Before Transformation

Krhaal was always the quiet one, the thoughtful one. Taller than most, always stooping, with a wiry frame that gave him the look of someone who had learned to endure hunger and hardship without complaint. His dark, shoulder-length hair was often unkempt, falling into his sharp, tired eyes—eyes that were always searching for something unseen, something lost. They held a strange mix of intelligence and sorrow, as if he had spent his whole life unraveling a puzzle that no one else could see.

His hands were calloused from years of living rough. Cutting wood, scribbling notes, sketching symbols, and turning the brittle pages of forgotten tomes. Even as a child at Wightlych Academy, Krhaal had an obsession with knowledge, especially the kind that should have remained buried. He was the first to question the oddities of their existence, the first to sense that something was wrong beneath the surface of their so-called education.

Despite his sharp mind, he was not cold. He had a dry, often morbid sense of humor, a way of deflecting fear with wit. He was the one who kept the group steady when they planned their escape, the one who never wavered when they set the fire that should have covered their tracks forever. But even then, a shadow lingered in his thoughts—an unease that he never fully spoke of.

After their escape, he lived in solitude, withdrawing from the world as if afraid of what he might become. His home in The Hollow Pines was filled with half-written letters, books on alchemy and other academic theory, and strange symbols scrawled on scrolls. Over the many years he grew gaunt, haunted, speaking of whispers in his dreams, of a hunger that gnawed at the edges of his mind.

And then, the letters began.

By the time the party returned to his home, Krhaal was already gone.

What they found was not him, but a message scrawled in blooded ink.