Averick

A goateed local trapper who frequents the Keep Grow Inn at the war crossroads beyond the Palisade — a quiet woodsman of the area who hunts game ("tooth-and-lay, dig-'em-ups, snares") and once kept a bear trap until "a giant stepped on it." The barkeep Radek keeps his water topped up and addresses him by name (which Silithane briefly mishears as "Aethelric"). The party's best source of local intelligence on the Outskirts.

(Our older notes leave the trapper unnamed; his name is Averick.)

Session 22

• Relays the lead on the Grabbler: a many-handed beast in the nearby Gray Veil Cave (once a human dwelling before Laewendas took the crown), which has killed several of the queen's drunk men and carries a 100-gold bounty. He marks the cave on the party's map, and offers to build a giant-sized trap if needed.
• Confirms Guilford's pattern of hanging women who spurn him (or whom he imagines have), and warns Silithane off: "you're not a woman with wheat-colored hair."
• Reveals Ponterford's curse — abducted children return waterlogged and dead, "drug down beneath the water," on the first of the month, and only those with a son or daughter are at risk. Advises going on the first of the month "and you shall see and understand — but I wouldn't recommend it." Then leaves for "a bath and sleep."

Session 23

• Out back of the inn (painting alongside the puppet-girl Wicker), he confronts Silithane as a reluctant protector of the tavern: "Guilford's bad, but there's worse." A man of the woods, he settled here because Guilford "ain't so bad," and fears the replacement Laewendas sends will be crueler. He asks Silithane to bring Guilford back. (Silithane does not.)