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?))
Wilhelm lowers himself onto the offered cushion, though his posture remains rigid, one hand resting near the hilt of his weather-worn sword. He does not remove his cloak, the damp fabric clinging to his broad shoulders as candlelight flickers across the scarred steel of his armor. “I am just passing through,” Wilhelm says bluntly, his voice rough like gravel dragged across stone, “and I sit because you commanded it, not because I trust you.” His pale eyes sweep the tent, measuring shadows and exits before finally settling back on the old hag. “My name is Wilhelm, and I come from a place you would not know,” he continues, jaw tightening as memories surface. Wilhelm shifts his weight, recalling frozen battlefields where the wind screamed louder than dying men and where he buried his brothers in soil too hard to yield without broken blades. He had grown up in the far north, raised by a stern father who taught him steel before scripture and by a mother who prayed he would never need either. Gold had driven him south—gold to survive, gold to settle debts left behind by war, and gold to keep moving so the ghosts could not catch him. Wilhelm exhales slowly, the smell of rot and wet moss filling his lungs as he slumps back slightly, exhaustion finally bleeding through his hardened exterior. “I’ve been traveling to earn coin enough to see another winter,” he says flatly. His fingers curl briefly, then relax, as he fixes the hag with an unblinking stare. “So speak quickly and plainly,” Wilhelm adds, “because I have no love for backwater towns or those who claim to be expecting me.”
