Basic Information
Bloodline Ability
This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.
Physical Description
Jeriko is small even by kobold standards, standing just over three feet with a build made for slipping through underbrush rather than standing his ground. His scales are a deep, near-black obsidian that catches green and gold at the edges of certain kinds of light, running from a low ridge of soft spines along his skull down the length of a tail that never quite stops moving. His eyes are enormous, round, and amber-gold, set in a face that reads every emotion he has almost before he's finished having it. He wears a fringed wrap of woven grass and dyed cord that Anise put together for him years ago, cinched at the waist with a patterned band, and a single jade earring in one notched ear that he has never once considered taking out.
At his throat, on a plain cord, Jeriko wears a small green soulstone. It stayed smooth and warm for every year of their marriage and every year of friendship before it, the way a kobold's gifted soulstone stays warm for as long as the kobold who enchanted it is still alive. Three weeks ago it went cold. He still wears it. He checks it, without meaning to, dozens of times a day, the way someone probes a bruise to see whether it still hurts. It does. His hands and feet carry the specific scarring of someone who spent a decade climbing out of places faster than he climbed into them, and he startles hard at loud, sudden movement in a way that has nothing to do with cowardice and everything to do with one particular night, three weeks past, that he has not stopped replaying.
Personality & Temperament
- Loved Anise with total, uncomplicated devotion
- Endlessly resourceful when he has nothing else
- Warms instantly to anyone who's kind to him
- Notices danger before almost anyone nearby
- Keeps moving, one day at a time, on purpose
- Acts on excitement before he thinks it through
- Can't yet sit alone in his own second room
- Quietly certain the gate was his fault alone
- Trusts kindness so fast it's easy to exploit
- Checks a cold stone at his throat without meaning to
Anise used to say I get excited like a puppy who forgot it has claws. She was right. I just never thought it would cost her the way it did.
The house has two rooms. I only use one. I haven't figured out what the other one is for yet.
She wouldn't want me sitting in the dark thinking about the dark. So most days, I just go outside and keep moving. That's the whole plan.
- Sitting outside long after dark, just to not be inside
- Anyone who says her name instead of stepping around it
- Small, unasked-for kindness from strangers in Rokoura
- The weight of her soulstone, even cold, at his throat
- Being handed something small and told to watch it
- The second room, still exactly as it was left
- Being thanked for "catching" the man at the gate
- Sudden shouting, for reasons he'd rather not explain
- Pity that arrives before anyone says her name
- Long stretches alone with nothing to keep watch on
Background & History
He kept it wrong. When the bald man finally appeared, Jeriko's nerve broke a few seconds too early, he signaled the guards before they were in position, and those few seconds were enough. The stranger saw them coming and turned the encounter into a fight before it had properly started. Anise was dead before Jeriko understood what was happening. He remembers very little of what came after in any order that makes sense: a dagger, the ground, Anise's name coming out of his own mouth over and over, and then very little at all.