ALMERIC

Overview

Guide. Scholar. Former King’s Patroller. The one man in the border country who walks into Wilderwood on purpose and walks out again.

Almeric was born in a woodcutters’ village on the eastern edge of Wilderwood, where the land climbs out of the forest toward the Alzion Mountains. Children there learned the forest’s rules before their letters: never answer a voice from the trees, never follow a light into the fog, never burn wood that glows. Goblins raided down from the mountains most summers, and the village feared them less than the woods at its back. The goblins, for their part, gave the forest’s heart a name of their own. They called it the Hollow, and they would not cross it.

At sixteen, Almeric walked east into the Alzions and took the eagle of Alzion Hall, joining the handful of King’s Patrollers who still hold the ruined hall and the passes below it. For twenty years he ranged the foothills, hunting goblin raiders and bringing lost travelers down from the heights. He learned to find his way anywhere a trail had ever run.

The patrollers’ charge ends at Wilderwood’s tree line, and the hall’s commanders have forbidden crossing it for generations. In his thirty-seventh year, Almeric led a patrol over that line anyway, chasing a raiding party into the fog. He walked out alone. By his count, he spent three days inside. By everyone else’s, most of a month passed. Alzion Hall struck his name from its rolls, and he has spent every year since learning what took his patrol.

His teachers were whatever he could find: crumbling chronicles of Lord Caelmir’s lost kingdom, the sayings and charms of hill-country grandmothers, and the scraps of warding craft left behind by the Verdant Crown’s fallen coven. He now guides treasure hunters, and he charges them dearly. The coin buys his books. The companies carry him deeper into the Hollow than one old man could go alone.

Appearance

Almeric looks seventy and is closer to fifty-five. Wilderwood takes its toll on anyone who returns to it, and the craft he uses to survive there takes more. His face is weathered brown and creased deep, his beard short and grey, his hands all knuckle and tendon. He moves stiffly until he needs to move fast, and then he moves faster than a man his apparent age has any right to. His eyes are pale and never still.

He dresses for the woods rather than for company. An oiled leather coat, black at the seams, hangs over layered wool. He has resoled his boots so often that little of the original leather remains. A satchel of battered notebooks rides at his hip. Over everything he still wears the grey-green cloak of the King’s Patrollers, though Alzion Hall stopped counting him one of its own long ago.

His staff is plain ash, a hand taller than he is, and hung with charms: bone and iron, carved wood and hammered silver, each on its own cord. He can find any charm in the dark by touch. They knock together when he walks, and the sound grows louder when his hands are unsteady.

Abilities & Expertise

Almeric is the finest guide in the border country, and no other will take coin to enter Wilderwood. Paths inside the forest shift, and time runs crooked there. He finds his way regardless, by a sense he has never been able to explain. He has never lost the road out.

No one living holds more of the Hollow’s history: the Verdant Crown and its guardian witches, Morwenna the Ambitious and the hunger she woke beneath the roots, the betrayal of Lord Caelmir the Resplendent. He has cataloged the forest’s rules as well—what the shades may and may not do, what draws them close, what keeps worse things at bay. His knowledge has gaps, and he can name every one.

His true strength he keeps hidden. The charms on his staff are wards, and in extremity Almeric can wake them into a working that hurls back the dead and staggers things much worse. The coven that once guarded the Verdant Crown claimed their craft drew on a power older than the Old Gods. Almeric learned it alone and in pieces, and it answers him at a price. Each great working spends his years, leaving him grey, shaking, and older than he was an hour before. He does not know how many such workings he has left, and he would rather not find out.

Personality & Demeanor

Almeric talks like a scholar and watches like a soldier. He tells the Hollow’s history in a low, even voice that draws listeners closer to the fire, and all the while his eyes keep moving across the dark beyond them. His humor runs dry and grim. Ask him whether a venture is the worst idea you have ever had, and he will tell you it likely is, then help you carry it out.

He fears Wilderwood and does not pretend otherwise. Fear keeps a man alive, in his view, provided he never lets it steer. Patience serves him the same way. His favorite answer to any question about the Hollow is not yet.

He is not a comfortable man to know. He leads fortune hunters into a forest he knows will kill some of them, takes their coin, and tells himself he brings most of them back. Most is the word he never examines. When shades gather at the edge of the firelight, he counts them. He is looking for faces he knows, and some nights he finds them.

Notable Relationships

The patrol he lost in Wilderwood remains the central fact of his life: five patrollers of Alzion Hall who followed him across the tree line because he told them to. He has never told a client their names.

A few of the old patrollers still share a fire with him when he passes through the Alzions. The rest will not say his name.

To the company that hired him for Wilderwood—Cassian, Marella, Daegra, and Lista—he was paid help, and he kept the distance paid help keeps. Cassian gave him the scorn of the young for the cautious. Marella gave him the respect Cassian withheld. Lista listened to his tales more closely than anyone, and asked the questions he least wanted to answer.

He has heard the Witch-King’s cry a dozen times over the years. He knows the name the thing once bore and the brother who took it from him. What he does not know is how much of Caelmir remains inside it, and that question draws him back across the tree line as surely as the coin.

Role & Affiliations

Almeric works as a guide for hire along Wilderwood’s borders. Sooner or later, the regulars at the Stabbing Sword send any company that asks after the forest to him, and he meets most of them there, over a drink they pay for. He answers to no order and no lord. Once a King’s Patroller of Alzion Hall, he counts himself the last student of the Verdant Crown’s warding craft. Whether that makes him the forest’s warden or one more of its servants is a question he does not ask aloud.