Flint

Flint is a tiefling druid of the Circle of the Moon, an outlander hauled into Aristonia by a tax crackdown that swept up most of Little Pandemonium along with him. He can't produce the coin or the papers to clear a debt of back taxes, so he works it off cleaning the city's waterways — one more tiefling doing the job nobody else wants. He is, by his own account, a farmer and a hermit at heart, and the city sits on him like a coat that doesn't fit: too loud, too crowded, too far from anything growing. What he brought with him instead of coin is a quiet, constant conversation with the ground under his feet — less a religion than a habit of noticing Gaia in everything, which nobody in Little Pandemonium quite knows what to make of.

An orange tabby found him within days of his arrival and has never really left — trailing him through docks and back alleys, riding out a sea crossing, now bonded to him as something more than a stray. In a fight Flint has been the party's steadiest hand: Cure Wounds pulled two of them back from the brink in his first outing with the group, and he's just as likely to solve a problem by turning into a wolf or a great brown bear as by casting a spell.

Up the coast north of Saltmoor, in a stand of wind-bent pine the locals call the Saltwood, Flint found something closer to family than he's had in years. The party arrived to a druid camp under attack by one of its own — a huge coastal elk, sickened and maddened by something poisoning the coast from the north — and where a fight would have been the easy answer, Flint talked it down instead, reading its pain rather than its rage while the others roped it to the ground alive. The circle's elder, Bracken, received him afterward as one of their own, a fellow moon-circle druid, and named the sickness creeping down from an old ruin further north that his people won't go near. Over a short rest by the fire, Bracken told the old story that goes with it — a moon-marked woman, generations back, said to carry a little of the moon's own light under her skin, who walked north under a rising blue moon and quieted that same machine-place rather than fighting it — and pressed the circle's own keepsake into Flint's hands: the Moon Sickle, cold and ordinary for longer than anyone living can remember. The night Flint carried it south again, it woke with a faint glow, the first anyone of the circle had seen from it in memory.

Flint gave his clan a name out loud for the first time at the Saltwood — the Bedrock clan — more to himself than to anyone listening. He carries the sickle north with the rest of the party now, toward whatever is poisoning the coast, welcomed by people who share his god and his kind of quiet for the first time since he was a boy.