Darian Fenblade

Darian Fenblade is a Polder, a woodsman and hunter by trade, who became an adventurer the way most people do not choose to: through loss. He kept a hunting lodge on the edge of Greyhart, a small village near Dunhallow in Northvale — sold game, told stories at the tavern, and wanted nothing more than for the quiet to last. Greyhart sat close enough to the Fingers that corruption was a fact of life there, a slow pressure everyone had learned to live beside.

The corruption stopped being a background fact the night the monsters came. They came for several nights, bolder each time, and on the worst of them a passing band of adventurers stood with the village in its defence. Greyhart held. Barely. By the last morning most of the defenders were dead, every one of the adventurers among them, and Darian was bleeding out among the fallen.

He did not die, because a fox spirit decided he should not. It was no act of mercy: the spirit was furious at the corruption that had drawn the monsters, and it bound itself to Darian to keep a hand in the world. The bond gave him a second shape and a companion that is in no way tame — it nudges him toward what it judges important, and when it decides the time has come, it can force the change whether he wills it or not. The survivors of Greyhart resettled in Dunhallow. Darian did not go with them. He has walked Northvale ever since, following the spirit's pull toward small places with corruption in them and too few hands to fight it.

When the Crucible vision came, the fox spirit named it the way he should go, and told him — in the wordless way it tells him anything — that the corruption he has been fighting all this time is bound up with the green ring he saw turning in the dream. Darian does not pretend to understand the connection. He has only learned that the nudge is usually right, and so he is heading to Crownhold.