Milovan Umbragate
the Briar Count
Named for the gracious gate through which shadows pass into earth, where roots drink the dark and the soil remembers every burial.
Power
Rootmeld — you dissolve into a tree's root network and emerge from any connected tree within a league, but every journey leaves a splinter of thorn beneath your skin, a splinter that never stops growing.
- Familiar
- a ghost-white adder named Bone
- Bloodline
- The Thornwrought Line
You keep a rusted key that opens nothing, because the door it was made for rotted into soil before you ever turned it. You found it in the fist of a corpse that had clawed its way out of a grave, only to die again at the forest's edge. From that corpse, you took not just the key, but its hunger — you learned that the earth gives and takes, and you have been paying for that key ever since.