Player character of The Rosenthorne Court Incident. A rather wealthy noble with many contacts searching out rare items of interest for him. His prize is a firearm of Elvish origin — exceedingly rare, and it cost him a pretty penny. He likes to show it off to other nobles, but dares not flash it around the unwashed rabble lest he have to use it to keep it from being stolen.
Biography
Noble gunslinger, collector, and steadfast ally whose greatest courage was choosing obligations he never had to accept.
Lord Giles Darrington cultivated the image of a man who was difficult to surprise. He was a proud hunter, a practiced shot, and an alchemical experimenter who mixed specialized reagents for his weaponry. His treasured firearm was an ornate elven gun purchased at considerable expense and displayed with the satisfaction other nobles reserved for bloodlines or estates. In a hunting lodge he could look entirely at home with cigar smoke, trophies, and a story about the shot that brought each one down. The Rosenthorne disaster placed him in a sequence of situations in which appearances, tracks, strange creatures, and unfamiliar machines mattered as much as raw force. For a hunter accustomed to understanding what he pursued, the months that followed were an education in prey that could cross worlds and in landscapes whose rules had to be learned while moving through them.
Giles was present at Rosenthorne when Markus Tatarmoff explained Project Sunrise. The observatory had been built to establish a lasting bridge to a separate plane of existence, an achievement ambitious enough to sound like the sort of thing a collector of rare experiences might boast of seeing once. It became something else before the evening was over. Armed attackers struck during dessert, plunging the room into darkness and crashing through the windows. Later, the observatory exploded, killing Markus and the researchers and leaving the portal itself unstable or gone.
For Giles, one of the most important clues was also among the smallest: two sets of small footprints at the point where the portal had been. Their owners were not known. The tracks did not answer whether the missing people had crossed willingly, been taken, or even moved in the direction everyone feared. But the sign mattered because it was physical. Amid political claims, magical catastrophe, and frightened testimony, there was a trail.
The following days offered less certainty than a normal hunt. Vika Yeetfield confessed to helping an outsider gain access to Rosenthorne but insisted she had expected a nonlethal theft. Captain Lena Glitz arrived to investigate. Then the breach itself produced Skumpy, a four-armed traveler, and hostile creatures from another plane. Giles fought alongside the others rather than treating the supernatural intrusion as someone else’s problem. Skumpy said her world was Naa, that the Nardics were exploiting the bridge as a beachhead, and that a woman and a child had crossed it.
Drankov supplied the kind of evidence that required less trust. The town had been emptied. An inactive Nardic gate stood there, and drag marks led from throughout the settlement toward the opening. Some of the victims had clearly been alive and struggling when they were taken. Whatever uncertainties surrounded Skumpy’s larger political account, Giles could read the aftermath for himself: people had been harvested from the town and carried through an interplanar conduit.
The pursuit of the assassins remained active in parallel. Robbie Karmov was caught alive and described the apparent Agrarian connection as a false flag. Markus, he said, had been the intended target. A lead involving passed notes in Westbridge led to Staffley and another ambush. Later information tied the original attackers to an assassin gang associated with Red Shield and suggested infiltration within the Agrarian Guild. Yet the final sponsor remained hidden. Giles was therefore dealing with two kinds of quarry at once: one human and deliberately obscured, the other alien and increasingly visible.
Once it became clear that the bridge could not be fully severed from Rosenthorne, Giles committed to the crossing. A final hit squad struck the estate before departure and was defeated. The travelers were warned that their arrival point in Naa could be imprecise by many miles, a reminder that even reaching the hunting ground would involve uncertainty.
On the far side, Skumpy guided them toward City Six through storm drains and the lower structure rather than the guarded approaches. The route suited Giles. It reduced exposure, exploited terrain, and treated the city as something to be read rather than confronted head-on. Contact with Malomo’s resistance turned the outsiders into active allies of people already fighting Nardic rule.
The City Six temple operation was the first major strike. Prisoners were found and released. The Naa-side bridge apparatus was destroyed. Records indicated that a mother and daughter had been sent to the capital for the Queen. Before withdrawal, the temple was burned while the freed captives escaped. The action shifted Giles’s place in the conflict. He was no longer following evidence left by abductors; he was helping break the infrastructure that allowed the abductions to continue.
