Dustin Maple

Origin

Malinar. Latterly the Wagon Flagon, Lower District, Elleris

Class

Battle Master Fighter and Drakewarden Ranger

Standing

Deserter of the Malinari Armed Forces

Status

Active with the Veil Piercers

Dustin Maple deserted the Malinari army because the brutality of the war had hollowed him out.

He did it thoroughly. A false name, an enemy capital, and work behind the bar of the Wagon Flagon in the lower district of Elleris, where nobody asks about anyone's history.

On the night the campaign begins, a squad from his own boot camp walked into the bar. He got them drunk before any of them placed his face.

He fights as two men. One of them learned it out of a Malinari drill manual and never stopped: measured maneuvers, openings taken deliberately, the discipline of a soldier who deserted the army and not the training. The other keeps a drake, and answers to Melorah.

At range he is the most dangerous person in the party. He put two arrows into King Aghat Umraz and forced the Mind Flayer riding him to show itself. He killed an executioner from a distant rooftop before the man could take his father's head. Direll Lazlow, captain of the Malyri Paladin Order, Chosen Harbinger of Malyr, murderer of a king and a queen, died at the end of Dustin's bow, pleading.

Away from a fight he is the party's pragmatist, and not always a welcome one. It was Dustin who argued that crime cannot be abolished, only known, and that a familiar hand on the underworld is worth more than an unfamiliar one.

Melorah found him somewhere on the road and set him a task. He does not discuss it. It surfaces when it matters. In the Feywild, against Ezra the Unkind, it was Dustin leaning into that connection and into the Wisdom of the Dragon that turned the battle.

He died in that fight.

Beyond it he found his mother waiting, and Melorah with her.

He chose to return.

He has since found his father alive, met his younger siblings, and taken a tiger out of the Feywild.