Vixia Emberclaw

Description

A small kobold whose comfortable relationship with death and explosives masks both revolutionary ambitions and a predator's calculating patience. Behind her candle shop lies a web of careful operations—burning trees fed divine blood, shadowless flames brewed in hidden distilleries, and manipulations designed to reshape power structures through fire and strategic elimination. Vixia moves through the world with the comfort of a predator in its element, speaking of violence and death with the same matter-of-fact tone others use for weather. She operates under the cover of her Dragon Sigh candle shop and sprawling farmstead, using druidic magic that manifests as wildfire and destruction to coordinate with wood elf revolutionaries including Sariel and Durian. Her familiar owl delivers messages, her sentient bees serve as sentries, and her operations stretch across months and years—every sacrifice calculated, every person weighed for utility or expendability. Yet cracks appear in her detachment: she withholds the knowledge that Trophis burned Caelum's family home, using it as leverage to manipulate him deeper into darkness, and when forced to reveal dangerous truths, she speaks of genuine care buried so far beneath pragmatism it barely exists—or perhaps it's everything. Her possessiveness over her "toys," particularly Caelum's carefully constructed fall, suggests she may have become too invested in her own game. During the Red Shepherd Games, she sabotaged opponents with calculated interest, understanding that spreading rumors among common folk carries weight beyond noble intrigue. Her gift to Daria of candles representing each century of life, paired with her matter-of-fact acknowledgment that she might not survive to see the 400th birthday, reveals both her practical nature and the dangerous life she leads. Like the scorpion and the toad, Vixia's nature carries a sting that may ultimately drown her alongside those she carries across the water—but whether she's the predator or the victim in that metaphor remains beautifully uncertain.