Gretchenwald
The Wandering Hermit · Older Than the Fracture · Survivor of the Fracture
A Deepkin of impossible age who predates the Fracture Cataclysm itself — wandering hermit, living paradox, and the only being in Diregulf who confuses himself more thoroughly than he confuses everyone else.
“The pie — yes — no. The pie was after. Or before. The pie was... present. That much I am certain of.”
— Gretchenwald, on the reliability of his own memories
✦Origins & The Fracture
Gretchenwald does not remember being born. This is not unusual — few people do. What is unusual is that he does not remember anything with reliable clarity, including events that, by all accounts, he was present for. He claims to have originated within the Elder Fey Dominion, the unified Fey civilisation that predated the Fracture Cataclysm, born to a happy Deepkin couple whose names he cannot currently produce.
Before the Cataclysm, he worked as a librarian’s assistant. This is perhaps the most coherent biographical detail he possesses, and he offers it with the particular pride of a man who knows it to be true even when nothing else is. He has not, to anyone’s knowledge, successfully recalled which library.
What is known — or at least, what is consistent across the scattered fragments of his testimony — is that he was present at the Fracture Cataclysm itself. Not nearby. Not adjacent. At the dead centre of the point at which the Elder Fey Dominion tore itself apart into the Everbright and the Everdawn. Where those two successor planes diverged, Gretchenwald did not follow either.
He was flung into the Overworld. Changed, somehow. In ways he either cannot or will not explain — though given his general inability to explain anything coherently, the distinction may be meaningless.
◈The Problem of Truth
Somewhere in sixteen thousand years, Gretchenwald’s relationship with linear time and coherent communication became complicated. He is not a liar — or not straightforwardly. He lies about small things, random things, for no apparent reason. He claims to dislike apples and then eats one. He insists he has never visited a city and is clearly known there. He describes events in the wrong order and does not notice.
When he speaks truth — real truth, the kind that matters — he speaks it in riddles. This is not, apparently, a choice. He is genuinely frustrated by it. Those who have spent time around him report that his confusion on this point is authentic: he knows the direct answer, opens his mouth, and something elliptical comes out instead. Whatever the Fracture did to him, it did something to the architecture of his honesty.
⊕The Long Years
14,978 Years Before the Fracture
The Librarian's Assistant
Gretchenwald is born to a happy Deepkin couple in the Elder Fey Dominion — a unified civilisation, a world before the split. He is, by his own account, unremarkable: a Deepkin who likes pie and dislikes time and shelves books for people who cannot be bothered to do it themselves.
The Long Years Before
The Long Life Before
Nearly 15,000 years pass between Gretchenwald's birth and the Fracture Cataclysm — a span longer than any recorded civilisation. What he did during this time is not recorded anywhere and cannot be reliably extracted from Gretchenwald himself, who describes it in terms of pie, eggs, apples, and “that business with the door.” There was apparently a door.
The Fracture Cataclysm
The Centre of Everything
The Elder Fey Dominion tears apart. The Everbright and Everdawn diverge. At the precise point of maximum dimensional rupture — ground zero of the Fracture — Gretchenwald is present. He is flung into the Overworld. He does not become Everbright-aligned or Everdawn-aligned. He becomes something else: older than the division, belonging to neither, changed by forces that have no clear name.
Present Day
Showing Up
Gretchenwald appears in Diregulf — and disappears. And reappears. He has an uncanny habit of being present at exactly the wrong moment, saying exactly the wrong thing, and vanishing before the implications fully land. Whether this is deliberate is unclear even to him.
◇Personality
Gretchenwald is genuinely, permanently confused. Not performatively. Not strategically. He is a being of incomprehensible age who has experienced something no one else has experienced and survived, and the result is a mind that processes the present through a timeline that has long since stopped making sequential sense.
Odd
Not in the endearing eccentric sense, though that is how it often reads from the outside. In the sense that his internal experience of reality does not map cleanly onto anyone else's.
Truth in Riddles
The times he speaks real truth, he speaks it sideways. He cannot help it. He finds it as frustrating as everyone else does, possibly more so.
Genuinely Confused
He is not pretending to be confused. He confuses timelines, cause and effect, who he has spoken to and when. This is not a defence mechanism. It is simply what sixteen millennia does.
True Neutral
He has no allegiances. He predates every faction, every nation, every divide that currently structures the world. He is not above politics — he simply cannot locate them on his internal map.
Dislikes Time
This is listed among his dislikes and it shows. He speaks about time the way most people speak about an old injury — with resigned familiarity and low-level resentment.
Likes Pie & Eggs
Some things persist across sixteen thousand years. He is consistent on pie. He is consistent on apples. He is consistent on eggs. These are, apparently, anchor points.
⋄Role in the Campaign
Gretchenwald is a living artefact — not in the sense of being an object, but in the sense of being a person who belongs to an era that no longer exists. He predates the Everbright. He predates the Everdawn. He predates every Fey political structure currently operating in the world, and every racial division that emerged from the Fracture.
✧Appearance
Gretchenwald presents as a lean Deepkin of six-foot-one, with the dark grey skin common to his people and deep raven-black hair worn long and flowing — an aesthetic choice apparently unchanged for a very long time. His eyes are green. His voice is gravelly and questioning in tone, as though he is perpetually working through a problem he cannot quite resolve.
Most distinctively, he wears mismatched clothing from different eras — not because he is unaware of fashion but because he has accumulated garments across millennia and does not consistently remember which century he picked up which piece. The overall effect is confusing in a way that somehow suits him.
Beneath his clothing, along his back and chest, run lightning-like scars — branching, silver-white patterns consistent with exposure to catastrophic dimensional or planar energies. He does not volunteer information about them. When asked, he typically says something about a door.
His overall presence is described, consistently, as confusing. Not threatening. Not comforting. Simply confusing. He has the quality of someone who is clearly important and clearly fine, in a way that is difficult to explain and impossible to dismiss.