Taliesin Briarmane
Firbolg · Level 2 · Paladin / Warlock · active
https://tabletopbuilds.com/flagship-build-oath-of-the-watchers-paladin/
Player Information
- Joined Campaign: Session 0
Character Basics
- Race: Firbolg (see System/Reference/Races/firbolg-vgm)
- Class: Paladin 1 / Hexblade Warlock 1
- Patron: The Raven Queen (The Crone)
- Pact Weapon: Branch from the Three Threads Tree
- Deity: The Three Fates (The Maiden/Sehanine, The Mother/Melora, The Crone/The Raven Queen)
- Alias/Nickname: "Thistle"
- Languages: Common, Elvish, Giant, Common Sign Language
Racial Traits (Firbolg)
- Size: Medium (7-8 ft tall, 240-300 lbs) - but built like a sturdy tree stump
- Speed: 30 ft
- Lifespan: Up to 500 years (explains his long presence in Viekryss)
- Firbolg Magic: Cast detect magic and disguise self (Wisdom-based, 1/short rest each)
- Hidden Step: Turn invisible as bonus action until next turn (1/short rest)
- Powerful Build: Count as one size larger for carrying capacity
- Speech of Beast and Leaf: Limited communication with beasts and plants
Character Description
Appearance
Unlike the hulking, broad-shouldered laborers of his Firbolg kin, Thistle is built more like a sturdy old tree stump than a mountain. He lacks the definition of a warrior; his arms are somewhat soft and his frame is padded with a layer of healthy "insulation." However, he possesses an undeniable, barrel-chested robustness.
He looks like he could walk through a blizzard in a linen shirt or eat poisonous berries without flinching, radiating a glow of unshakeable health despite his lack of raw lifting power. His build suggests endurance and constitution rather than strength - a survivor, not a warrior.
Personality Traits
Magnetic Presence & Quiet Confidence:
Thistle possesses a magnetic presence that doesn't need to shout to be heard. Time has not worn him down, but rather polished him into a figure of deep, quiet confidence. He carries his centuries with a seasoned tranquility, acting as an unshakeable anchor in any storm.
The Listener:
His advice is sparing but heavy with intention. He listens with an intensity that makes others feel truly seen, radiating the warmth of a man who knows exactly who he is and needs no validation from others.
Profound Humility:
Despite his vast experience, Thistle is profoundly humble, preferring to deflect questions about his past with a gentle smile. He treats his memories like rare vintages - uncorked only for those who have truly earned his trust.
Two Faces:
- To strangers: Just a kind, grey-furred soul
- Around the campfire with close friends: Weaves mesmerizing tales of the past, not to glorify his own deeds, but to impart wisdom to those he has come to call family
Caretaker Nature:
- Ensures others are fed and looked after before himself
- Makes sure everyone has what they needs
- Provides food, lodging, and support without fanfare
Ideals
The Three Fates:
Thistle follows a trinity of goddesses known as The Three Fates, representing the cycle of life, destiny, and the natural order:
- The Maiden - Sehanine (beginnings, potential, moonlight)
- The Mother - Melora (life, nature, nurturing)
- The Crone - The Raven Queen (endings, fate, death)
This worship reflects his understanding of life's cycles, his caretaker nature (The Mother), his prophetic visions (fate and destiny), and his acceptance of mortality and endings (The Crone). The trinity represents wholeness and balance rather than focusing on a single aspect of existence.
Devotion to The Three Fates
As an aged warrior and devout follower of The Three Fates, Thistle honors the trinity through practical rituals that reflect his caretaker nature and acceptance of fate's cycles.
Pre-Battle Rituals
The Three Threads Blessing:
- Braids three strands of natural fiber (silver/white, green, black) while speaking a prayer to each aspect
- Ties the braid to his weapon or armor as a reminder that all battles touch all three fates
- The braiding itself is meditative - accepting what's to come
The Caretaker's Vow:
- Places a hand on each companion's shoulder, silently acknowledging they're under the Mother's protection
- Whispers: "The Maiden grants us courage, the Mother grants us strength, the Crone grants us wisdom to know when the fight is done"
- For an aged warrior who's seen death, this is about protecting those younger than him
Moonlight Vigil:
- If there's time before battle, meditates under moonlight (the Maiden's domain)
- Reflects on prophetic visions - are they the Crone showing him fate's threads?
- Accepts whatever outcome the weaving brings
The Ground Blessing:
- Kneels and touches the earth (honoring Melora)
- Asks the Mother to receive those who fall with grace
- Asks the Crone to guide their passage
- Asks the Maiden to light the path for survivors
Post-Battle Rituals
The Counting:
- After battle, counts the fallen - allies and enemies both
- Speaks each name if known, or "Unknown thread" if not
- Acknowledges the Crone has claimed what was always hers
Thread-Cutting Rites:
- For each fallen ally, cuts a black thread and lets the wind take it
- "Your thread is cut, your weaving complete, the Crone welcomes you to rest"
- Plants something green (seed, sprig, flower) where each ally fell if possible
- "The Mother reclaims you, that new life may grow from your sacrifice"
The Survivor's Burden:
- Alone after others rest, whispers names of those he couldn't protect
- An aged warrior carries many names
- Asks the Maiden for hope that their deaths had meaning
- Acknowledges he too will one day join them
Tending the Wounded:
- This IS prayer for Thistle - the caretaker serving the Mother's domain
- Doesn't speak prayers aloud while healing, but his actions ARE the devotion
- Sees healing as extending the Mother's thread, accepting when the Crone's claim is inevitable
The Three Libations:
- Pours three small offerings from his waterskin:
- Silver/clear water on stone (Maiden - for new dawns after darkness)
- Water on earth/plants (Mother - for life continuing)
- Water into shadow/grave (Crone - for those who've passed)
The Weight of Threads
Thistle likely carries tokens from past battles - fallen companions whose threads have been cut. Before battle, he might touch each one, remembering that the Crone has already claimed many he loved. After battle, he adds new tokens if necessary. Each one serves as a reminder that he's still here when others aren't - the survivor's weight that all aged warriors carry.
