Name: Anni Prismwarden
Race: Dwarf
Role/Class: Prism-Beacon Keeper
Appearance: Anni Prismwarden is a stout dwarf with a steady posture that makes her look taller than she is. Her hair is a pale gold braid wrapped tight around her head like a crown, and her beard is cropped short and kept immaculate—salt wind never seems to win against her discipline. Her eyes are a bright hazel, almost honey-colored, and they hold the calm intensity of someone who has watched too many ships vanish and refused to become numb to it.
She wears layered harbor robes under a heavy weathercloak stitched with reflective thread—subtle in daylight, unmistakable in lantern light. Around her neck hangs a prism talisman set in brass, faceted and slightly chipped at one edge. Her hands are calloused from levers and lens frames, not weapons, but she carries a mace with a head shaped like a lantern cage—practical, symbolic, and well-used.
Backstory
Heathdun’s harbor survives on two things: lifts that move cargo and lights that keep ships from dying on reef teeth. The prism beacon is the city’s heartbeat in fog—an engineered miracle of rotating lenses and glow-crystal arrays that throws a cutting beam across the surf line to mark safe approach.
Anni didn’t inherit the role. She earned it.
She began as a lens-cleaner, a low-ranking worker in the beacon tower, rotating shift after shift while older keepers treated the work like routine. Then a fog season arrived that was worse than any living memory. In a single week, three ships struck the reefs—each one just a few degrees off the beam’s guidance.
Everyone blamed the storm.
Anni blamed complacency.
She found the real cause: a subtle misalignment in the rotation gearing—caused by a “minor” replacement part bought cheap and installed without proper calibration. The part was signed off by a broker. The broker’s name was on the manifest. The manifest disappeared.
After that, Anni began keeping her own records, her own checks, her own procedures. She made enemies. She also prevented more wrecks. When the previous Prismwarden died—quietly, unexpectedly—Anni was the only person the crews trusted to take the tower keys.
Now she keeps the beacon running through fog, gale, and sabotage attempts that arrive wearing the face of “normal maintenance.” She is a guardian of a system most people only notice when it fails.
