Victus the Mute

A Ponterford local with a reputation for knowing about rituals and strange goings-on — the party's "word guy" for the lore of the shrine up north — who is also the town's farm-tool blacksmith and a quiet hunter. Long known as "the Mute" and believed unable to reply, he has since been cured of his muteness but never dropped the title (when the party realise he can talk: "That's funny — no one told me."). He has apparently visited the northern shrine himself, and is the source of the party's warning about the Candleman who haunts it.

(Heard as "Victus," with the GM uncertain of the name — "Victus the Mute, whatever his name is." Spelling and identity unconfirmed.)

Session 37 (debut)

• The junk stone. First met at the roadside altar of useless garbage at the edge of Ponterford — broom-sticks, bent needles, a goat-shoe, a leaky patched bucket — where the townsfolk lay their junk "because it's just what people do." Introduces himself: "I'm Victus. Victus the Mute. Well, I was mute, but then they cured me — I kept the name."
• Lash donates the gnome skull taken from the necromancers' boat (where Kain vanished); Fenric adds Thalia's worthless "I owe you one favour" note signed in a dead man's name. (This junk stone is almost certainly the "shrine of useless items" Victus later takes Jex to in Session 44.)

Session 40

• Consulted by the party before the cave raid about strange temples nearby; confirmed the shrine to the north with its tomb and a river running through it, and that the river had changed its path.
• Advised the party to toss "junk" at the shrine to appease it, and — with the old town cleric gone — to carry silver against the cave's ghosts and skeletons.
• Named the dormant figure at the shrine the Candleman, the warning the party later confirms in the flesh (see The Snatcher's Cave).
• At his forge — confirming he is Ponterford's blacksmith — Lash (the party's own smith) shows him her orichalcum hammer; he recognises the "ancient underwatery metal" at once and stubbornly wants it to be "from the orcs" (it isn't). A by-the-recipe smith of farming tools who never improvises, he gifts her — free — a rake/trowel blueprint that adapts perfectly into the claw weapon Fenric means to forge from the five worm teeth of Session 39.
• Keeps his living "masterpiece" in his safe — a semi-living artefact that wriggles when near flesh that isn't his own "for too long," handled with tongs.
• Lets slip a buried local tragedy: years ago a child died playing in the south-side worm skeleton (scratched, turned to a pustule, popped) — confirming Ponterford's drake-wyrm carries the same venom as the tower beast.

Session 44

• A day's hunting. Spends 1–2 downtime days taking Jex hunting in the woods (duck calls, leaf camouflage, the "shrine of useless items" where they leave their trash) — a quiet companion who signs more than he speaks. His longbow proves to be a beast-only aim-lock weapon (unerring against beasts, an ordinary bow otherwise); Jax declines to buy it, content to let the old hunter keep hunting.