Moss-Treads-Softly (“Mossi”) - Way of the Dreaming Step Monk
“I was walking in my sleep again? Hm. Then I suppose the forest had something to say.”
Name: Moss-Treads-Softly (“Mossi”)
Race: Firbolg
Role/Class: Monk Level 9 (Way of the Dreaming Step)
Appearance: Mossi looks like the forest decided to try its hand at making a person and almost got it right. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with the gentle heft of someone built more for carrying than crushing. His skin is a muted blue-gray with a mossy green undertone, textured in places like old bark. Soft patches of lichen-like fuzz grow along his jawline and forearms instead of a traditional beard. His hair is a wild tumble of dark green and brown waves, often threaded with leaves and twigs he hasn’t noticed.
His eyes are a calm, misty teal, heavy-lidded as if he is perpetually half-asleep—yet when he focuses, they sharpen with startling clarity. He wears simple, loose monk’s garb in deep forest greens and browns: wrap tunic, wide trousers bound at the ankle, and a sleeveless over-robe. The fabric is worn but clean, with faint spiral and leaf motifs embroidered along the edges. His feet are almost always bare, the soles toughened and stained by earth; tiny shoots of moss sometimes grow between his toes after long meditations. Around his neck hangs a braided cord strung with small wooden tokens carved to resemble sleeping faces, leaves, and crescent moons.
Backstory
Mossi was born in a hidden firbolg enclave near the heart of the Ardent Woods, where quiet was treated as a sacred language. As a child, he had a habit of vanishing at night—only to be found at dawn curled up at the base of certain trees or perched on mossy rocks with no memory of how he got there. At first, his family thought he was simply wandering. Then they noticed a pattern: whenever Mossi sleep-walked, someone nearby received a strange dream, a whispered warning, or a nudge that led them away from danger.
One particularly harsh season, when blights and twisted beasts pressed against the enclave’s borders, Mossi’s wanderings grew more frequent. Villagers began waking to find him standing at their doors, eyes closed, murmuring warnings in a voice that sounded half his and half like the wind through leaves: “Not the western path today,” or “Do not drink from the stone-basin stream.” Those who listened survived encounters they never knew they’d avoided. Those who didn’t… gave the enclave grim stories about what might have been prevented.
Recognizing that something beyond them was moving through Mossi’s dreams, the elders brought him to the Whispering Grove, a sacred stand of trees known to speak to druids and spirits. There, during a three-night vigil, Mossi fell into a deep sleep and walked the glade like a ghost, his steps never bending a single blade of grass. When he woke, a circle of moss had grown around where he had lain, and he remembered only a feeling: that the forest had “taken his feet on loan.”
He was sent to train with itinerant mystics and monks who walked the Woods’ ley-lines, learning to yoke his body’s discipline to his drifting spirit. Through breath, motion, and contemplation, he learned to fight without anger, to move without sound, and to balance the waking and dreaming states. Yet the sleep-walking never stopped—if anything, it grew subtler and more purposeful. Now, Mossi serves as a wandering dream-messenger of the Ardent Woods: a firbolg monk who may stumble into a camp in the dead of night, deliver a cryptic warning from the Grove, and then curl up against a tree having no idea what he just said.
Lately, his sleep-walks have drawn him again and again toward moonlit clearings, nightmare-touched shrines, and travelers whose dreams show the same places. He doesn’t know why—but the forest clearly does.
