Hollowkith - The Doppelganger
Sorrel has tended Lyreleaf for eleven years. Nobody has ever asked where the real one went.
Role in Its Society
To Lyreleaf, Hollowkith is simply Sorrel Aldergrove: the halfling herbalist who has delivered half the village's children, dried its wintergreen, and sat up with its fevers since before most residents can remember her arriving at all. She keeps the sickhouse stocked, trades fairly at the gnome-run tannery, and remembers everyone's birthday better than their own kin do. Lyreleaf, tucked close to the reeds of Saltspray Swamp and far enough from Brightcrown's courts that its troubles rarely reach a magistrate's ledger, has no reason to doubt her.
That distance from Brightcrown is exactly why a small cell of the Crimson Hand, the criminal network that works the capital's underside and keeps a handful of quiet outposts scattered through the Weald, chose Lyreleaf as a place to plant someone who could listen without ever being suspected of listening. Hollowkith reports on tax assessors, land surveys, and which noble's agents pass through on the Haltcross road, and in exchange the village never seems to lose its harvest to Brightcrown's collectors quite as badly as its neighbors do. Nobody in Lyreleaf knows why they've been lucky. They only know Sorrel always seems to hear about trouble before it arrives.
Appearance Description
As Sorrel, Hollowkith is a stooped, silver-haired halfling woman with flour-dusted hands and a moss-green shawl she claims her own mother wove, ink-stained fingers from decades of writing down remedies, and a laugh that puts frightened children at ease before a splint is even set. Nothing about her invites a second look, which is precisely the point.
Beneath that face is a lean, hairless, ash-grey humanoid form with smooth, doughy features that never quite settle into an expression of their own, and wide, colorless eyes with no visible pupils. In this true shape it moves with an unnatural fluid quiet, as though even its footsteps are still deciding what to sound like.
Backstory
Hollowkith remembers no hatching, no kin, no name that was ever truly its own; only a long adolescence of borrowed faces, worn a season at a time until they stopped fitting or stopped being useful. A Crimson Hand handler found it somewhere along the Brightcrown docks, recognized what it was faster than most, and offered it something it had never been offered before: a purpose, and a place to stay in one shape for longer than a season.
The real Sorrel Aldergrove walked into the reeds along Saltspray Swamp eleven years ago to gather bloodroot and never walked back out. What happened to her out there is a question Lyreleaf stopped asking years ago, and one Hollowkith has never once answered, even to itself. It studied her mannerisms, her patients, her recipes, and her debts for a single season before stepping into the empty space she left behind, and it has not stepped back out since.
