Annoron

Backstory

Annoron Thistlewick is a gnome of boundless good cheer and relentless curiosity, the kind of creature who greets a thunderstorm with the same bright-eyed enthusiasm he reserves for a sunny market morning. He stands barely knee-height to a tall human, with a round, ruddy face framed by wild copper sideburns, a nose perpetually smudged with soil or pigment, and eyes the warm amber of fresh-brewed tea. He was born in the gnomish enclave of Burrowmere, a cheerful underground settlement on the far side of Varenhold, where his family kept an apothecary that smelled of dried lavender, sweet resin, and old mistakes. He learned his craft from his grandmother — a formidable woman who believed that every plant had something to say if you were patient enough to listen — and he has been listening ever since. He filled twelve journals with botanical observations before he turned thirty, and has since filled forty more. Annoron came to Varenhold six months ago on what he described to anyone who asked as 'a research expedition of tremendous personal importance,' which is a grand way of saying he had heard that Gil'drun's bioluminescent fungi were unlike anything catalogued in the known literature and he simply could not resist. He set up a small stall near the market's eastern gate, trading remedies and tonics for coin and gossip, and quickly became a familiar and well-liked presence — the sort of person who remembers your name after one meeting, asks after your children by name after two, and has somehow already prepared a salve for your exact ailment by the third. He is not naive — he has lived long enough to understand that the world contains genuine darkness — but his default assumption is that most problems have a solution and most people are doing their best, and he finds this outlook has served him well more often than not. His motivation for entering Gil'drun is equal parts professional and personal. The corrupted plant samples he has been receiving from desperate herbalists at the forest's edge have him genuinely alarmed — the cellular degradation he is observing is unlike any blight or fungal infection in his considerable experience, and the patterns suggest something is wrong at a level far deeper than soil or weather. He has also, quietly, made friends among the edge-settlement folk, and he does not take it well when friends are frightened. He carries a satchel stuffed with more remedies, tools, and specimen jars than seems physically possible given its size, and he enters the forest armed with encyclopedic botanical knowledge, a surprisingly sturdy walking staff, and the unshakeable conviction that understanding a thing is the first step toward fixing it.