Silas Rain

Silas was born in Maukandara, the matriarchal Maurin nation of the eastern Copper Bay coast, in a year when the planet's shadow swallowed the ring light and both moons hid their faces on the same night, twice over. Those born under such a sky are said to carry a gift, and Silas was no exception. He came into the world with the Sight, though neither he nor his parents understood what that meant until it was too late to matter.

He was young, no older than seven, when he began to see things before they happened. Small things at first, then not so small. He tried to warn his parents of what he saw coming. They did not listen, or could not act in time, and Silas watched the vision he had tried so hard to prevent come to pass exactly as he had seen it.

Orphaned, he went to live with his grandfather, the last of his family who remained. It was his grandfather who recognized what the boy carried and did not flinch from it. Under his grandfather's care, Silas learned the druidic ways of the Maurin, the old rites, the reading of season and soil, and above all, the tending of his family's grove of Xylos, the ancient, half-sleeping tree-elders who remember the world since shortly after the Visra fell.

Something in that grove, or in Silas himself, drew the attention of things older than either. He grew into his gift rather than away from it, and the visions never fully stopped, only grew stranger and harder to parse. In time he found that solitude quieted the noise in his mind, and so he took himself away from the towns and hunting grounds of his birth nation, west across the bay to The Shrouded Pines, a vast old growth wilderness reputed to be haunted, where he could listen to the forest without the world talking over it.

He is broadly sympathetic to The True Green, the loose and unofficial alliance of Grove Elves, Maurin, druids, and rangers who take it as sacred duty to defend the Xylos and the wild places they root in from the steady encroachment of civilization, though he has never formally called himself one of them.

What finally moved him to leave the Pines was not a single vision but the accumulated weight of many: warnings of plague, of raiders, of dying things he could not always reach in time to save. He came east to Asthareth chasing threads of old knowledge in the Archives, word that the Xylos and the wild places are threatened by more than logging axes, and persistent, half-believed rumor of some plan, somewhere, to end the growing threat of Quorath's Return. He walked through the door of The Salty Leg on the 23rd day of The Turning, 2543 AGS, forty years old and carrying more than he has told anyone.