Tovan Rillstep - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Tovan Rillstep

Nickname

(none)

Race (Grade)

Vanara (E)

Class

Ranger

Height

5'10"

Birthday

Greenrise 20, 1275

Age

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Birthsign

The Radiant Treant

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Tovan Rillstep, newly arrived in Haven

Appearance

Tovan carries the loose, weathered build of someone who has spent thirty-one years moving through trees rather than around them. His hair falls past his shoulders in a wild sea-green mane, streaked lighter at the tips from years of sun, and a short beard of the same color follows the line of his jaw. His ears taper to points, his brow is heavy, and a fine coat of tawny hair runs down his forearms and calves, more pronounced than any human's, the clearest sign of the ape-blood in him. He dresses in layered wraps of faded gold and teal cloth, cinched with dark leather straps hung with pouches, cord, and small carved talismans, and wears no shoes, his feet and shins wound instead in worn strips of hide that let him feel the ground beneath him. He carries a tall hooked walking staff, its head wrapped in cord and strung with beads and dangling charms collected over years on the trail, as much a tool as a habit he can't set down.

Unique Characteristics

Tovan has a short, low-slung tail he keeps wrapped and tucked beneath his outer layers in a city, out of long habit more than embarrassment, though it flicks free the moment he's back under open sky. He moves with an unnerving, unconscious quiet, even indoors, even on stone, and has more than once startled a shopkeeper simply by having already been standing in the doorway. His eyes have the particular sharpness of someone whose living once depended on spotting the one broken branch or disturbed leaf that told him which way something had gone.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Calm and steady in genuinely dangerous situations
Honest to a fault about what he does and doesn't know
Quietly generous once he trusts someone
Deeply respectful of wild places and living things
Dependable; if he says he'll be somewhere, he is

Challenging Traits

Guarded and slow to open up with strangers
Restless and short-tempered indoors for too long
Changes the subject fast when asked about home
Reluctant to ask anyone for help, ever
Blunt to the point of tactlessness under stress

I can find you a way through most anything. I couldn't find a way through what came for Windperch. I've had to make my peace with that difference.

You want to know a forest, you stop talking and you start listening. Same rule for a city, near as I can tell. I'm still listening.

No, I don't know anyone here. Didn't know anyone in Gelderai either, once. That one worked out. Give it time.

Likes

High places with a clear view of the horizon
Work that pays in something other than coin
Silence that isn't demanded of him
Sturdy, well-made rope and good boots
Being useful to people who actually need it

Dislikes

Being pitied or fussed over
Crowded rooms with no clear way out
Idle questions about what happened to his village
Anything that moves like it's already dead
Being indoors past sundown by choice

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Background & History

Raised in Windperch

Tovan was born and raised in Windperch, a Vanara village built into the high canopy of the Ellespi Woods, where the trees thin out from Gelderai's ancient heart toward the coast. Windperch was small by any city's standard, a few hundred souls living in rope-bridged platforms and hollowed boughs, but it was old, and its people measured their lives by the seasons of the canopy rather than any calendar a human would recognize. Tovan grew up climbing before he properly walked, and by the time he was old enough to be trusted alone past the village's outer branches, he was already better at reading the forest than most adults twice his age.

Paths Into Gelderai

Windperch sat close enough to Gelderai that trade and traffic between the two was constant, and Tovan found his calling in the gap between them. He made his living two ways that turned out to be the same skill: exploring the wilder, less-charted stretches of the Geldergreen for his own sake, and hiring himself out as a guide to the merchants, scholars, and occasional adventurers who came to Gelderai needing someone who actually knew the forest floor beneath the elves' canopy roads. He was good at it. He built a modest, solid reputation over a decade of work, the kind that gets a name passed along by word of mouth rather than by any formal guild, which suited him fine.

When Windperch Fell

The undead that had been pressing against the Geldergreen's borders for months did not spare the smaller settlements when they finally broke through in force. Windperch, built for grace and speed rather than defense, was overrun in a single night. Tovan was three days out on a guiding contract when it happened, and returned to find the platforms burned or fallen, the rope bridges cut, and no clear answer as to how many of his people had gotten out ahead of it. He does not know, precisely, how many survived. He has not stopped counting anyway.

The Climb to Haven

With nothing left in the Ellespi Woods to guide anyone through and no home to return to, Tovan made for Gelderai itself, and from there up into Duraz-Khul, which had drifted into position above the city in the wake of the same crisis that took Windperch. He crossed paths, briefly and without much conversation, with a small blue kobold making the same climb for what sounded like the same reasons. Neither of them had much to say about it at the time. Tovan stepped out into Goodberry not long after, a stranger to the city, its people, and, for the first time in his adult life, without a single forest he could call his own.

Why Silmarithil

Tovan doesn't intend to stay in Goodberry any longer than it takes to get his bearings. Word among traders and scouts passing through Gelderai always painted Silmarithil as a city built around its forest rather than despite it, one that keeps its own game trails maintained and trains ranger-acrobats out of somewhere called the Lanternwalker Outpost. He's never actually set foot there. But it's the first place he's heard of, since Windperch fell, that sounds like it might understand what he's for, and that alone is more than he expected to find this soon.

What He Hopes to Offer

Tovan has no reputation anywhere in Haven yet, and he knows it. His plan, such as it is, is to start with whatever work a stranger can get, escort contracts, short surveys, anything that lets him actually show what he can do, and let the work speak for itself the way it always has. He reads difficult terrain the way most people read a sentence. He is hoping that's still true somewhere that isn't the Geldergreen, and that it turns out to be worth something to whoever gives him his first contract.

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Goals & Aspirations

To Eventually Be Trusted With the Hard Ground

Tovan hopes, eventually, to be trusted with the harder assignments: routes nobody else is confident enough to take, terrain that's currently marked unknown on whatever maps Silmarithil keeps. He knows that kind of trust gets earned one small, unglamorous contract at a time, starting from nothing and no reputation at all. He's prepared for that. He's just hoping it doesn't take as long as it feels like it will.

To Go Back, Eventually

Tovan intends, someday, to return to what's left of Windperch, not to rebuild it, he's not sure that's possible, but to see it properly, to learn what actually happened to the people he can't account for, and to bury what deserves burying. He is not ready for that yet. He knows he isn't. He's decided that's allowed to be true for a while longer.

To Not Need Anyone, Until He Does

He is arriving in Haven knowing no one, and some part of him would prefer to keep it simple and stay that way. A larger, quieter part of him knows that isn't sustainable, and isn't really what he wants either. He's hoping, though he wouldn't put it in so many words, that wherever he ends up settling turns out to be the kind of place where that changes eventually. He hasn't decided yet who, if anyone, gets to be the exception.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Silmarithil

Role

Wilderness Scout

ATTENTION!

Tovan is newly arrived in Haven from the Ellespi Woods near Gelderai, after his home village of Windperch was overrun and destroyed by the undead crisis pressing against the Geldergreen's borders. He intends to make his way to Silmarithil, believing a city built around the Elderwood is where his tracking and woodcraft might finally matter again, but he has no reputation there yet and everyone he meets is currently a stranger to him. He is polite, competent, and a genuinely capable tracker and woodsman, not someone to be underestimated in the wild, but he carries recent, real grief close to the surface and does not respond well to being pressed about Windperch or what he saw there.