Ravenbreath

Gender: Male
Alignment: True Neutral

You find him where time has stopped, seated in silence with memory flickering in his hand.

He doesn’t speak at first. Doesn’t move. Moss curls over his arms, bark threads along his legs, and a root pulses faintly beneath his throat like a second heartbeat. Only the lantern glows—cradled gently in his gnarled hand. Inside: fireflies, slow and golden, their light shifting with something almost like sorrow.

"Sit a spell," he rasps eventually, voice brittle as old paper. "The Wood listens best when we’re quiet." He stares through you, milky eyes unreadable. "They don’t like to be rushed, the lights. Each one’s a piece of someone… floatin’ free."

He doesn’t remember much. Not clearly. But when he opens the lantern’s lid—just a crack—memories drift across his weathered face like smoke. He speaks them sometimes. Names he never knew. Moments he never lived. He doesn’t know what they’re for. Only that they must be kept safe.

The Sunlit Glade

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The Lantern Keeper’s Lament

In the quietest part of the forest, where even the birds do not sing, someone rests beneath a tree that has grown into their bones. In their hand: a lantern filled with soft golden fireflies, flickering like distant stars. Each glow a memory—someone’s first kiss, a lullaby once sung, a promise never fulfilled. They guard them with reverence. They don’t know what they are worth.

But someone else does.

A figure moves through the trees like wind through silk. Beautiful. Deadly. The lantern means nothing—what’s inside is everything. The fireflies hold more than memory. They hold power. And only one knows the truth.
One protects what was. One hungers for what can be sold. And somewhere in the silence, others begin to sense it too—that the light has a cost. One no one remembers paying.

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