Yezzi - XERES LIVE!

📋

Basic Information

Full Name

Yezzi

Nickname

"Nightlight"

Race (Grade)

Kobold (E)

Class

Sorcerer

Height

3'11"

Birthday

Frostnight 24, 1256

Age

Loading...

Birthsign

The Twilight Phoenix

🩸

Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

🪞

Physical Description

Yezzi, with a handful of the night sky

Appearance

Yezzi stands just short of four feet, which makes him the tallest kobold most people will ever meet and still leaves him looking up at nearly everyone in Rokoura. His scales are a deep violet, almost black along his crest and the spines of his tail and paler, close to lavender, at his throat and fingers. A crown of short dark horns sweeps back from his brow, broad frills fan out behind his jaw with a warm rose color inside them, and the very tip of his tail gives off a faint glow that he has never been able to explain or put out. His eyes are large and gold, with slit pupils, and they are the only part of him that looks his age. He is fifty years old and has the face and frame of a kobold of twenty-five. He still dresses as an elder of Burrowbough: a hooded robe of indigo cloth, layered and belted, trimmed in gold and stitched all over with small stars and moons. A wide leather belt carries his pouches, three brass charms on chains, one for each of Xeres's moons, and a row of stoppered vials that glow a soft blue and violet in the dark. His staff is dark, twisted oak wound with brass wire, and it is a full head taller than he is.

Unique Characteristics

Yezzi's sorcery has only ever taken one shape, and it is the night sky. When he casts, violet and blue light turns in slow spirals around his hand, thick with points like stars, and what it does can be as small as a single mote left hanging over a child's bed or as large as a fire that the dead of the Geldergreen could not walk through. Nearly everything he carries was made for him by his village. The staff is a limb of the old oak that stood beside Burrowbough's meeting hall, brought down by lightning years ago. Its head is newer: a cage of brass rings bent for him by Tozzle, the village clockmaker, around a violet crystal that Skobble dug out of the roots while cutting a burrow. The robe was the village's gift when he was seated as an elder. It was sewn with one star for every kobold living in Burrowbough that day, and a new star was added for every child born afterward. Yezzi knows which star belongs to whom. He has not unpicked any of them. The vials on his belt hold dew gathered on clear nights and left out under the open sky until it takes on a glow, and he says they are for nights when the clouds are in and he needs reminding of what is up there.

🧭

Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Gentle, patient, and very hard to hurry or anger
Listens to the whole of an answer before he speaks
Endlessly good with frightened children
Knows the night sky the way others know a road
Stays awake so that other people can sleep

Challenging Traits

Carries every death in Burrowbough as his own fault
Will not give advice now, even when asked outright
Barely sleeps, and hides how little
Turns aside any kindness aimed at himself
Trains past exhaustion, as if it were penance

They asked me whether we should leave, and I told them the forest would keep us. I was the one who read the signs. So they stayed. That is the whole of it.

For thirty years I watched the sky for them. Frost, rain, when to plant. It never once occurred to me to watch the ground.

The little ones called me Nightlight. I would hang a star over the bed and promise it would still be there in the morning. I have been thinking a great deal about what else I told them would be there in the morning.

Likes

A whole sky with no branches across it
Children asking what the staff is for
Sitting beside someone without needing to talk
Listening to Funzi plan absolutely anything
The hour before dawn, when the stars are sharpest

Dislikes

Being called Elder
Being told that it was not his fault
Something moving in dry leaves after dark
Lamps left burning where they can be knocked over
Undeath, and anyone who thinks of it as a tool

📜

Background & History

Nightlight

Yezzi was born in Burrowbough, a kobold village deep in the Geldergreen, on Frostnight 24, 1256, in the darkest stretch of the year. Like every child there he was raised by the whole village, and the whole village knew one thing about him before it knew anything else: he was afraid of the dark. The winter burrows among the oak roots are black from dusk until morning, and night after night he lay awake in them. When he was six, he reached the point where he could not bear it any longer, and a single point of violet light opened in the air above his bed and stayed there until dawn. Nobody had taught him. Nobody in Burrowbough could have. The elders came to look, decided it was harmless, and within a year every kobold with a frightened child was carrying it to Yezzi's bedside at dusk. He would hang a small star over each one and promise that it would still be there in the morning. It always was. The children called him Nightlight, and the name outlasted his childhood, his growing to nearly four feet tall, and every attempt he ever made to be taken seriously.

Above the Canopy

Burrowbough lived under oak leaves and saw the sky in pieces. Yezzi wanted all of it. As a boy he climbed to the crown of the tallest oak in the village, higher than the roof crews went, and built himself a perch where the canopy opened and nothing stood between him and the stars. He spent most of the nights of his life there. He learned the turning of the constellations and the paths of the three moons with no one to teach him, and he learned what they meant for the ground below: that the color of Verdant's glow told the turn of the season more truly than the leaves did, and that a certain ring around Lumina meant frost within three nights. The village came to plant, harvest, and mend its roofs by what Yezzi saw from the oak. It was also on that perch that he slowly understood he was not aging as the others were. The kobolds born the same winters as him grew grey-scaled and stiff, while he stayed as he had been at twenty-five. Burrowbough seated him among its elders at thirty-four, the youngest it had ever chosen, and sewed him a robe with a star on it for every kobold in the village.

