)
Rhys — another former stone-weaver, who followed Kaelyn blindly and is now undead; would wrangle the Runt God to re-ascend. (S18)
Dagga Brunnvar — antiquarian dwarf of the Celsian Compound; takes artifact tribute of teleporters; bonds with Jamal over drinks and moves to protect him. (S19)
Dean Therion Calanthe — the elf dean of the Celsian Athenaeum; fights through illusory duplicates; held Ygva captive; stabbed down by Heyou as the Runt God erupted. (S19)
Inola Wending, Keeper of Splendor — a simiah woman burning white-hot with Splendor; dines with Sylvie, names the two candidates for the Elect, and strikes the true dean with her glowing blade. (S19)
Ash-begets-Tide — a fungal priest of Ossa-in-absence at the Compound; wields entropic magic and grows two sapling treants from Ygva's corrupted remains. Crushed dead by the toppling Runt God. (S19–S20)
Casper tol-Otheidas — a human noble, great-grandson of God-King Otheidas, among the dean's party; summoned junior seraphs to kill the Runt God. Killed by the party (unrecoverable); his circlet gives Draz Splendor-sight. (S19–S20)
Inola Wending, Keeper of Splendor — after the dean's fall she blesses Draz ("my son") and hands him the Sacred Pyre scepter; would cage the Runt God as a Splendor source. Leads the party into the vaults, then VANISHES in the library chaos (S23) — a loose thread. (S19–S23)
Vanco — Draz's hard father, a Syndicate agent frozen in the Athenaeum vaults; returns Heyou's chest-core. Sent (with Zevin) to learn how Heyou was built. (S22–S23)
Zevin — Draz's sibling and one of a pair of twins (Draz himself is the youngest, not a twin); a Syndicate agent thawed beside Vanco ("seventh best assassin in the reaches"). NOT "Seven" — the name is Zevin. (S22–S23)
Speaker — a faceless Umbra-animated stone construct (no glow; the same kind as Kelun) that Sylvie woke below the Forbidden Library — Splendor would not take, a piece of her own Umbra did; it named ITSELF Speaker. Her servant. (S23) — At the shore wood, Moonshadow set two Eyes of Kreth into its face; it then rose and, for the first time, spoke in a full, sonorous voice — a warning about trusting what is seen — before going inert again. A god's perception now lodged in a construct. (S25) — In Talis it proved a conduit: it spoke Kreth's memory over Sylvie in the night (the sincere promise to return), and by the ember-garden it channelled Brathis — raising the god's three-stone sign, activating the sigil, then declaring "it is time" and yanking Heyou's mind into itself while emptying Retta. Afterward it reverted to its mute, single-word self. Both gods answer through it only as residue — true-but-not-present recordings of what they were before they left, not the living gods. (S26)
The Eye — a vast eye gazing down through the gap between worlds, glimpsed by Draz through the Astronomer's Spire's observatory helmet; the Spire was built to point at it. God, titan, or thing of the World Above — unknown. (S24)
Moonshadow — a soft, ever-shifting, child-sized fae of the shore wood and regent of its glade; wears two Eyes of Kreth and rouses the lesser fae. Speaks for the wood; says Kreth "went away to fetch something." (S25)
the Shadow Cast — the great looming shadow that stands over Moonshadow like its own cast silhouette, with its own pair of Eyes of Kreth; it swallowed Heyou whole. Through its eyes the wood is sunlit and teeming and the intruders are the monsters — and the shadow itself a gentle beast. (S25) — Now Heyou's body. Given the choice of vessels through the woken Talis sigil, he poured himself into this shadow (over the mirror-fae): an amorphous form ~18–20 ft tall, a hand passing half through it, bearing the Eyes of Kreth. His old construct-body he dismantled and left. (S26)
the Sweet One — a small, sweet fae of the shore wood that offered Draz the fruit that felled him, then came at Sylvie with a kitchen knife when the contest turned. (S25)
Retta — an old human hermit of Talis, name long forgotten (the party gave her this one). Lost in the wood ~100 years ago and rescued by the fae, she built a hut and tended a hidden ember-garden — a buried-fire sigil — as her own "service" in place of a Sacred Pyre. Un-eyed but bent by long years, her senses her own; Jamal read her as honest. She knew the body-jump secret ("which body would you like to occupy?") and named it to Heyou. When Speaker channelled Brathis her mind was emptied; she went feral and was killed by Draz (a mounted crit) in the melee. Dead. (S26)