Skreecha

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Skreecha is a slender blue kobold with the compact, quick frame typical of her kind, though she carries herself with a quiet self-assurance that makes her seem larger than she is. Her scales are a deep, vivid blue with a glassy sheen that catches the light cleanly. Her most striking feature is her hair, a thick, blood-red ponytail that falls nearly to her tail-tip and sways behind her when she moves. Her amber eyes are sharp and always slightly watchful, a habit she has never fully shed. She tends to wear simple practical clothing now, though her old instinct for dark colors and uncluttered silhouettes has never quite left her.

Skreecha moves almost without sound as a matter of pure habit, which she is entirely unaware of. Her ponytail is never tied with the same fastening twice; she collects small cords, strips of leather, and scraps of ribbon and rotates through them. There is a thin scar running along her left forearm from an old knife exchange she rarely discusses. When deep in thought, she braids and unbraids the end of her ponytail without realizing she is doing it.

Skreecha grew up in a small kobold community that she remembers mostly as warmth and noise, the kind of place that felt too ordinary to lose. She was a teenager when bandits tore through it without much reason and less hesitation. She did not stay to see the end of it. She ran, which was the smartest and most painful thing she ever did, and she kept running for years after. She was good at surviving on the road. She learned to pick locks, read people quickly, find coin where there was none, and sleep light enough to hear trouble breathing. She was never cruel in how she worked, but she was careful, and careful kept her alive when nothing else would have.

She was fleeing a particularly persistent group of bandits when she stumbled across Durkum in the wilderness near Bannon. She almost ran past him. He was enormous, scarred, and alone in a way she recognized, and something about that made her stop. Most people who saw his size reached for a weapon or a reason to move on. She reached for a conversation instead. He was nothing like what she expected, and everything she had not let herself want. She stayed one night and did not leave for the rest of her life.

Together they claimed an abandoned village and made it into something. Skreecha had never really built anything before. She had always been better at leaving things than staying. But she found, to her own surprise, that she was good at this too. She turned the ruins into a home with her hands and stubbornness while Durkum learned from her how to be gentle in quiet moments. When Vesha was born, Skreecha set her lockpicks on a high shelf and did not take them back down. She was done with the life that had kept her safe. She wanted something worth protecting instead.

The creatures came in the dark. She heard them before she saw them, that wrongness of sound that her road-trained instincts knew immediately. She had Vesha in her arms when they reached her. She fought. She was good at it even after years of rust, and she used every corner and shadow of the home she knew. But there were too many, and they did not tire, and the last thing she remembers is Durkum's voice somewhere behind the noise, calling out, and then nothing.

On Frostnight 2, 1304, Skreecha opened her eyes in cold dirt she did not recognize, with Vesha in her arms and no explanation for either. She was on her feet fast, instinct overriding the confusion, scanning the crowd of disoriented strangers rising all around her. She did not know the place. She did not know how she had gotten there. The last thing she remembered was her home, the dark, and then a door closing. She held Vesha close and started calling out the only name that mattered. When Durkum came running and dropped to his knees in front of them, shaking, she understood that something enormous had happened that she had entirely missed. She does not yet know what. She is beginning to suspect it was not small.

Everything else is secondary. Skreecha does not know what happened, where they are, or why she woke up in a graveyard with sixteen months of her life simply gone, but she knows that Vesha is here and alive and that is the fixed point everything else revolves around. She will not let herself fall apart until she is certain her daughter is safe, fed, and settled. Her protection of Vesha is not fearful or smothering; it is the calm, total vigilance of someone who has already lost everything once and does not intend to lose it again.

Skreecha is quietly aware that there is a gap where her memory should be. She does not yet know she died. She does not know what the Faceless are, what became of her home, or how over a year passed without her. She intends to find out, patiently and methodically, the way she always approached things she needed to understand. She has not pushed Durkum yet. She can see in his face that the answer is not easy, and she has always known when to wait for a better moment.

She and Durkum built a home once from nothing. She does not know yet what Goodberry is or whether it can become that kind of place, but she is already watching it with the measuring eye she used to use on abandoned buildings: looking for what holds and what does not, for where a family might anchor itself. She wants to give Vesha ground to grow on and Durkum something to come back to. She has built from rubble before. She is not afraid to do it again.