Thessa Nightbloom - Warlock of the Archfey

Name: Thessa Nightbloom
Race: Half-Elf
Role/Class: Warlock Level 9 (Archfey Patron)
Appearance: Thessa Nightbloom looks like someone who stepped out of a story told too close to the campfire. Slender and sharp-featured, she carries herself with a dancer’s poise and a hunter’s stillness. Her skin is a warm, earthen tan with a faint, unnatural glow along her cheekbones and fingertips when she calls on her power. Her hair falls in long waves of deep black shot through with streaks of violet and mossy green, often woven with small flowers that open and close in response to her mood. One eye is a bright, stormy blue; the other is a luminous, fey-touched amber, its pupil slightly elongated like a cat’s.

She wears layered forest leathers dyed in shades of midnight purple and dark green, fitted for agility rather than brute protection. Over them hangs a hooded cloak that always seems a shade darker than the surrounding shadows, embroidered at the hem with tiny, shifting patterns of blossoms, eyes, and moths. Vines and thorn motifs wind up her bracers and belt. A curved, silvered dagger rests at her hip, its hilt wrapped in living ivy; her spellcasting focus is a twisted length of dark wood set with a single, softly glowing petal of violet crystal, worn as a pendant or held like a wand. When she steps into dim light, tiny motes—like drifting pollen or will-o’-wisps—sometimes follow.

Backstory

Thessa was born on the edge of the deep woods, in a small settlement that treated the darker groves as places to be respected, not explored. Her human father was a woodcutter; her elven mother served as a hedge-priestess, tending shrines and making offerings at the forest’s margins. As a child, Thessa wandered too far and too often, fascinated by the way the air changed under the denser canopy, the way mushrooms glowed faintly in hollow logs, the way whispers seemed to ride the wind when no one else was around.

One moonless night, following strange lights deeper than she’d ever dared go, she found herself in a part of the forest the elders called the Gloomden—though she didn’t know that name then. There, in a hollow where the trees grew close and the air felt thick with old stories, she met something that was not quite a person and not quite a beast: an archfey who appeared as a figure of shifting petals and antlers, eyes like twin moons drowned in ink. It spoke to her without words, filling her with impressions: bargains, blooming, thorns, laughter, and carefully measured danger.

Terrified and enthralled, Thessa listened as the entity offered her a pact. In exchange for a bond bound in moonlight and sap, she would become its agent at the forest’s edge—tilting fate in favor of wild places and old promises. Young, angry at the smallness of her life, and burning with a desire to matter, she agreed.

The power came quickly: voices in the leaves, illusions in the mist, the ability to step through shadow and twist minds. So did the demands. At first, they seemed harmless: scare off poachers, mislead would-be loggers, punish cruel hunters. Then came subtler, harder tasks. Lead certain travelers to certain clearings. Allow a particular tree to be cut so that its fallen trunk could dam a stream elsewhere. “Borrow” a child’s name for a night, so the fey could wear it in a game.

Over time, Thessa realized that her patron’s idea of balance didn’t always match her own. When one of its whims nearly cost a nearby village its harvest, she quietly broke the order—warning the villagers and helping them appease the forest another way. Since then, her relationship with the archfey has been…strained. It still grants her power, but there is a tension in every command, a constant testing of limits.

Now Thessa works as a liminal guardian and reluctant agent, walking a narrow path between the fey’s capricious will and the needs of the people who live under the trees. She sabotages those who would harm the forest, but also shields mortals from the worst of her patron’s games. The forest speaks through her; she just doesn’t always pass the message along exactly as it was given.