#jorell

JORELL VIRAY: A mother’s son. A rifle’s vessel. He aimed it. He fired. He watched a man not die. He didn't know what it meant—to shoot someone loved. (Now he does.) There’s something coiled in his chest, and it’s not just guilt. It’s the shape of a new belief. The kind that grows in the shadow of mistakes. If you leave him now, he becomes the ghost you already fear. If you stay… maybe not. STAT MODIFIER: +1 Volition when protecting the innocent. -1 Composure when interrogating someone you pity.

ÉLIANE B.: She’s still here. Somehow. Despite all the silence and smoke and systemic forgetting. You see her and you remember a hallway — antiseptic tile, fingerprints in fogged glass. She tried to scream once. It made no sound. The light behind her isn’t divine. It’s clinical. A failed exorcism of something she never invited in. Her eyes say: I did everything right. Why does it still hurt? Lavender is supposed to be calming. But on her, it bruises. STAT MODIFIER: +2 Inland Empire when perceiving the Pale. -1 Suggestion when speaking to survivors.

“Good luck,” whispered a voice on the wind, and petals brushed over Jorell’s face and wings as he set off. He smiled and caught one of the petals out of the air, tucking it into his belly pouch along with his pearl and his map-making tools. 

“Now you can accompany me on my journey,” he murmured into the wind, and he felt the touch of a soft wing along his flank.

The journey to the Viridian Labyrinth was long, and Jorell followed many paths over hills and through canyons. He passed the Pillar of the World itself, where the ground was strewn with runed shards, and he bowed deeply in honor to the Earthshaker and whispered an entreaty for strength.

The Everbloom Gardens and the Gladeveins were as beautiful as ever, and Jorell breathed in the smell of the flowers as he forged his way across rivers and through the woods. There will be time to enjoy the sights later, he thought. All the time in the world. 

He had not gone far into the dark and dripping forests of the Wild when he realized that the Labyrinth had become aware of his goal, and was working to stop him. The path twisted under his feet, vanishing into ferns and dead-ending at the bases of massive trees, but where there was no path, Jorell forged through the undergrowth.

Soon enough, thorns began to whip out of the earth, snagging his legs and the soft membrane of his wings. “What is this, the Tangled Wood?” Jorell muttered, wincing as he unsnagged a pointed branch from his wing. Glowing eyes watched him from the shadows, and he hissed threateningly. They did not leave, but they did not come closer.

And at last, covered in thick mud and thorn-scratches, he came to a clearing. And in the center of the clearing, there grew a golden vine, flowers dripping with nectar. As the ancient tomes had said, Jorell took a vial and trapped the overflowing nectar of a single flower, the brightest and most beautiful. The others, he would leave to grow- and perhaps another adventurer would come one day to claim their potent nectar.

“Bronwyn!” called Jorell as he staggered down the slope of the valley on shaking legs. Dirt and blood dripped from his scales, and Bronwyn gasped as she materialized out of the ground beside him.

“Jorell, you’re hurt!” the spirit exclaimed, and her scales smelled of dust after rain as she pressed against him, running the pads of her talons over his cuts.

He shook his head, breathing hard. “The- the trek over the mountains was hard,” he said. “But I have brought the nectar.” Holding the glass vial, sparkling golden in the sunlight, Jorell laughed. “I found it,” he said. “I found it.”

And they went side by side to the river, and Jorell took a golden goblet from the halls of dusty artifacts that the clan had gathered over the years. “It seems appropriate,” he said, turning the goblet to the light. He dipped water from the river, and with steady claws he uncapped the vial and poured in the nectar. 

He smiled at Bronwyn, whose face was drawn and nervous, and he tilted his head back and drank. And the liquid was like fire in his blood, like sunlight, like lightning. He drank, even as it burned his lungs, and when the goblet was empty, it fell to the ground from his twitching fingers.

And he raised his head and gulped in the air, the sweet cool air that smelled of flowers and mountains, and he laughed as his blood cooled. 

She said, “Once there was a princeling with eyes like burning coals, and a smile that tilted up at the edges just so. And he fell in love with a nature spirit with wildflowers draped around her wings, and they both were young and filled with dreams of hope and heroes.”

