Magmaw the Meltmeister

Magmaw the Meltmeister is a goblin of singular purpose, and the purpose is fire. Goblins are a rare sight in the Vale of Fingers, and rarer still is one who arrived from somewhere he cannot name, carrying nothing of the life that came before. Where his past should be, there is only a blank. What the blank left behind is appetite: an instinct, an obsession, and the unshakeable conviction that the flame must always grow.

He is not cruel, and not, in any deliberate sense, a danger to those around him. He is warm toward anyone who shares his enthusiasm or is willing to stand near it, and he follows the party into danger less out of loyalty than because danger has a reliable habit of producing opportunities for larger fires. He has no appetite for leading, planning, or weighing consequences. The flame must grow. Everything else is detail.

In Crownhold a mage took an interest in him, having seen something in the way Magmaw handled threadlight — a real aptitude, perhaps the makings of a prodigy. The lessons did not last. Magmaw learned quickly and destroyed more quickly still, and in the end the mage asked him to leave, and then begged. The mage's dog has never grown its fur back. Magmaw wanders the city as he pleases now, attached to no one and answerable to nothing.

Now and again, in the middle of all the noise, his hands do something careful. A measure of threadlight too precise for a creature who claims to want only the largest possible explosion, a control that seems to belong to someone else entirely. The moments pass before he notices them, and he does not wonder where they come from. He has never been one to look backward, least of all into a past that gives him nothing back.