The Dragon Slayer's Acceptance
If the dragon slayer rumors are true, Thistle knows he's already lived longer than most warriors. His prayer before battle reflects this: "The Crone has passed me by many times. If today she calls, I answer. If not, I serve the Mother's work another dawn."
Caretaker's Practical Faith
For Thistle, faith isn't elaborate ceremony - it's in the doing:
- Checking on Marva and others before battle = serving the Mother
- Accepting some won't return = honoring the Crone
- Hoping for victory = trusting the Maiden's promise of new beginnings
- Feeding the hungry, sheltering the weary, healing the wounded = living prayer to all three aspects
Bonds
- Proprietor of Three Threads Tavern in Viekryss
- Member of Toil & Trouble adventuring party
- Has had prophetic visions - see Thistle's Vision
- Long-time friend of Marva Ironfist's father (a cobbler)
- Watched Marva Ironfist grow up
- Has been in Viekryss for as long as anyone can remember
- Looks after Raeve Nyaxia, making sure she has food and a room when she's in town
Flaws
- Unwilling to talk about his past, despite rumors of dragon slaying
Background & History
The Grove
Firbolgs don't name their forests. They don't name their children either, not properly, just descriptions of what a thing does or how it grows, which worked fine among people who lived five centuries and could afford to let identity arrive at its own pace. His mother called him "the quiet one who watches" until he was thirty and old enough, by Firbolg reckoning, to need a name that traveled well among shorter-lived folk. Taliesin was what she settled on. It means "shining brow" in a tongue older than most trees, which was either prophecy or irony, depending on how charitable you are feeling.
His clan kept a grove in the deep woods, the canopy closed overhead like a cathedral vault. The light that could reach the floor filtered through so many leaves it arrived green and sanctified. A wellspring of wild magic lived in the grove's heart. Raw stuff. The kind that made mushrooms grow the size of cart wheels, turned birdsong into something that sounded uncomfortably like language, and convinced foxes that they could talk. They couldn't. But they tried, and it was unsettling.
Firbolgs are well suited to guarding a wild magic wellspring because they were patient enough not to use it. A dwarf would have mined it. A human would have taxed it. An elf would have written poetry about it until everyone else wished it were dead. Firbolgs just kept it breathing.
Three witches came that autumn, when the grove smelled of rot and sweetness. They claimed to be fleeing persecution. This may even have been true, plenty of covens were, in those years. The clan's druids deliberated in the way Firbolg druids deliberate, slow, and thorough. They concluded that witches deserved sanctuary, and that the wellspring could sustain practitioners who respected it.
It took just four months. The three performed rituals at the wellspring during the winter solstice, when wild magic runs thinnest. By morning it was poisoned. The magic still flowed, but wrong. Trees shed their bark in long strips. Animals born that spring arrived with the wrong number of legs. The mushrooms still grew, but eating them brought visions that ended in screaming.
They were gone before the dawn. Took whatever they needed from the wellspring and vanished. The clan spent a decade trying to heal the grove and failed. When it became clear the corruption had set into the roots of the oldest trees, those who once protected the grove packed up what little they owned and walked away.
Taliesin was nearing his first half century when the grove fell. Young enough that he hadn't yet understood what the wellspring meant. Old enough to understand what losing it cost. He carried two lessons out of those woods and kept them polished for the next three hundred years: that magic in the wrong hands could ruin the world, and that trusting intentions without watching the hands would get you gutted.
The first lesson would make him a hunter.
The second made him something worse.
The Road After
Taliesin walked. Not aimlessly, Firbolgs don't do anything without a reason, even if the reason is "I need to understand what kind of person I am before I choose what to do about it." A luxury only available to people who live five centuries and can afford to burn a few decades on self-reflection.
He worked. Hired himself out as a guard, a porter, a woodsman, jobs that used his size and endurance and didn't require him to talk much, which suited him. He moved through human lands, and elven borderlands, the marginal country where different peoples' territories bled into each other and nobody was quite sure whose laws applied. He saw things. A village herbalist drowned in a pond by her neighbors because the goats had taken ill. A court mage who'd been quietly bleeding apprentices dry to fuel his enchantments, literally, in two cases. A coven that had worked the same crossroads for three generations, healing travelers and mending broken bones, driven out by a preacher who needed a villain.
Magic attracted suffering the way meat left in the sun attracted flies. The practitioners who used it well were punished for existing. The ones who used it badly were punished eventually. And nobody seemed to think it was their job to sort the one from the other before the torches came out.
He tried, a few times, to intervene. Warned a coven about a mob forming in the next town. Stood between a hedgewitch and a group of soldiers who'd decided he was cause of their commander's kidney stones. He even tracked a genuine rogue, a transmuter who'd been turning village children into animals to sell at market, and cornered him in a barn.
The transmuter set that barn on fire, transmuted himself into a hawk, and flew away. He wasn't fast enough to save the barn, but Taliesin did put out the fire, and saved the two goats which was something.
Not much, but something.
It was after the barn that he met his first Paladin of the Coven.
The Oath
Paladins of the Coven were not witch-hunters. This is an important distinction, and one that most people got wrong, which irritated the Paladins. Witch-hunters killed witches. The Paladins of the Coven protected them.
