Varis Nightreed — Gloom Stalker of the Inner Scar

Name: Varis Nightreed
Race: Wood Elf
Role/Class: Gloom Stalker of the Inner Scar / Ranger Level 9
Appearance: Varis Nightreed is all sharp angles and shadows, a lean wood elf whose presence is felt more often than seen. His skin is a muted tan with a faint green undertone, the color of leaves seen at dusk, and his dark hair is cropped short on the sides with a longer top swept back, practical for slipping through branches without snagging. A few silver streaks run through it, less from age and more from too many sleepless watches at the forest’s darkest edges. His eyes are an unsettling amber, like candlelight reflected in still water, catching even the faintest glimmer in the gloom.

He wears close-fitted studded leather armor dyed in deep greens and blacks mottled with grey, breaking up his outline in low light. A hooded cloak of shadowy weave hangs from his shoulders, sewn with patches of darker fabric that blend seamlessly into the night. Across his back lies a recurved longbow of dark-stained yew, wrapped in leather at the grips; his quiver holds black-fletched arrows and a few shafts tipped with odd, dull-metal heads etched in warding sigils. A pair of short blades ride at his hips, and his belt is studded with pouches of charcoal dust, waxed cords, and smooth stones marked in careful ink—trail signs only he and a few others understand.

Backstory

Varis was born beneath the canopy of the Ardent Woods, but his earliest vivid memories are not of birdsong or sunlight through leaves—they are of a strange, wrong quiet along the shadowed trails near the cursed heart of the forest. As a child, he wandered farther than he should have, chasing a foxfire glow, and stumbled into a patch of woods where the air tasted sour and even the insects had gone still. Something watched him from a fissure between roots. Only his mother’s frantic tracking and a circle of wardens pulling him away with whispered prayers saved him from vanishing into that darkness forever.

That brush with the forest’s corrupted depths marked him. While other young elves learned songs and games, Varis learned where the light failed first at twilight, which birds went silent when the wrong things moved, and how to read the subtle shift in wind that meant “do not go that way today.” He apprenticed to wardens stationed along the forest’s inner scar—those who watch, not for lumberjacks or poachers, but for things that should never have been able to crawl out of the heart of the Woods.

Over decades, Varis became one of the foremost trackers of “things that slip through.” Aberrant beasts, twisted fey, shape-touched predators—he hunted them all, pushing himself to move and see as they did. He learned to fight in darkness without fear, to strike first and vanish, and to guide patrols through blackened groves without losing anyone to panic or illusions. One failed hunt haunts him still: a pack of warped wolves that slipped past his watch and tore through a village on the forest’s fringe. Too slow, too cautious. Since then, his mercy for anything touched by that corruption has grown thin.

Varis respects the other guardians of the Ardent Woods, but he often works on the edges of their authority, slipping away on solo hunts and returning with little more than a nod and a new scar to show for it. He believes that the best defense for the heart of the Woods is to make sure nothing from the dark reaches it at all—even if that means hard choices, ugly truths, and sometimes doing what gentler souls would balk at.