Gwenivere Velmont

“Not all wounds vanish; some just learn to bloom around the scar.” – Gwen

Background

Lady Gwenivere Velmont was born into a respected noble family in Amulta. Her father, Magnus Velmont, was a renowned arcane researcher and healer, famous for blending herbal medicine and magic to treat mundane illnesses. Her mother, a devoted follower of Winifred Orenda, ran literacy programs for the poor and instilled in Gwen a strong sense of service and compassion.

Their household was one of love, charity, and learning. Gwen’s early years were bright, filled with dreams of becoming a teacher, sharing arcane knowledge with others, and uplifting the forgotten through magic and education.

Everything changed when her mother began to weaken. At first, they thought it was a rare curse or affliction. But it became clear: she had contracted the strange magical wasting disease Magiauredo. Magnus, desperate and grieving, threw himself into research, but nothing worked. She died slowly, painfully.

When Gwen began to show the first signs (minor at first, a shimmer in her skin, a draining of her magical reserves), her father’s sanity frayed. He was convinced he could save her. He abandoned conventional medicine and entered a dark, obsessive phase of experimentation. He brought in volunteers: lesser mages, street conjurers, arcane vagrants. He infected them with the disease to study its effects and find a cure. Gwen, though not a test subject herself, was surrounded by the sounds and smells of the lab, the weeping of those dying around her.

The disease didn’t spread naturally, but her father had learned to replicate and inject it. One after another, the test subjects died. All except one: Elijah, a young mage whose body responded to experimental freezing treatments. He grew stronger, not weaker, but the truth would only come later: the magic had preserved his power, but was eroding his body from within. He would never live to old age.

Then came the fire. Gwen doesn’t know who started it. The lab beneath the Velmont estate burned. Her father died inside. Gwen and Elijah escaped, though they were separated in the chaos. She has not seen him since. She doesn’t know if anyone else made it out.

Fleeing Amulta with little more than her life and scars, Gwen made her way to Idir, settling into a quiet life in the distant town of Haudh-Gwenn. It was not an easy choice. Gwen loved her homeland fiercely and had been raised to serve its people through healing and education. But after the fire that consumed her family estate and the laboratory beneath it, everything changed. She had no idea who was behind it, or why it happened, and that uncertainty hollowed her trust in those around her. The uncertainty, paired with her condition, left her with no choice but to flee for her own safety.

In Haudh-Gwenn, she became an herbalist, using what knowledge and (on rare occasions) magic she still possessed to help others. Her body still bears the disease: its symptoms flare like a rash, sometimes glowing faintly, leaving her drained and in pain. Her magic is not what it once was.

But in spite of everything, Gwen holds on to hope: for healing, for forgiveness, and for the dream of someday returning home to become a teacher of healing and literacy, like her parents before her.

Appearance

Gwenivere stands 5’5”, with a slender frame and slightly pale complexion. Her green eyes are striking, and her auburn hair is worn long and brushed over the left side of her face to conceal the burn scars that mar her cheek and neck. She dresses conservatively, often in buttoned-up dresses of green or gray, and keeps several keepsakes close: a burnt locket from her mother, her family’s signet ring, her old spellbook, and a pendant dedicated to Isara.

Personality

Timid and gentle, Gwenivere is a deeply polite and soft-spoken woman, often burdened by guilt and a sense of helplessness. She apologizes frequently and avoids attention, preferring quiet observation to active participation. She’s curious, highly intelligent, and has a keen interest in the arcane, though she approaches magic now with a cautious reverence, knowing how easily she can reach her limits.

She cherishes dreams, both her own and hearing others’, and finds peace in teaching children, helping the wounded, and tending to her growing collection of wildflowers and herbs. Gwen has a deep fear of fire. Her magic hurts when used without proper channeling, and the burn scars across the left side of her body are a reminder of all that was lost.

Current Role

Gwenivere is engaged to Koa and remains a quiet but invaluable ally to The Valiant Few. She helped Ashanti and Elliot decipher the elusive Mól Encyclopædia, lending her expertise in both language and alternative arcana. Before that she provided discounted supplies and rare herbs to support their cause, and even donated 200 gold, a staggering gesture given her modest means.

