Gryph

Introduction

Name's Gryph.

I play the bodhran. I collect stories. I go where the work is, and the work brought me here - something about the frontier, the blank map, the fact that nobody's written the songs yet. Seemed like opportunity.

I travel light. I ask questions. I notice things. If that makes you uncomfortable you're probably interesting.

The drum is not available for inspection.

I'll see you out there.

What We've Learned

The drum is not available for inspection because the drum, and the music it makes, is the part of Gryph that everything else sits on top of. The song he plays — the one about his hometown, his family, the room they played music in together — is the bottom layer of the dwarf himself. When the Gestalt beneath the mountain monastery stripped the final bar of that song out of his memory in the iron corridor, the loss was not a song; it was a gaping hole he could not function around. He bargained it back over the protests of his companions, and threw in the memory of why he had come to the Wildermarch in the first place to seal the deal. The Gestalt gave him a set of bone Pipes of Haunting as a sweetener.

He no longer remembers why he is here. The song is whole again.

He carries the Pipes of Haunting. He learned Touch of Death from the memory of Brother Keef, a Day Monk of the Order of the Long Death whose body was preserved in the cocoon at the head of the Gestalt's biomass — the trick of drawing vitality from a creature as it dies within arm's reach. He has a new composition forming in his head from the moment the pylon cage closed — the title is not yet his.