Protected them from mobs, from lords who wanted pet mages, from each other, and, more importantly, from themselves. They were the law of the magical world. Sheriff, judge, executioner when needed, but also advocate, sanctuary, and shield. The Order answered to no crown and served no particular god though many of its members had their faith. Their foundation, a simple understanding that magic is dangerous, the people that wield it are both its greatest champions and its greatest threat, and that someone had to stand between the world and its worst practitioners without burning the good ones in the process.
The Paladin Taliesin met was an older woman named Esmere. A human, built like a fence post. She found him there in the ashes, smelling like smoke and goat, and listened. His story was met with the patient attention of someone who'd heard a hundred similar.
"So, you tried to stop him alone, with no training, no authority, and no plan beyond 'stand in front of him and hope for the best,'" she said.
"I had a plan," Taliesin said.
"And how did that work?"
"He turned into a bird."
"Not the first, not the last."
She bought him a drink, and told him about the Order. He listened the way he listened to everything, quietly, completely. Before the new moon he was in front of the Order's chapter house, asking to take the Oath.
By Firbolg reckoning, he was barely out of his awkward phase. By human standards, ancient. The Paladins, who had seen enough of the world to measure a person, thought he was about right.
The Oath was taken before representatives of The Three Fates, the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Not every Paladin of the Coven followed the trinity, but Taliesin did. He'd come to the way his kin come to most things, by watching long enough to see the pattern. Things begin. Things grow and sustain. Things end. The three who had ruined his grove had broken the cycle, taken without giving, ended without beginning. The Oath of the Coven was, at its heart, one to keep the weaving intact.
The Maiden blessed his new beginning. She came to him in a dream the night before, appearing as a young girl, barefoot, standing in a field of white flowers that hadn't existed when he fell asleep. She said nothing. She just looked at him with an expression that combined hope and sorrow. She already knew what he would become and loved him for trying anyway. He woke with tears on his face and no memory of why, only the certainty that something new had started.
The Mother charged him to protect those who nurture magic with wisdom.
The Crone warned him, in the flat voice of someone reading a list: "You will cut threads before their time. You will carry the weight of every thread you sever. This is the price. Accept it or walk away."
He accepted.
He commissioned his great shield. Round, heavy, built for a Firbolg's frame. The face bore three interwoven threads, silver for the Maiden, green for the Mother, black for the Crone, wound so tightly into each other that you couldn't tell where one ended and the others began. This was the point. The smith who forged it asked what he wanted inscribed on the back.
"A blade only knows one answer," Taliesin said.
The smith looked at it, nodded, and charged him double for an inscription that short.
The Witcher
For one hundred and fifty years, Taliesin hunted.
That sentence deserves to sit for a moment. A hundred and fifty years is longer than most human family lines. It's long enough for entire kingdoms to rise, rot, and collapse into ballads. It's long enough to bury everyone who knew you when you started and find that the grandchildren of your earliest quarries have become your later ones. Taliesin spent a century and a half tracking down practitioners who broke coven law, killed their masters, cursed innocents, or committed the kind of magical atrocities that make priests of every god unanimous in their horror.
Taliesin was good at it. This is worth saying plainly. You would never get him to say it himself, and he surely would change the subject if you tried. He was very, very good. Patient the way only a Firbolg can be patient, listening, watching, learning the shape of the local magic. Thorough, fair, and relentless once his mind was set. He carried the shield and a longblade. He used both, but the shield more often. He preferred standing between a rogue and their victim to striking the rogue down, if he could manage it. If he couldn't, the sword came out, and the sword was efficient.
The work was often ugly, but not always. Sometimes it was simple. A hedge witch hexing livestock for coin. A transmuter experimenting on vagrants. You found them, you judged them, you stopped them, you filed a report with the Order. Clean enough.
Other times it was not simple at all.
The Dragon's Garden
What everyone in Viekryss knows, or thinks they know, is that Thistle killed a dragon. Said in hushed tones at tavern tables, or loud ones over pints. "The old Firbolg at the Three Threads? Killed a dragon, they say." Nobody says it to his face, because his face does something specific and uncomfortable when the topic comes up. Also, most people have enough sense to not push a man who looks like he could walk through a wall if it annoyed him enough.
Here's what actually happened.
Verathraxis was a green dragon, which is worth explaining because people who haven't studied dragons tend to think they're all the same. Big, scaly, breathe something unpleasant at you, sleep on gold. Greens though, are the sinister type. The ones who would rather talk you into the pot than toss you in. A red dragon burns your village because it's angry. A green dragon burns your village because it determined, that your village was worth more to it as a cautionary tale than as a source of tribute. They collect people the way other the others collect gold, not to kill them, but to own them.
Verathraxis had established itself in a stretch of woods a good two weeks south of the Galdenmere Reach. It had lingered there decades before anyone noticed. At some point, a coven of a dozen witches had settled in the same forest. This was not a coincidence.
The dragon introduced itself gradually. A warning here there are hunters coming, you should move your camp. A gift there the herbs in the eastern clearing are ideal for warding, let me show you. Protection, freely offered, from a world that had given these twelve little enough of it. The witches were grateful. Gratitude can be a debt, and greens understand debt the way sharks understand blood in the water.
Over years, not months, years, the arrangement shifted. The witches warded the dragon's territory in exchange for its protection. They gathered reagents for it, tended the forest it claimed, brewed compounds that interested it. Fair trades, or close enough. Then the dragon began asking for more. Specific rituals. Pact magic. The kind of binding agreements that tie a practitioner's power to a greater entity, like the pacts warlocks sign with their patrons. Except this patron had scales and teeth and a voice like warm honey poured over a rotting peach.
By the time Taliesin arrived, they had been under Verathraxis's influence for the better part of two decades. Some of them loved the dragon. Some were afraid but couldn't articulate of what. And at least two knew exactly what had been done to them and had tried to leave, only to find that the pacts they'd signed wouldn't let them. Their magic was woven into the dragon's hoard. They couldn't walk away without unraveling themselves.
