Barney (Barnebus)

Barney — Barnebus, when there is time for the whole of it — is a High Elf who has become something his own people would struggle to recognise. He has the look of somewhere like Valmir and the High Elf culture around it, which prides itself on elegance carefully made; whatever he was in that life, he is not it now. He is scarred and often blood-spattered, long dirty-blonde hair and no beard, built rugged where High Elves are usually fine, and dressed halfway between a barbarian and a gladiator: bare above the waist, leather straps below, a sword and a shield close to hand.

There is a tension in him he does not explain and may not have the words for: a High Elf is not supposed to fight like this — all fury, nothing held back, the elegance of his people burned out of him and replaced with something rawer. Whatever turned him from the one into the other, he keeps to himself. The scars and the rage tell a story he has chosen not to.

He hunts bandits. He tracks them across the Vale and into terrain most people will not follow them into, and he does not always stop when the work is done; he will live rough for days, push himself well past necessity, as though the point were never the bandits at all but the making of a fighter that nothing can beat. He does not say why. He was somewhere in Midvale, south of Crownhold, living that way, when the Crucible vision found him.