The Forest Will Keep Us

When Gelderai fell to the undead in the late summer of 1306, the dead began to gnaw at the edges of the Geldergreen, and some in Burrowbough wanted to leave while they still could. The elders met in the meeting hall to decide it. Yezzi spoke last. He had walked that forest for forty years, he said, and the dead kept to the roads and the ruins; they had never once come so deep among the old trees. A village of small folk strung out along an open road, with its children and its grey-scales, would be in far more danger than the same village in its own boughs. He told them that the forest would keep them, and that he would watch. The others agreed, because Yezzi was the one who read the signs. For a year he was right. He walked the bounds of the village at the dark of every month and found nothing, and Burrowbough slept soundly on his word.

A Quarter of an Hour

On the night of Goldenleaf 26, 1307, when Kobbin's alarm rang out, Yezzi did not climb. The oldest kobolds in Burrowbough, the ones born the same winters as him, no longer slept in the summer perches. They slept in the root burrows by the stream, and they were the villagers least able to reach a branch. Yezzi stood in front of their doors and put everything he had between them and the dead. For about a quarter of an hour he was the most dangerous thing in the Geldergreen: the light that had hung over two generations of children's beds came down among the oak roots as fire, and the dead did not get through it. Then it was gone, all at once, the way a lamp goes when the oil is spent. Two roofers dragged him up a trunk by his robe. He spent the rest of that night in the branches with nothing left in him, listening. The children in the trees around him asked for Nightlight, and he could not make so much as a spark. It was Tozzle, calling out the hours until sunrise, who gave them something to hold on to.

Not everyone he had stood in front of reached a branch. Yezzi does not know how many of the dead he put down that night. He knows from Jozub's Roll exactly how many of the living he failed to reach.

The Young Ones' Road

Yezzi walked out of the forest in the middle of the column and said very little. It was the young who brought Burrowbough through the big-folk towns and onto the road to Haven: Funzi with her lists, Jozub reading every contract aloud, Pexxi standing guard at the back in armor made for a child. Nobody asked the elders what to do, and nothing went wrong because of it. Yezzi noticed. He was prouder of them than he could say, and he understood that whatever Burrowbough was going to become, it would not need him to decide it. He reached Goodberry with most of the village and stayed two nights. He went to every household of survivors in the city, and in every one of them somebody moved over to make room for him by the fire and called him Elder. Not one of them blamed him. On the third morning he took the portal road to the coast.

The Whole Sky

He had two reasons. Funzi and Pexxi were in Rokoura, the only two of Burrowbough's people on that whole shore, and Yezzi has always believed that an elder belongs where the fewest are, because the many have each other. The other reason he kept to himself. He had heard that Rokoura was built by two peoples who were nearly swallowed by history, and that they had answered it by raising a memorial ground and treating remembrance as a duty instead of a wound. He arrived on Harvestide 5, 1307, a little before dusk, and for the first time in his life he saw the entire sky at once, from one edge of the world to the other, with not a single branch across it. He stood on the Ākau Nui until the stars came out. Then he walked to Ngā Pou Mahara, the Pillars of Remembrance, and stopped at the edge of the ground, unsure whether a stranger was permitted any closer. One of the keepers moved over to make room and did not ask him anything. In Rokoura they call that Te Noho Kotahi, the gift of presence. It was the first hour since Goldenleaf 26 in which nobody had needed Yezzi to be anything at all.

✨

Goals & Aspirations

The Names on the Shore

Burrowbough's dead have no ground. There is no grave to visit and no post carved for them, only one side of a list written on birch bark. Yezzi has written to Jozub for a copy of that side of the Roll. Rokoura keeps Te Pō o Ngā Wairua, the Night of Spirits, on Mistfall 28, with dimmed fires and lowered voices, and on that night he means to stand on the shore and speak every name aloud, and to set one small light over the water for each of them as he does. They would be the first lights he has made since the night the village fell. He has not yet asked whether an outsider may do such a thing here. He is working out how to ask it properly, and whom.

Why They Came So Deep

Yezzi does not excuse himself, and he is careful that this never sounds like an excuse. But he walked the Geldergreen for forty years, and what happened on Goldenleaf 26 does not fit anything he knows. The dead he had watched at the forest's edge wandered. The dead that came to Burrowbough came deep, in numbers, and nearly straight, as though they had somewhere to be. He wants to know what could make them do that, before it happens to someone else's village. Rokoura's Tohunga read signs of a kind he was never taught, and its people hold undeath to be a violation of a spirit's passage. He thinks they may be the right ones to ask.

Lighting One Again

He has not hung a star over a child's bed since the night he could not. Rokoura's children found him within an hour of his arrival, as children always do, since he is very nearly their height and carries a staff with a glowing stone in it. They asked what it was for, and he told them it holds the sky up. They have requested a demonstration. For now he is starting with smaller things. He keeps watch on the Great Shore at night, since he is awake anyway, and he has begun trading star names with the tide pilots, who steer by the same lights he once read for frost and call every one of them something different. One evening a child will ask him for a light because it is dark, and he will find out whether he still can. He is not sure. He would like to be.

🌱

Development

🌌

Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Sorcerer

From Burrowbough