Taliesin tried diplomacy. The shield before the sword. He walked into the forest, announced himself to Verathraxis, and made a formal request under coven law for the witches' release.
The dragon laughed. It was a warm, rich laugh. Then it suggested that if Taliesin didn't leave its forest by nightfall, it would add a Firbolg to its collection.
The fight lasted most of a day. Not continuously, as green dragons are ambush predators at heart. Verathraxis used the forest like a weapon, appearing and vanishing between the ancient trunks, breathing poison into clearings and retreating before Taliesin could close the distance. The witches were the worst part. Five of them fought alongside the dragon their pacts compelling them, or because they believed the dragon's protection was real, or because they were simply too afraid to do anything else. Two others tried to help and were cut down in the crossfire. Three huddled in the dragon's lair and prayed to gods who may have not been listening. Two more were simply in the wrong place when everything went to hell, which is where most people end up when everything goes to hell.
Seven witches died that day.
Taliesin took a claw across his shield that gouged three deep furrows through the interwoven threads and nearly tore his arm from his body. He drove the dragon off. Green dragons know when to retreat and where to hide, and Verathraxis was old enough to value survival over pride. It abandoned its garden, its collection, its two decades of careful cultivation, and slithered into the deep places of the world where things with scales and long memories go to wait.
The five who survived were free. And broken. The pacts had woven so deeply into their magic that severing them tore something loose. They could no longer feel the current of magic in the world, couldn't cast, couldn't light a candle with a word. Their power had died, like a limb lost to gangrene.
Taliesin has had his shield repaired twice since. Small things, a cracked rim, a loosened boss. The three claw gouges from Verathraxis he left exactly as they were. A record of what it costs to save someone who doesn't know they need saving, and of the seven who paid.
The rumors call him "dragon slayer" implying a corpse, and there isn't one. The word "dragon" makes people think of glory, and there wasn't any of that either. Seven dead. Five broken. One dragon nursing its grudge somewhere in the dark, patient as all. Thistle deflects the stories and, if pressed, claims he once vanquished a dragon with a spoon. Some people believe him. It's still closer to the truth than "dragon slayer."
Thornhaven
An age later, roughly halfway through his stay on this world, Taliesin made the mistake that would define the rest of his life.
It should be said that two hundred and forty-five is not old for a Firbolg, but it is tired. By then he'd filed more reports with the Order than he could count, attended more funerals than he cared to remember, and developed the particular kind of moral certainty that settles over a person who has been right so many times that being wrong has become theoretically impossible.
A minor lord named Coravel had sent word to the Order of a coven of nine witches in the town of Thornhaven having cursed his family. His wife was withering. His son, gone blind in one eye. His crops had blackened. Coravel was wealthy, connected, and convincing. A man who sounds like justice when he speaks and only looks like revenge if you study his eyes. Taliesin missed the eyes.
The evidence was overwhelming. Ritual components in the coven's quarters. Hex marks scratched into door frames. A poppet made from the wife's hair. Servants testified they had seen the witches performing rituals aimed at the manor during the crescent moon. Others confirmed it. The coven denied everything. The guilty deny, and Taliesin had heard enough to know the sound of them.
He had a doubt. One. A cold thing, like a pebble in a boot. The leader, a woman named Yselde, had grey hair and steady hands. She looked him in the eye when she said they hadn't done it. Most liars look away, or at you too hard, or they fidget, or their voice goes up at the end like they're asking permission. She did none of these. She looked at him and he saw something in that look that his certainty didn't want to examine.
He examined Coravel's evidence instead. The servants. The hex marks. The poppet. Everything pointed the same direction. One pebble in one boot was not enough to acquit nine women with ritual components in their homes.
Three ran when the judgment came. Lys and Senna bolted for the treeline; Maren made for the river crossing. Taliesin caught them all. The fighting was brief and ugly. All died with spells on their lips and fear in their eyes, and Taliesin's hands stayed steady through the killing.
The others were arrested. They stood trial, such as it was, with Taliesin providing testimony. He was thorough. He was fair. He presented the evidence clearly and answered every question put to him. The verdict was unanimous. The six were executed in Thornhaven's square on a Tuesday morning, and Taliesin watched. A man should see the cost of his certainty, and the Crone asks no less.
Yselde was the fourth to die. She visits his dreams most. Not because she screamed. She didn't. Not because she cursed him. She didn't do that either. She looked at him again, that same look, and she said quietly enough that only he could hear: "You know."
He didn't know. Not then.
Three months later, the truth arrived in the way truth usually does, through greed. Coravel's steward, a man named Aldric, was arrested for an unrelated fraud and, facing imprisonment, offered information in exchange for leniency. Aldric was a warlock. He had cursed Coravel's family himself, gradually, carefully, making it look like hedgewitch work. He'd planted every piece of evidence. The ritual components. The hex marks. The poppet. He'd coached the servants on what to say. The entire accusation had been manufactured to destroy a coven that had refused to share their knowledge with him, and he had used Taliesin, the Order's own investigator, fair, thorough, relentless Taliesin as the instrument.
Nine innocents had died that day. Three killed by his hand. Six by his word.
He visited each of their graves. He didn't pray. He didn't ask forgiveness. He stood at each grave and spoke their names aloud, because the Crone teaches that a name spoken is a thread remembered, and he owed them that. Halwen, the elder, whose healing hands had mended half the town's broken bones. Britta, who had watched Taliesin drag her daughter Maren back from the river in irons and said nothing because there was nothing left to say. Dorrit, who kept the coven's records in a hand so neat it looked like print. Cathaire, Yselde's apprentice, who'd had steady hands like her teacher until the sentence was read. Pell, the youngest of the nine, who cried at the trial and couldn't stop.