Movement through Naa depended on mastering unfamiliar transport. The resistance arranged passage aboard the Empress Queen, a civilian airship. A hostile vessel crashed into it and began a boarding attack. After the attackers were defeated, Giles and his companions seized control of the damaged ship and learned enough from its crew and machinery to continue using it. For a man who prized specialized equipment, Naa’s engineering presented an irresistible practical challenge: not admiration at a safe distance, but the need to understand an alien machine quickly enough to survive in it.
At City Two, the ship became camouflage. The travelers presented themselves as special forces who had recovered the vessel after a pirate attack and needed room for an urgent mission. The deception worked long enough to secure access and begin another temple assault. When authorities later tried to keep the Empress Queen from leaving, the vessel tore itself free of the mooring.
Then came a maneuver that would have appealed to the most ruthless side of a hunter’s ingenuity. The civilian airship was rigged to explode. A Nardic military team was allowed to board it while Giles and the others crossed onto the military vessel. The Empress Queen detonated behind them. The captured warship had to be cleared deck by deck, including its command bridge, and another hostile skyship was destroyed during the subsequent aerial fighting.
By then Giles had spent weeks turning enemy environments into usable ground. Storm drains became entrances. Civilian transport became cover. A doomed ship became bait. A military vessel became the road to the capital. The pattern was not subtle in its destruction, but the underlying principle was familiar: study what the quarry assumes is safe, then use that assumption against it.
The warship’s final purpose was to create an opening. It was driven into a capital docking port and abandoned as a burning diversion. On foot, the infiltrators found a portal mechanism that resembled the technology at Rosenthorne, suggesting that a route home might exist inside the heart of the Nardic regime. They also found a fleshwarping laboratory occupied by a lizard-like alchemist named Reginald.
Reginald was subdued but kept alive. He knew routes through the capital and said Medina was being held for the Queen near the throne room. His information aligned with the earlier temple records closely enough to dictate the next move. The Queen came first.
The confrontation revealed an enemy unlike any animal Giles had hunted. The Queen occupied Estera’s body and claimed to have eaten her, absorbing much of her into herself. When the host body was killed, a brain-like parasite abandoned it and sought another host. The enemy’s true form turned identity itself into camouflage. For a hunter accustomed to controlling what others saw when they looked at him, the Queen represented a grotesque inversion of disguise: not a chosen face worn over a continuing self, but an invasive creature using other bodies as possessions.
Medina was found alive after the throne-room fighting. The wider prison was opened as well, releasing roughly eighty captives. Before escape, the capital’s generators were prepared to overload as part of severing the far-side foundation of the bridge. Reginald activated the route home. Refugees from Naa crossed with the returning group, and the bridge was destroyed behind them.
The crossing did not end the violence. Salmaya attacked soon afterward with Sard, a colossal animated dead tree. Sard was destroyed, and Baby Yeetfield struck the killing blow that ended Salmaya. The cost was Trevor Tatarmoff’s death to an overwhelming death spell. A funeral followed. Gaby inherited the barony and became Medina’s official guardian, while Naa refugees were integrated into Drankov’s reconstruction.
Giles survived to see a landscape different from the one he had left. Drankov, once emptied by drag trails leading to a dead gate, became a place of rebuilding and eventual prosperity. Rosenthorne’s bridge was gone. The immediate Nardic route into their world had been severed. Yet the months in Naa had given Giles a catalogue of things no hunting lodge could comfortably contain: flying cities, alien warships, fleshwarping laboratories, parasitic rulers, resistance tunnels, and prey that could not be understood by ordinary anatomy.
For all his taste for trophies and impressive equipment, his most consequential hunt produced no single object adequate to represent it. The ornate elven gun remained a point of pride, and his alchemical craft remained his own, but the deeper proof of competence was that he had carried those familiar tools into an unfamiliar world and kept adapting when the terrain changed. He returned with the bridge destroyed, Medina rescued, prisoners freed, and the knowledge that even a hunter who liked to appear entirely in control could meet a wilderness large enough to challenge the pose. Giles’s answer was not to abandon confidence. It was to make the confidence earn its keep.