Mikhail Kethrel

He is in Idir on academic business. A bard and traveling scholar out of Peredhel, schooled at the university in Durwyn in Bardh Province, he came east to study the Idiran curses for his Arcane Congress thesis. He has since spent rather more time inside the cursed keeps than the thesis strictly required.

He kept one thing back from his own companions for a long while. Mikhail is Peren, and wore Lady Eravil’s holy symbol hidden under his shirt the whole time, because Idir is not a country where a Peredhel man announces himself. He told Koa privately, in S2E24, and the sky did not fall.

He works under other names when the work calls for it: Calvin Hobbs at the Color Stay inn (S1E08), Brendan at a clinic that would rather not be named (S5E62), Michelle, an Escarian fashion designer, at the soirée (S6E67–E68). He also lent Aldo his father’s lute so Aldo could compose a song mocking a jailer, having first been asked, and having reluctantly said yes.

In Their Own Words

I believe the world is broken but beautiful, and that it can be refined, not by desire alone, but by story, sacrifice, and the will to do what others won’t. That every truth has a shadow, every hero a flaw, and if the gods are watching, they’re waiting to see if we’ll make something better than what they gave us.

Campaign Updates

Burning the ooze under Haudh-Gwenn was his to run. Three seasons of Ashanti al-Hassan’s work came down to one dawn and one procedure, and after an extra week of drilling he no longer needed her calling the steps. The ooze came apart as the work had always said it would. He stayed until it had burned out rather than take anyone’s word for it, and had to be pulled away.

At the Twisted Grove he forced a radiance crystal down into the death-tree’s roots and burned his hand to the bone doing it, the stone’s facets melting into the palm. The wound is otherworldly and behaves like it. Two days on it still felt fresh and had barely begun to scab, and he is a trained physician and can make nothing of it. What it costs him is the lute, which is not a hobby but the way he thinks. The idling anybody has heard out of him is him focusing, and stopping is strange, and it hurts. Koa recognized the shape of it from his own drills and offered to hold the strings while Mikhail called the notes.

Torgun Kurvroc died in Loshev while the company was north, and the letters reached them too late for the funeral: one from the council, one inviting Mikhail by name to the reading of the will. Half of what the will listed could not be handed over, those objects having been taken in the raid. What could be was given to Mikhail, in praise that reads as though somebody else wrote it, and what he was given was the whole estate, undivided: an old half-furnished house standing on a historical site, needing real work, with the books gone out of it. The room was full of Draazstone hobgoblins who had travelled hundreds of miles to be there, and he was the only person in it who was not one of them and the only one who got anything. His own first thought was that they would take him for the man who killed Kurvroc.

He carries a sliver of Nancáro besides, poured into all three of the company at once so Aldo’s soul could be put back in his body. By Vëné’s correction it holds not for as long as they live but for as long as they exist.