Yselde was last. He stood there longest.
You know.
He did.
The Sword Without a Shield
Taliesin threw himself back into the hunt, but the hunt had changed, or rather, he had. The shield came off his arm more slowly. The sword came out more quickly. Investigations that once took patient months finished in weeks. Judgments that once required certainty now required only suspicion. He was still thorough, he was always thorough, but thoroughness in service of the wrong conclusion is just a more organized cruelty.
Over twenty-five years, Taliesin became the thing the Paladins of the Coven were supposed to prevent. A man who saw threats in every shadow. A man who had been catastrophically wrong exactly once and had decided the solution was never to hesitate again, because hesitation was what had let Yselde's eyes put a doubt in him instead of the evidence putting conviction. Had he been faster, harder, more decisive, maybe he would have seen the fraud. This was the lie he told himself. He held it the way the drowning hold breath, because feeling powerful was the only thing left that wasn't broken.
The worst of it was that the zealotry felt good. Clean, the way a blade is clean. No more weighing evidence against instinct, no more lying awake with a doubt he couldn't name. Just the quarry, the judgment, the sword. The mercy of simplicity. For the first time since Thornhaven, he slept through the night without hearing Yselde's voice. Or rather, he slept through the night because the work exhausted him past the point of dreaming.
Other Paladins noticed. Reports filtered back to the chapter house: Taliesin is pushing too hard. Taliesin is cutting corners. Taliesin cornered a rogue coven in the Ash Downs and nearly let the building burn with practitioners and a child still inside rather than break pursuit. The Order sent letters. He ignored them. They sent messengers. He was polite to the messengers in the way that large, armed, quietly furious men are polite to people they could snap in half, which is to say, the messengers left quickly and reported that he seemed fine.
He stopped being the shield. Stopped standing between threats and innocents. Started walking through both to reach his quarry. The shield still hung on his arm, but he'd forgotten what it was for.
At his lowest point, as he rounded the corner on his third century, he cornered a rogue practitioner in a farmhouse where three families were sheltering from a storm. The practitioner was using them as cover. Taliesin considered the fire. Not for long. A few heartbeats, maybe. Just long enough to measure the distance between who he was and who he'd sworn to be.
He didn't light it. The practitioner escaped.
He thought about Yselde again that night. Suspected she wouldn't need to look at his eyes to know what he'd become.
You know
The Broken Shield
The vision came in the grey hour before dawn when the world is uncertain and the spaces between sleeping and waking fray at the edges.
The Fates had not spoken to him since his Oath. A hundred and eighty-two years of silence. He'd assumed they were watching, but he'd stopped asking for guidance when the work had become routine. Pride is quiet. It doesn't announce itself. It just fills the spaces where prayer used to live.
In the vision, he stood on a mountain made of bodies. Not a metaphor, an actual mountain, stacked and tangled, hundreds deep, thousands wide, the dead pressed together so tightly you couldn't tell where one ended and the next began. Some wore witches' marks. Some wore farmer's wool. Some wore armor. At the summit, where he stood, his shield lay shattered at his feet. The three threads, silver, green, black, had come unwound and lay in the dirt like dead snakes.
His hands were red to the elbows.
Then the voices. Not from above, not from below. From inside the weaving itself, the place where all threads cross and pull and hold the world together.
The Maiden spoke first. She sounded like the girl from his Oath dream, barefoot in the field of white flowers, but older now. Tired.
"There is still time to begin again. But not on this path."
The Mother spoke like the earth, like the deep roots of forests.
"You protect nothing. You nurture nothing. You have become barren."
Then the Crone, in the flat, patient voice of someone who has watched the end of every thread ever spun and is merely waiting for this one to catch up.
"You have cut too many threads. You have forgotten the weaving."
He woke screaming. The Crone does not believe in gentle lessons.
The Vow
Three years later, Taliesin laid down his sword.
Not in battle. Not in some grand gesture on a hilltop with witnesses and weather. He set it on a table in a rented room in a town whose name he's long forgotten, looked at it for a long time, and walked out. He left the door open behind him. Whoever found the room next could have the weapon if they wanted it. He hoped they wouldn't.
He kept the shield. He hung it on the back of his pack like a man who couldn't quite let go of who he'd been but knew he couldn't be it anymore. The shield had been about protection. The sword had been about punishment. He could abandon one and keep the other, and if the three gouges from the dragon's claws caught the light while he walked, reminding him of failures older than Thornhaven, that was fine. A man should carry his failures where he can see them.
The vow was simple. No bladed weapon. Not ever. Not in self-defense, not in defense of others, not if the world was ending and a sword was the only thing between him and the thing ending it. He would be the shield or he would be nothing at all.
He had a lot of life ahead of him. A lot of empty time to fill when you've given up the only trade you've ever truly known.
He decided to try being useful instead.
Viekryss
Taliesin wandered for fifteen years after laying down the sword. He took work where he found it, farmhand, bouncer, carpenter's assistant, once a brief and regrettable stint as a cook. He helped where he could and kept his mouth shut about where he'd been. Nobody asks a seven-and-a-half-foot grey-furred stranger too many personal questions anyway. They either hire you to carry things or they get out of the way. Both suited him fine.
He heard about Viekryss from a merchant who described it as "a town where strange things happen and nobody seems terribly bothered." It was meant to be a warning. Taliesin heard an invitation.
He liked the place immediately. Viekryss was the right size, big enough to have proper temples and at least three opinions about everything, small enough that strangers became regulars inside a month. Magic was present without being remarkable. The townsfolk were practical in the way that people who live near strange things become practical, saving the worrying for winter nights when there was nothing else to do.
