Tar Azal

Tar Azal — Tar, to the few who earn it — is a devil who carries a wound he will not name. He had no settled self before a mage called Master Oryn, the Ashen Hand, found him and made him part of the College of Black Ash. Oryn became a teacher, and then something nearer to a father. That is the part that still cuts.

Tar came too close to something Oryn could not allow to surface, and learned that the trust between them had always had a floor beneath it, prepared in advance. The contingencies closed in a single night: Tar was framed, Oryn vanished, and the man who had been a father became the architect of his ruin. Tar did not stay to clear his name. He ran, and found out which doors the criminal underworld keeps open for the recently betrayed.

Oryn took a book with him when he disappeared. On its cover was a green ring — a symbol Tar did not understand then and cannot read now. In the chaos he tore a single page from it, written in a language he has never been able to decipher, and he has carried it through everything since. When the Crucible vision showed him a great jade ring turning in the air, he knew it on sight: the same green, the same shape, out of the worst night of his life. Whatever this quest is, it leads back to Oryn, and to the book.

Crownhold is not home. It is the place in the Vale where information moves most freely, and so it is where Tar waits, listens, and pulls gently at threads. He keeps a footing here through Valerius 'The Ledger' Vane, a broker whose friendship is genuine and entirely transactional at the same time. He presents as cynical and easily charming; underneath sits a grief he has not finished and a distrust he has earned. He wants the truth about Oryn more than he wants to be safe, and far more than he wants to be rich.