Kazimir
- Race
- Spriggan (Leshy)
- Born
- 25 years ago
- Died
- n/a
- Aliases
- Kaz
- Twig-Biter
- Surovoy
- Family
- tbd
- Racial characteristics
- Shadow magic, flight, glamour, vulnerability to iron
- Sex
- Male
- Height
- 93mm or 70mm depending on scale
- Weight
- 7.5g at 70mm scale
- Hair
- Black
- Eyes
- Gray
- Affiliations
- Her Majesty's Royal Army (scout brigade) (deserter)
Born to the Chernobrov clan of Spriggans, Kazimir was raised in the traditional manner of the Twilight Forest, learning to hunt, trap, and play the dangerous woods.
History
- Race & Subrace: Spriggan (Leshy Tribe of the Twilight Forest)
- Scale: Standing 79 mm tall and weighing a wiry 6.8 grams, he is built for low-perch silence and swift bough-to-bough glides.
- Birthplace: The Hollow of Chernobog, an ancient, lightning-split deadwood pine in the deep southern canopy of the Twilight Forest, right where the dark boughs begin to brush the towering oaks of the Greenmantle's High Forest.
Birthplace & Clan Kinship
Kazimir emerged from his chrysalis-drift into a world cloaked in perpetual dusk. In the communal Leshy warrens, ancestral lore holds that while High Fey claim memories die during metamorphosis, a family's bond survives through the items passed between hands. Raised in the crowded belly of Chernobog’s hollowed trunk, he grew up surrounded by extended kin, moth-down bedding, and hanging shelves of salvaged river glass.
His family was governed by the uncompromising matriarch Old Aunt Marzanna, a sharp-tongued Leshy elder who taught the young hatchlings that the outside world is populated entirely by fools and marks. From Marzanna, Kazimir inherited his deep sense of the Amari—the clan code: outsiders are sheep to be sheared, but kin share the last drop of dew. His closest companion was Mila the Weaver, a childhood friend and seamstress who crafted his first pine-bark tunic and reinforced his iridescent moth-veined wings with midnight spider silk. Together, they learned to survive the harsh forest floor, dodging predatory blind centipedes and ground-hunting weasels among the deep leaf litter.
Frontier Service: The Queen’s Auxiliary Scouts
When the Sun-Blossom Court pushed its frontier outposts into the wild marshes and thorny hedges, royal recruiters arrived demanding a "leaf-tithe" of able-bodied skirmishers. Rather than let his clan’s meager honeydew stores be seized, Kazimir stepped forward, enlisting in the Queen’s Frontier Auxiliaries.
Assigned to the border marches near the Briar Patch, he quickly earned the nickname "Twig-Biter" among the high-caste Sylph commanders. He carried a dried pine needle between his teeth to regulate his breathing, stalking the dark thickets to flush out mantis scouts and border beasts. In the ranks, he forged an uneasy, pragmatic friendship with a common Cait Sith scout named Kizzy, whose sharp nose and night vision mirrored his own.
Yet the frontier was an eye-opener. Kazimir saw firsthand the court's deep disgust for basekin and sylvan-featured fey. He watched highborn officers lounge under silk pavilions drinking refined honeydew while common Leshy and feral-kin skirmishers were thrown into briar ambushes as disposable arrow-fodder. It was during this campaign that he earned the lasting hatred of Captain Yvaine of the Silver Pinions, a pompous Sylph officer whose entire rear guard survived only because Kazimir broke formation to draw away an ambushing mantis brood—an act Yvaine officially branded as "insubordinate cowardice" to cover her own tactical blunder.
Mastering the Arcane Archer: The Lesson in the Mire
During a disastrous patrol through the waterlogged margins where the Twilight Forest sinks toward the Nightmarsh, Kazimir’s unit was pinned down by a band of scrap-armed raiders carrying rusted bobby-pin spears. The metallic hum of the Bane was overwhelming; its entropic drain sickened the fey, leaving them sluggish and unable to take flight.
Cut off from his squad, Kazimir took shelter in the hollow root of a weeping willow, stumbling into the muddy shrine of Old Semyon, an ancient, reclusive Bog-Wisp and veteran wanderer. Seeing the terrified young scout fumbling with ordinary wooden darts, Semyon struck him across the knuckles with a dried reed and taught him the core secret of the Leshy shadow-shooters: a physical arrow hits only flesh, but an arrow woven from the Gloss bends the battlefield itself.
Under Semyon's harsh, rapid tutoring, Kazimir learned to marry his innate Spriggan shadow-magic with marksmanship:
- Shadow-Weaving the Shaft: Rather than firing simple splinters, he learned to condense ambient gloom and dusk-spores around a dried hawthorn needle, creating projectiles that strike as silent phantom bolts.
- Bait-and-Switch Glamours: He learned the "Tracer Trick"—infusing an arrow with dazzling light or terrifying phantom shrieks so that, upon impact, enemies spin toward an empty clearing while he slips into the opposite shadow.
- The Entropic Foil: By threading his bowstring with high-tensile silk treated with non-conductive pine sap, he mastered the art of loosing arrows into the dead zones of human iron without having his own vital anima siphoned down the shaft.
With these newly forged arcane shots, Kazimir single-handedly blinded the raiders with shimmering dusk-glamours, broke the siege, and melted away before the morning sun broke through the canopy.
The Desertion and the Mark
Disillusioned with fighting for an autocratic Queen who viewed his people as vermin, Kazimir didn't bother waiting for an honorable discharge. One moonless night along the western march, he tucked his service chevron under a stone, appropriated a scavenged brass watch gear and a quiver of fine thorn shafts, and slipped into the brambles.
Now free of the ranks, Kazimir lives by his wits and the sacred priority of the family ledger. When his keen eyes catch two clueless, non-Spriggan adventurers stumbling heedlessly through the perilous twilight boughs—ripe with high-value gear and utterly blind to the teeth hidden in the shadows—the hunter in him sees the greatest hunt of all. Slipping an arrow from his quiver, he steps into their path, wide-eyed and performatively breathless, ready to save them from every terrible trick in the forest—just as long as they pay him handsomely for the privilege.