Using most of what he'd saved over two centuries he purchased a building. An old one, stone-walled, with a good hearth and a root cellar and one particular feature that settled the purchase the moment he eyed it coming into town.
An ancient tree grew through the center of the building.
The roots had found the foundation centuries ago and simply kept going, pushing up between the stones, threading through the floor, reaching for the light through a gap in the roof that someone had wisely decided to leave open rather than fight. The trunk was broad and grey-barked and alive in the way that very old trees are alive, stubbornly present, refusing to be finished.
He hung his shield above the hearth. The three interwoven threads of silver, green, and black, scored through by dragon claws faced outward into the room where anyone who entered would see them. He named the place Three Threads Tavern. A man needs to declare his intentions, and the best declarations are the kind you nail above your fireplace where you can't avoid them over breakfast.
He asked the tree for a branch.
This sounds peculiar if you've never met a Firbolg, but it shouldn't. Firbolgs speak to beasts and plants the way other folk speak to neighbors, not fluently, not in sentences, but with enough mutual understanding to get the point across. Taliesin put his hand on the trunk and asked. Not aloud. In the way that is more like listening very hard and letting the question fill the silence.
The tree dropped him a branch. Let it fall from a limb ten feet up, a piece the length and weight of a good quarterstaff, still green, still living. Taliesin caught it, and it fit his hand like it had been grown for the purpose, which maybe it had. Trees have longer memories than people and better instincts about who needs what.
He would wield it as his weapon. A piece of the home he was building, defending through him. If that sounds like symbolism laid on a bit thick, consider that Taliesin had spent centuries learning that symbols matter.
He took the name "Thistle." A tough, graceless plant that grows where nothing else bothers, hurts you if you grab it wrong, but feeds the bees and the goldfinches and anything else patient enough to get past the spines. It is not beautiful. It is not impressive. It is simply, stubbornly, and persistently useful, exactly the kind of thing a retired killer hoped to become.
The Caretaker
For ninety years, nearly a century, Thistle has run the Three Threads Tavern as a sanctuary. Not openly, because hanging a sign that reads "WITCHES WELCOME" would attract the wrong sort of attention and also because Thistle doesn't hang signs. But practitioners know. The ones who need a safe place to rest, to hide, to simply exist without someone demanding they justify their magic, they find their way to the Three Threads the way water finds its way downhill. By nature. By gravity. By the quiet pull of a place that means them no harm.
He befriended a cobbler named Ironfist, Marva Ironfist's father. The friendship was the uncomplicated kind that forms between men who don't need to talk to enjoy each other's company. They'd sit on the tavern's porch in the evenings, Ironfist working a piece of leather, Thistle watching the street, sharing a silence more comfortable than most people's conversations. When Ironfist's daughter was born, Thistle pulled her a wooden rattle from the tavern tree. When she grew into a girl, he taught her which mushrooms were safe to eat and which ones would have her seeing colors that don't exist. When she grew into a young woman with her father's stubborn jaw and a barbarian's temperament, he watched with the quiet pride of an uncle who knows better than to take credit for someone else's steel.
Then there was Raeve Nyaxia.
Raeve is a warlock. This fact is not lost on Thistle. She is angry the way young people with power and pain are angry, not at anything in particular. She comes and goes from Viekryss without pattern or explanation, vanishing for weeks and returning with new scars and the same dark look, and Thistle makes sure there is food and a room waiting for her every time. The Mother asks that of those who serve her, and Thistle serves.
But it isn't just duty. He recognizes something in Raeve that he'd rather not, the way you recognize your own handwriting. The certainty that the world is rotten and that power is the only reliable protection against it. The slow drift toward a line you don't see until you've already crossed it. He walked that road. He knows where it ends. Thornhaven is at the end of it, and nine graves, and Yselde.
Every time he coaxes Raeve to eat, every time he keeps her room warm for a return she hasn't announced, every time he gently suggests that rage is a tool and not a home, he is trying to prevent another Thornhaven. Another him. It is the most selfless and the most selfish thing he does. He knows it, and he does it anyway.
On the bad nights, he wonders whether any of it is real. The feeding, the sheltering, the patient listening. Is this what atonement looks like, or is it what a man does when he can't bear to sit still with what he's done? He doesn't know. He suspects the answer, but facing it would require a kind of honesty he's not sure he possesses. You know, Yselde says, in the small hours when the tavern is empty and there's nobody left to feed.
His prophetic visions returned around age three hundred and fifty, sixty years into his time at the tavern, after decades of proving through quiet, persistent service that the man on the mountain of bodies was someone he'd chosen not to become. The Three Fates trusted him with foresight again: the Maiden's hand extended with the same hope she'd shown him on the night of his Oath, the Crone's patience rewarded by his. The visions are infrequent, cryptic, and unsettling, because the Fates are not in the business of making things comfortable. But they come.
Recently, he suggested that two strangers, Lysander Cross and Varyn Starwhisper, room together at the tavern. He could not explain why. He sensed threads connecting them that neither yet understood, and the Fates don't explain their work. They show, and trust the weaving to hold.
Every meal served is an offering to the nine witches of Thornhaven. Every room provided is a prayer to the Maiden for another new beginning. Every witch guided toward wisdom is a thread added to the weaving to replace the ones he cut. The shield hangs above the hearth, scarred and silent, watching over a tavern built around a tree that refuses to stop growing.
If Thistle ever takes the shield down from that hearth, it means something has gone so badly wrong that the caretaker must become the guardian one last time. The branch in his hand. The shield on his arm. No blade. Not ever.
Until that day, he pours the ale. He feeds the hungry. He listens with the intensity of a man who knows that listening is the first and hardest form of love. And when someone asks about the dragon, he smiles gently and claims he once vanquished one with a spoon, and changes the subject before anyone can see what the memory costs him.
