Fenric "Kind-Hand" Vale

*Veilwood woodsman, Spellbreaker

Roots in the Gloom

Fenric was born in 1330 CE among the maple-scented logging camps of Snagroot Hamlet, southern Veilwood. His mother, Maera Vale, ran a cooper's shed. His father, Branik Vale, felled darkwood trunk for Venatori bowyers. Veilwood was already a place of tall trees and tall tales, but in Fenric's childhood the land had not yet soured. Families kept lamps burning for fae goodwill, and night travel was merely unwise, not lethal.

That peace cracked in 1332, the first year locals whispered of the curse. Raven spiraled backward on the wind, a farmer's newborn bleated like a goat. Children stopped climbing the watch-pines after dusk, and Branik came home with claw marks not from a wolf. By Fenric's twelfth summer in the Veilwood, Maera had vanished, last seen answering a mournful flute in the fog, and Branik bled out beneath a night-walker's talons two winters later.

The orphaned boy lived off of militia stipends, joining the Junior Wood-Ward patrols that ringed each hamlet. He learned to string trip snares, to read tree-bark scars, and, most useful later, to feel the buzzing prickle in the air a heartbeat before strange magic manifested.

Rise of the Curse

Through his twenties, Fenric ranged with Hunt-Mistress Sova Greyleaf, a Venatori captain who believed the forest could still be saved. Their sorties culled twisted elk and burned canker-shrubs, yet every season the nightwalkers bred faster. In 1348 Fenric watched a schoolhouse vanish in a single moonless hour, the building's foundations were left behind, but the desks, children, and teacher were simply gone. He penned the first entry of what would become a weather-beaten field journal, recording curse anomalies and crude sketches of weave-scars in the air.

By his early forties the forest felt predatory, paths shifted, acorns sprouted teeth. Rumors reached even Snagroot: refugees were leaving Veilwood for rival provinces, and the coastal nation of Varia ferried Orathos exiles across mist choked seas. Fenric, hardened but still mortal, sold his father's darkwood saw and purchased a guaranteed berth on the Last Light, a galley scheduled to sail from Port Duskwater in midsummer 1369.

Kind-Hand at the Duskwater Pier

When the Light Light, the final refugee galley out of Port Duskwater, was moments from casting off in 1369, the wharf had become a desperate knot of shouting families and waving tickets. Dockhands were already hauling the gangplank when a frail, coughing boy in ragged wool was turned away: no berth, no hope.

That was when Fenric Vale, a solitary woodsman in a travel-stained cloak, stepped forward. Without fuss he raised his own paid chit, pressed it into the child's hand, and said only, "Breathe easy on the far shore, little one."

Gasps turned to cheers. The crew, seeing the exchange, whisked the boy aboard just before the ropes were loosed. The ship slid into the mist, yet the woodsman stayed behind on the timbers, eyes wet and shoulders squared as he watched the List Light sail into the distance.

Someone near the rope line murmured, "There's a kind hand if ever I saw one," a Veilish compliment for one who shares in crisis, and the nickname stuck. By the time the Last Light made landfall in Varia, local tavern talk already praised Fenric "Kind-Hand" Vale, the Veilwood hunter who gave up his own escape so a sick child could live.

Four Decades in the Deep Green

After the Last Light pulled away, Fenric did not simply vanish into a hut and wait forty years for rescue. The first seven winters were spent "clearing the line". Fenric chose the ruined Pilgrim's Trail as his lifeline and walked it end-to-end with little more than an axe and a sling. He hacked back creeper thorns that had swallowed the old cobbles, righted toppled way stones, and buried the dead he found in over-turned wagons. Most corpses were ordinary refugees, but a few showed burns where wild magic had touched them. During those seasons he met Jaska Cinder-Eye a tiefling tanner whose left iris was clouded white from a crematory flash. Jaska joined him for a stretch, reducing plague pits to ash and teaching Fenric the precise heat needed to burn bone without cracking it like glass. From then on Jaska traveled the forest with a handcart furnace and would still pay silver for any bones etched with curse-runes.

Once the road was passable, Fenric turned to building refuge. For the next several years, he raised nine hidden lean-tos, later called Kind-Posts, spaced a day's march apart. Each was stocked with salt-pork tins, flint, and a chalk code carved on the doorpost: an open palm meant safe, a clenched fist meant leave quickly. Twice every year he walked the entire 120 mile loop to restock supplies. It was on those journeys he met Orlin Ashfoot a halfling scavenger with a talent for finding lost caches. Orlin adopted Post Four as a personal project, leaving bundles of herbs and the latest bush-telegraph gossip, then vanishing before Fenric returned, something like a forest pen-pal nobody ever met in daylight.

A couple of years later, Magister Corund Hale a historian from Stellmoor College, blundered into Post Two with half-frozen fingers and a head full of questions about weave anomalies. Fenric escorted the scholar for most of four years, guarding him against beasts while Hale drove copper stakes into warping ley-lines. The results fill fifteen pages of Fenric's battered notebook. Hale eventually limped back to Varia, branded a harmless eccentric by his peers, but he still owes Fenric a favor.

In the spring of 1390, the woods offered something strange: at Lake Tearshade, Fenric recovered six silver acorns stolen from a spriggan named Mellif of the Seven Words. Returning the acorns earned him a lopsided bargain: Mellif promised three riddled warnings whenever the forest shifted too far toward calamity. Two warning remain, owed but undelivered.

The harshest test came in the winter that followed. A brood of colossal spiders occupied Greywick Chapel and began dragging livestock, and sometimes travellers, into web-choked vaults. Fenric rallied a rag-tag team of Venatori Stragglers, led by his old mentor Sova Greyleaf, and laid siege for five nights. Two hunters died, but the brood-mother fell at dawn on the sixth day. From the corpses of her victims Fenric pried an ivory mask that still hums on nights when he moon tips red. The story of that fight drifted through the refugee camps and inflated into a half-myth of a "ghost warden" who bled darkness from the trees. Fenric never corrected it, but neither did he foster it.

The final years before contact with Varia were quieter. Fenric spent two winters mapping weave scars in charcoal rubbings that spark faintly when held to candlelight. He also tutored a pair of teenage siblings, Adler and Miren Shaw in snares and silent signals, then sent them east toward Rivalon where grain still grew. Alder serves now as a junior scout, wearing an open palm badge carved from hickory. Miren's joined a group of merchants, her name appearing intermittently in market ledgers along the coast.

Recruitment by the Mage Society

In early 1395, a Varia backed reconnaissance team landed to scout reclamation routes. Among them was Adept Lysandor Quill of the Mage & Arcanist Guild Esoteric’s Society. During their reconnaissance of the area, Quill stumbled onto a Kind-Post where Fenric was patching the roof. They conversed for some time, and the Veilwood curse came up, and Fenric showed Quill his weather beaten journal: forty years of dates, curse symptoms, and hand-drawn maps of “warped shadows” along old ley traces. No academic in Varia had field notes that thorough.

Impressed, Quill offered a winter of formal training in a number of disciplines that they offered if Fenric would return with the forthcoming reclamation force. Once in Varia, he chose to train as a spellbreaker.