MOSS | Level 7
The Lonely Tortle
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Age 43 · Male · 5'4" · 240 lbs · Green skin · Hazel eyes
Moss prepares spells each dawn: up to 6 Cleric (WIS 4 + CL 2) and 9 Druid (WIS 4 + DL 5). Life Domain spells are always prepared. Tap a spell, then "Prepare" to build your daily list.
Attunement: 3/3 slots used. No room for additional attuned items.
Prepares up to 1st-level Cleric spells (6 + Life Domain always-prepared). Prepares up to 3rd-level Druid spells (9).
Moss was born where the forest gives up. Past the last honest tree, where roots dissolve into black water and the air tastes like peat and patience. The hidden marshes. He spent forty years there, mostly alone, mostly fine with it. The cypress knew him by the sound of his shell scraping through the shallows. The herons let him pass without startling. He was part of the landscape, same as the moss that grew on everything, same as the name he carries.
There was a nest. Eggs in the soft mud beneath the burial cypress, warm from his body heat and the slow rot of the marsh floor. His clutch. The only thing he ever built that wasn't shelter. The plague came on migrating birds. Something from the northern flyways, invisible and efficient. By the time the eggs went cold, Moss had already been praying for three days. He did not know clerical magic yet. He was praying the way animals pray: by refusing to leave.
He learned healing after. The cruelest sequence: the knowledge arriving one season too late, like rain after the crop is already dead. He built a cairn in the deepest part of the grove. Set a gem atop it, polished and green, the color of the eggs before the cold. He told himself the spirits might look back. He told himself it mattered. It did not bring them back. But it gave his hands something to do besides shake.
He became the grove's keeper. Tended the animals, read the root-networks, guided the passing spirits toward whatever comes next. Circle of the Shepherd, they call it in the druidic orders. Moss just called it staying. His totem chose itself: the Unicorn spirit, luminous and warm, an aura that mends what it touches. He did not choose it for its healing power. He chose it because it reminded him of the light in the nest before the cold.
A band of adventurers stumbled into the marshes. Broken. Poisoned. Barely breathing. Moss healed them over three days, fed them swamp soup that smelled like herbs and tasted like something pulled from a shell, and watched them leave. He stood at the edge of the grove for a long time after. The marsh would always be safe. The marsh did not need him. Everything outside was bleeding.
He left with his staff wound in vines, the burial cairn gem hanging against his chest, robes woven with creeping plants that still grew. What he found on the road, who he walks with now, the tiefling and the cat and the quiet one: that is a story from a different time.