The Crone has passed him by many times. One day she'll call, and he'll answer. Until then, he serves the Mother's work another dawn.
Goals & Motivations
Personal Goals
- Understand the meaning of his visions
- Protect the world from the catastrophe seen in Thistle's Vision
Abilities & Features
Class Features
Paladin 1
- Divine Sense
- Lay on Hands
- Fighting Style
- Spellcasting
- Divine Smite
- Sacred Oath:
Hexblade Warlock 1
- Hexblade's Curse — Thistle marks a creature he can see within 30 ft. In his hands this is not a hunter's brand — it is fate's notation. The black thread has been placed. The Crone has taken notice of this particular weaving, and she rarely looks away without reason.
- Hex Warrior — His proficiency with the Branch from the Three Threads Tree now applies to attack and damage rolls, and he may use Charisma for those rolls. The tree gave him this branch. It has always known what he was.
- Pact Magic — One spell slot (1st level), recovered on short rest.
Spells
Cantrips
- Eldritch Blast
- The Thread. A single filament of black extends from Thistle's palm — barely visible, more felt than seen. It finds something vital in the target and pulls, like fate reaching out to remind something that its thread is finite. There is no crack, no flash. Just impact, and a faint spreading cold. Those watching might not be sure anything happened until the target staggers.
- Prestidigitation
- The Caretaker's Touch. Small domestic miracles. A cup warmed before it reaches cold hands. A candle lit without fumbling for flint. A stain lifted from a traveler's cloak so they enter the next town with a little more dignity. These are not tricks — they are the Mother's work in miniature. Thistle has been doing this for ninety years without anyone noticing it was magic.
1st Level Spells
- Bane (Warlock)
- The Fraying. Three threads — silver, green, black — unspool from Thistle's closed fist and drift toward their targets like smoke in still air. Where they touch, something loosens. Not a wound. Not pain. A quiet unraveling of conviction, of sureness, of the certainty that this fight will go the way the target expects. The Fates are simply reminding them: the weaving is not theirs to control.
- Shield (Warlock)
- The Shield Arm. The great round shield has hung above the hearth for ninety years. But the shape of it lives in Thistle's bones. When the blow comes, his left arm rises — and for a moment, in the space between the strike and its landing, something is there. Not metal. Not wood. A pressure, like the weight of a vow remembered. The Crone holds back what is not yet hers to claim.
Equipment & Inventory
Gold
Current: 119 gp
History:
- Session 1 - +15 gp from Adventurer's Gambit rewards (his share)
- Session 1 - +15 gp from Adventurer's Gambit rewards (holding Raeve Nyaxia's share as she disappeared after the event)
- Session 2 - -5 gp given to Emmeriss
- Session 4 - -15 gp passed to Raeve Nyaxia (her Gambit share)
- Session 5 - -1 gp on dinner and a tip at The Griffon and Oak
- Session 8 - +50 gp from the heavy wooden lockbox delivered by Kessia Brightpage (with invoices)
- Session 8 - +60 gp share of Tryvenis Slatevein's 300g reward (split 5 ways; Lysander refused his share)
Weapons
Primary Weapon:
- Branch from the Three Threads Tree (Quarterstaff / Hexblade Pact Weapon)
- A branch from the ancient tree that Three Threads Tavern is built around
- Symbolic weapon representing his vow against bladed weapons
- "If I must defend, the home defends through me"
- Natural, protective, non-lethal intent
- Will never wield bladed weapons (sacred vow made at age 275)
- Now also his Hexblade Pact Weapon — the Raven Queen's claim on it is not new; the tree has always known what he was, and the branch was offered freely long before the pact was named
- Uses Charisma for attack and damage rolls (Hex Warrior)
Armor
The Great Shield (not currently equipped - hangs above the tavern hearth)
- Large round shield with three interwoven threads design (silver, green, black)
- Deep dragon-claw gouges across the face (never repaired)
- Forged at age 95 as symbol of his oath
- Currently hangs above the hearth at Three Threads Tavern
- See Background & History for full narrative
- Will only be taken down in catastrophic circumstances
Magic Items (Permanent)
- Adamantine Dagger (possessed but never wielded)
- Acquired: Session 1 from Adventurer's Gambit
- Properties: Adamantine weapon, bypasses hardness of objects
- Note: Thistle will not wield this or any bladed weapon due to his sacred vow (age 275). He keeps it as a reminder of his oath or may gift it to someone who needs it.
Consumables
Food & Special Items:
- Biscuits (whole mess, quantity unknown)
- Acquired: Session 2 from Adventurer's Gambit banquet room
- Used: Session 2 - Gave 1 to Emmeriss, fed several to Kessia Brightpage
Relationships
Party Members
The Warlock
There is an irony in the arrangement that Thistle has never spoken aloud and probably never will: for a hundred and fifty years, he hunted practitioners whose power came from pacts with entities of questionable character. Now he keeps a room warm and a plate of food waiting for one.
Raeve Nyaxia's patron is Perseis - a Fey goddess of shadow and secrets, the Destroyer of Pasts, the Truthsayer. In another life, in the years when Taliesin carried a sword and used it, a warlock bound to an entity like that would have warranted investigation at minimum. A file opened. Questions asked. Possibly a judgment. Perseis is not a malevolent patron by the standards of most pact-brokers, but she is not a safe one either, and the Paladins of the Coven drew no sharp line between dangerous and evil. They drew it between controlled and uncontrolled, and a goddess who demands her followers learn deceit, learn shadow would have given the Order pause.
Thistle knows this. It sits in the back of his mind like a stone in still water - always there, never stirred, because stirring it would mean examining what exactly he is doing when he makes sure Raeve has supper. Is he caring for her, or is he keeping watch?
He tells himself it's the first. Most days, he believes it.