“I don’t understand,” he whispered, but his ears flicked forwards, listening. The night was silent, and it seemed the whole world listened.

“The spirit vowed to spend all her days by the prince’s side, to forsake the long years before her for a few decades of joy. She cast a spell, to entrap her in a dragon’s form, and she walked by him for many turns of the moon. But the prince grew old, while the spirit, though her face was that of a dragon, stayed young.”

She bowed her head, not looking him in the eyes as she spoke, and as her tears fell, long-stalked orange flowers sprang to life in the fertile soil.

“And the prince died, and the spirit did not. I will be by your side as long as I live, she had promised him, and she took a knife to her chest and cut her scales to splinters. But she did not die. For a while, she was the river, she was the earth and the sky and the windswept grass. But she did not die. And the years stretched forwards, barren and dark.”

His talons tightened on hers, and he pulled her close against his scales, his scales that smelled of heat and dust and sunshine, and he said, “There is another way.”

“There is no other way,” she whispered, and her voice cracked.

“There is another way,” he said, and his voice was hard and sharp as ice, brittle from the tightness in his throat. “I make you now a different promise, daughter of the valley. I promise that I will stay with you... until the end of your days.”

And Bronwyn watched as the other child was taken by the Shade, and destroyed those that had held her hostage, and the valley burned with black fire. She kept the fire from spreading outside the valley, stifling it with charred wings and claws. And she watched, singed and weak, as the dragons sealed the darkness into the caves and fled, leaving the valley empty, and she watched as wildflowers began to grow again.

She saw the paladins come to the valley, and she smiled to herself as their hatchlings played in the long grass. But they seemed to her to be little more than mayflies, quick to life and quick to death, and she stayed at a distance.

Mortal lives ended so swiftly, and bones crumbled to dust, but the valley still remained. And over the long, long years, Bronwyn stayed outwardly young, but her heart was old and worn down from witnessing the mortals’ fights, the constant quarrels of the gods, the destructive power of the Shade.

And then came Jorell. He walked with a broad swing in his stride and a proud arch in his neck, and he sang slightly off-key, so loudly that his voice echoed from the mountains. Now and again, he would pass through the valley, to stop for a few nights in the paladins’ caves. Bronwyn wondered if he had a mate in the caves.

She never spoke to him, only watched, taking the form of tall flowers swaying at the river’s edge or browned leaves tossed by the wind. His laugh was golden, and the way his smile twisted at the edges reminded her of a ruby-eyed princeling she had known long before.

One day, she came too close, and he turned from his work- sitting coiled on a glacial boulder and sketching in his notebook. Bronwyn held still, taking the shape of flower petals fluttering on the wind, and his eyes passed over her. Bronwyn was unprepared for the stab of disappointment and relief that struck her as he turned back to his work, humming quietly as he scribbled.

“Is someone there?” asked Jorell, and Bronwyn jerked, her heart pounding. The pearlcatcher tilted his head, looking with half-slitted eyes at the grass, and Bronwyn smiled- it had been a long, long time since she’d seen a mortal properly able to sense spirits such as herself.

Jorell’s eyes widened, and he folded his notebook and tucked it into his heavy red mantle. “There you are,” he said with a smile.

“How did you find me?” she asked, her voice distorted as the petals coalesced into a draconic body. She mirrored Jorell’s form, slender and long-limbed with a flowery mane cascading over the arch of her neck.

“There’s a mushroom that grows in the Tangled Wood,” he said, giving her a long, curious look. “Specifically in the Wispwillow Grove, in a spot that only I seem to be able to find more than once. When you crush it into a paste and infuse it with magic from the Starwood Strand, most dragons who ingest the concoction gain faerie Sight.”

Bronwyn nodded slowly, and Jorell turned his head towards the sun, blinking in the light. “I’ve seen you before,” he said conversationally. “Aslesa told me there was a nature spirit living in the valley, and I kept an eye out when I came through.”

“Really?” asked Bronwyn. Jorell shrugged.

“I wasn’t altogether sure it was you, though. Might have been just a trick of my eyes, although my eyes in particular seem a little averse to being tricked. Anyway,” he said, and threw Bronwyn one of those quirked smiles, “Want to go for a walk?”