She hides now in The Crack, dark, hidden ruins a day’s walk from Haudh-Gwenn. It unnervingly mirrors the lab beneath her old family estate, and the shadows, the damp and the echoes have stirred up memories she thought she had buried.

She is carrying Koa’s child. Nobody announced it. It shows in a hand laid over her belly and in what she does not say, and it has been showing since before the wedding was ever discussed. Set against the Magiauredo, and against a wasting the Chantry gives her about a year to live with, it is the one fact about her that nobody at the Crack will say out loud.

Campaign Updates

She met Koa in Haudh-Gwenn, tending his wounds, and in time the two were engaged. He gave her a tourmaline he had carried for months, and Aldo saw to it that the whole refugee cave heard of it before she could decide how to answer. The same evening gave up her childhood. She was born inside the Amultan facility her father ran, and he experimented on her there at three years old; he also stilled the runaway magic of a genius child called Elijah, by tortuous means. The estate was attacked, the cure was lost, and the fire that scarred her killed him. She has never called herself a test subject.

Two things then arrived close together. She learned what the healing ooze in her own medicines is made from, the melted victims of the curse, which she had been dispensing across Haudh-Gwenn in good faith for years. And she became one of exactly two allies read fully into the curse secrets, the other being Elliot.

By then the Magiauredo was visibly winning. With Beltran’s guard hunting through Haudh-Gwenn the company talked her into shutting the shop and going south for her own safety, and she emptied her savings into the cause: two hundred gold, handed to Koa.

Then came the thing nobody had guessed: Gwenivere shares her body with the Chantry’s masked Slumbering Queen. They are not one person wearing two faces. The Queen is her own person entirely, with her own name and her own will, and for a long time the body looked like the only thing the two of them held in common. The two have never been awake in the same hour. Gwenivere had been taking the soul-goo secretly and by then addictively. It was holding the Magiauredo off, and it was how the Chantry learned its dream-catcher weaving from her. The Iophanite’s warning about a nightmare of her own making had been about this.

The withdrawal was supervised, at The Crack, and it went badly. The Queen surfaced, put the entire camp to sleep, and had a vial of trapped souls nearly to her lips before Koa, Rheem (who does not sleep) and Leon brought her down. She lived. But she is severed from the ooze now, and the disease it was holding back is expected to kill her inside two years. She remains at The Crack, a patient rather than an apothecary.

Leon has kept her there since, against her wishes and to her considerable anger, and kept her away from anything with ooze in it. Koa asked the Elder outright what could be done for her and was told he would have the answer once the curses were broken, and carried that in silence through the whole of the endgame.

The answer came in the ruins of the Twisted Grove, from the god the Elder turned out to have been a shadow of. Magiauredo is from a time long past and is near enough uncurable, and what survives it survives by giving up a portion of who it is. Vëné corrected him in front of everyone, to his visible surprise: the information was antiquated, because while he was shut inside the keeps Gwenivere’s own family did work toward a resolution. It is unfinished. Finishing it would take her back to her roots, and would take other things that have not happened yet.

The Slumbering Queen came with the same answer. She is Gwenivere’s own dreams, manifested in the waking world as a person who takes the body while Gwenivere sleeps, which is why the two of them cannot stand side by side and why Gwenivere fights for the waking. What manifests her is an ancient thing that feeds on sleeping minds, imprisoned beneath Haudh-Gwenn long ago; Gwenivere settled above the prison without knowing it was there and became the entity’s opportunity to grow. It is starved now the ooze is burned, unguarded since she was carried out of the city, and pushing at the lid. Two things would end the Queen: killing the dream, which was put to Koa with a question attached about what it means to destroy a person’s dreams, or killing the thing that conjures her, after which the hold falls away by itself.

Koa was given the choice and not the right to make it. Press the entity back down and Gwenivere gets a good deal more time as exactly the person she is; sever it now and she has almost none. Vëné’s word on it was that it would be cruel if it were not her own choice, so Koa asked for a way to put it to her, and was told to go to the wound in the land where the thing’s lair opens, and call, and take silence for an answer.