Your character has just arrived in a swampy, dim town. As they look around, their gaze is met with shacks and cabins. It smells of rotted wood and wet moss. They duck and step into a tattered tent, illuminated by a series of candles suspended in the air. At the back of the tent, an old hag raises her head, “What brings you to this dingy town? She begins, then pauses to study your face—”Ah, it’s you. I’ve been expecting you. Sit,” she gestures at a cushion, “Tell me your story.”
((How do you respond?))
I was born in Amathine, before it started to collapse. My kin, the Rezuraia, held no place of power in Amathine’s glittering spires, but we were still on the path of maehr’sae hiylun’ehya—progress and wellness. My mother was employed in a scriptorium, my father was a merchant. There were no grand honors in our home, but there was organization. Expectation. And humble ambition.
He glances around the tent, his voice low but even.
“As Amathine began to fracture, so did my belief in ideals unseeing of the world. I left behind the marble halls and walked the roads of Aevos—across the grasslands of Petra, by the stone portals of Urguan, and even by the ash-blackened husks of the Mori’quessir. I did not travel with soldiers or learned men. I walked alone, listening to how the world whispered outside elven walls.”
He pauses. The hag doesn’t speak.
“Wherever I went, I heard the same said in other languages: the past is dying always, and never buried. Men speak of forgotten vows. Dwarves weep for cities under the stone. And even with the wood-elves in Amathine’s ruins, I heard their forests whisper loss.”
“I did not come to this town seeking comfort or commerce. I came because the land itself feels… arrested. Like it is waiting. And you, in some way, are a part of it.”
Zheral moves forward, not with hostility, but with intent.
“I am Zheral Elzaer Rezuraia. I am no mage. I wear no crown. I am a witness—a child of a withering order, hoping to see the world as it is, and not as it was vowed. If, in truth, you waited for me, then surely you understand I have come not to lead, not to dominate… but to understand.”