The trouble with Raeve is that she is not him. This sounds obvious, but it is the mistake he keeps making, quietly, persistently, in the way that water keeps finding the same crack in a wall. He sees the anger in her and recognizes it. He sees the isolation, the contempt for a world that runs on hypocrisy, the magnetic pull toward power as the only reliable shelter - and he maps his own history onto her like tracing paper laid over someone else's drawing. Here is where she is now (the rage). Here is where she will go next (the zealotry). Here is where it ends (Thornhaven, or something shaped like it). He has walked this road. He knows the terrain. He can save her.
Except that Raeve's road is not his road. Her anger is not his anger. His came from guilt and a shattered sense of justice; hers comes from a family that cloaked her in illusion and shame and a world that punished her for existing. His pact was with an institution - the Order, the Oath, the three-threaded shield. Hers is with a goddess who told her the truth when everyone else was lying. These are not the same story, and the danger of treating them as if they are is that he stops seeing her and starts seeing the version of himself he's trying to prevent. That is not protection. It is projection wearing a caretaker's apron.
He does not see this clearly. He sees it in flashes, the way you catch your reflection in a window you weren't looking at - there and gone before you can study it. On the nights when Raeve returns to Viekryss with new scars and that shuttered expression, and he sets a bowl of stew in front of her without asking where she's been, he sometimes wonders: does she eat because she's hungry, or because refusing the food of a man who so obviously needs to provide it would be crueler than swallowing it? Is she accepting his care, or managing his need to give it?
And then there's the patron. Perseis, Truthsayer of Secrets. A goddess whose domain is seeing things as they truly are. Thistle has spent ninety years in Viekryss being nobody's business, deflecting his past with gentle smiles and spoon-and-dragon stories. He has built an identity - Thistle, the innkeeper, the caretaker, the kind grey-furred soul - on top of a century and a half of blood and judgment and nine graves in Thornhaven. And he has taken under his wing a young woman whose goddess specializes in burning away exactly the kind of careful, well-meaning disguise he wears.
He has not thought about this as carefully as he should. When he does, it will unsettle him. Raeve may already see more of him than he knows, or she may see nothing at all beyond a large Firbolg who overcooks the stew and leaves too many biscuits on her plate. Either possibility should keep him up at night. The first because it means his careful separation of Taliesin-the-hunter from Thistle-the-caretaker is thinner than he thinks. The second because it means the goddess of truth has decided he isn't worth examining yet, and gods tend to save their attention for moments when it will do the most damage.
The food is always warm when she comes back. The room is always clean. The biscuits are always there, whether she eats them or not. And Thistle tells himself this is enough, and that it comes from love, and that it has nothing to do with the nine names he carries or the two words that follow him into the small hours of every quiet night.
He is mostly sure about the food.
He is less sure about the rest.
NPCs
- Marva Ironfist's father - Cobbler in Viekryss; long-time close friend (name TBD - pending player input)
Character Arc
Introduced
Session 0 - Campaign start
Major Moments
- Experienced Thistle's Vision - catastrophic prophecy about The Portal to the Sky
Quests & Achievements
Active Quests
- Adventurer's Gambit - Competing with Toil & Trouble
- Thistle's Vision - Understanding and preventing the vision
Personal Quests
- Thistle's Vision - The prophetic vision drives personal quest
Session Log
- Session 0 - Campaign start
- Session 1 - Felt his hand forced to join The Adventurer's Gambit after the others had committed; coaxed Raeve Nyaxia to participate as an opportunity for her to release some of her rage; Toil & Trouble began their attempt at the dungeon; received Adamantine Dagger
- Session 2 - Completed The Adventurer's Gambit; Toil & Trouble was first group to complete the dungeon; in the magical banquet room finale, made sure everyone was fed before taking anything for himself, then pocketed a whole mess of biscuits (caretaker behavior); received 15g as share of 90g reward; held Raeve Nyaxia's 15g share as she disappeared after completion
- Session 3 - Grilled by reporter Kessia Brightpage about dragon slayer rumors, deflected by claiming he vanquished a dragon with a spoon while feeding her biscuits (she believed him); stayed behind in the infirmary after Ellowen Moonthorn spoke with her son Emmeriss, gave Emmeriss 5g and a biscuit, invited him to visit Three Threads Tavern (caretaker behavior); followed Marva to investigate back areas with Kessia; witnessed Perrin Slatevein's disappearance; participated in investigating Renvar Ilthis's room
- Session 4 - Passed Raeve Nyaxia her 15g share from the Gambit; prepared for travel to Davin with party
- Session 5 - At The Griffon and Oak, greased the bartender and spent 1g on dinner and a tip; talked Marva Ironfist into a pit fight with Big John and revived her with Lay on Hands after she was knocked out
- Session 6 - Helped question Big John at the Goblin's Fire; part of the confrontation with Gregor that landed the party in jail
- Session 7 - Revived Lysander Cross with Lay on Hands; struck by visions in the cave; received a potion of wild shape from Ellowen; went down in the lab fight and recovered; destroyed a pit of slugs deeper in Blackroot Hollow; Renvar Ilthis recognized him as "The Hunter" (noted retroactively in Session 8)
- Session 8 - Received a heavy wooden lockbox (50g and invoices) from Kessia Brightpage; spent the morning at the Slatevein estate trying to help with breakfast and getting in the way of the servants (a quiet battle of hospitality versus habit with the head servant); raided the kitchen with Varyn; went looking for Whitethorn's notice board and catalogued the blight warning, missing-person posters, anti-witch propaganda, and the Duke's edict
Party: Toil & Trouble
Business: Three Threads Tavern (Tavern proprietor)
Home Base: Viekryss
Alias: "Thistle"
Related Visions: Thistle's Vision
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