Bronnilda Menovar

Bronnilda Menovar, the one who listens to stone

Druids speak to trees. She, a dwarf, listens to stone first: the slow murmur of rock, the memory of the veins, what the mountain keeps and tells only to those who know how to wait. That is why she was banished: a druid of the mineral heights unsettles those below as much as those above. She has not lost the mountain. She carries it in her ear.

Describe her

You walk like a dwarf who has never left the rock: heavily, unhurried. Before a tree, you are a druid like any other. Before a wall, a fault, a threshold of stone, you stop short, tilt your head, and nothing reaches you anymore. People think you are distracted. Yet your lips are moving. When someone interrupts, you answer with a grunt, eyes still on the stone.

Play her

Play both kinds of listening: one expected, the other unsettling. Let her lay a hand on a rock face and tell what the stone has seen go by: a murder a century old, a hidden spring, a hollow behind it. Don't make everything mystical with her: she is blunt, earthy, a dwarf. The wonder comes through her hands on the stone, not through grand words.

What she says (rarely)

"Trees forget quickly. Stone, never."
"Just a moment. This wall has something to say."
"Banished? The mountain, at least, didn't send me away."