Worm

Worm is a young human monk, a Warrior of Shadow, raised from boyhood by a band of relic hunters who scavenge the ruins of the Second Epoch for whatever will sell. They kept him around for his size — small enough to fit into the tight spaces the grown members of the crew couldn't reach — and when a job outside Aristonia turned deadly and he stopped being useful to them, they left him for dead and moved on without looking back. He doesn't believe that's the whole story. He's still looking for them, and he still calls them family more readily than the word probably deserves.

He and Biz are rarely more than a room apart. Where Biz talks a mark down, Worm is the one standing close enough to make the talking matter, and between jobs he's the one left holding the coin purse when Biz needs both hands free for something crooked. It isn't an arrangement either of them sat down and agreed to — it just works, most days better than either would admit.

He found his old crew again in Saltmoor, and then again, worse, in the flooded dark of the Vex Caves, where they came asking him to walk away from the people he'd chosen and rejoin the ones who'd left him. He wouldn't. The standoff broke into a fight he didn't want, and by the end of it two of the crew who raised him were dead by his and Biz's hands, and the rest fled up a shaft, a small boy they had given his own name riding on their shoulders. One of them called down an apology on the way out that Worm hasn't decided what to do with yet.

Something has been happening to him that he can't fully explain and mostly doesn't try to. He has always had a knack for going still and unseen in a bad corner, longer than seems natural, and deep under the Vex Caves, in a stretch of corridor where the old magic ran loose and strange, his own small tricks went briefly sideways — the illusion he reached for came out as something else entirely, gone as quickly as it came. He takes it, same as he takes the rest, as proof of the gift the people who raised him always told him he had. He has never had a reason not to believe them.