Fulchor of Ameresh is a man out of time, and perhaps, out of place. His skin is marred by the scars of his trade, burns cover his scalp and parts of his face. He moves through the streets of Edana like a ghost dressed in threadbare scholar’s robes, the scent of crushed herbs and damp parchment lingering about him.
He was born in Ameresh — a mountain village swallowed nearly five centuries ago by the Shadowclan of Orcs. The place remains in ruin, its stones blackened and half-buried beneath moss, but a stubborn few dwell there still — folk hardened by wind, cold, and the memory of death. Fulchor’s blood runs with their tenacity. Though thin, he is not frail. His hands are calloused from travel and tincture-work, his eyes sharp from years of sketching foreign flora by candlelight.
He came down from the mountains seeking knowledge rather than coin, drawn by rumor of the Court Mage, Larissa Aylomeinne — once called the Storm Sorceress before she bent her power to the service of King Lando Narindun. It was said she could call lightning from a clear sky and harness its fury in the palm of her hand. Edana, capital of Mercadia, sprawls along the northwestern coast, its air cool and heavy with the scent of salt and pine. Beyond its walls lie forests thick and whispering, where Fulchor often wanders alone. There he studies the blood mosses that cling to stone and drink the moisture of decay, and the night-blooming flowers that feed on fog. He writes of them in careful script, with sketches precise as surgical incisions.
But Edana is not kind to strangers. Its people are wary, and its council wary still. To open his alchemy shop — to bring his elixirs and restoratives to those who shiver in the cold alleys or cough their lives away in the lower quarter — he needs the sanction of Councilman Cedric Warren. Yet Cedric, ever entangled in the politics of the capital, has no time for a pale wanderer from a dead village.
So Fulchor waits. He rents a narrow loft above a run-down inn with no name, marked only by a weathered sign that reads simply, Inn. Below, the hearth is seldom lit and the patrons fewer each night. There, in the dim loft, he grinds herbs by moonlight and dreams of a place filled with warmth and light — a shop where glass vials glimmer like jewels, and the people of Edana might find healing, not suspicion. But until the councilman’s seal is given, he remains a ghost once more — drifting between alley and forest, between solitude and the faint, aching hope of belonging.