Maerith can use the mastery properties of two weapons she is proficient with: Longbow (Slow: on a hit, the target's speed is reduced by 10 feet until the start of her next turn) and Shortsword (Vex: on a hit, she has advantage on her next attack roll against the target before the end of her next turn).
Maerith always has Hunter's Mark prepared and can cast it without expending a spell slot a number of times per Long Rest equal to her Wisdom modifier (2). She also gains advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track Humanoids (her chosen type, reflecting her hunt for the arsonists).
Grants proficiency in Athletics and Survival, and the Alert origin feat. Maerith can always recall a path through wilderness she has traveled before.
Maerith knows 2 Druid cantrips and prepares 2 Ranger spells of level 1. Spellcasting ability: Wisdom. Save DC 13, spell attack +5.
Maerith adds her proficiency bonus (+2) to Initiative rolls and can swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling.
Advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the Charmed condition. Magic cannot put her to sleep.
Walking speed 35 feet. Proficiency in the Stealth skill. Darkvision 60 feet.
Proficiency in the Perception skill.
Favored Enemy allows casting Hunter's Mark twice per Long Rest without expending a spell slot.
Whispering to the spirits of nature, you create one of the following effects within range: a tiny sensory effect (rain, a breeze, a sound of an animal), you instantly bloom a flower, or you create an instantaneous, harmless sensory effect.
You project a puff of noxious gas. The target must succeed on a Constitution saving throw or take 1d12 Poison damage.
A creature you touch regains a number of hit points equal to 1d8 + your spellcasting ability modifier (2).
Choose a creature you can see. On your next hit and every hit thereafter for the duration (Concentration, up to 1 hour), the target takes an extra 1d6 damage of the weapon's type, and you have advantage on Perception and Survival checks to find it.
Behind the character
Maerith Quill is a lean wood elf in her second century, copper-bronze skin weathered by forest wind, sharp amber eyes that track movement before they meet gazes, and ash-grey hair braided tight back from a high widow's peak. She wears a mottled green and brown cloak over dark studded leather, a longbow slung across her back beside two short swords at her hips, and a small bone charm at her throat that she touches before every hunt.
She moves the way the Thornwood taught her: silent on duff and stone, weight on the balls of her feet, always angled toward the nearest cover. She speaks rarely and precisely, in a low voice that carries further than she intends in quiet rooms. Her humor is dry and rare, doled out like rations. She is slow to forgive because she has practiced; the fire that took her grove taught her that grief and anger are the same wood, and what you build from them is a choice.
She gives one warning and then an arrow, and she has never given a second warning. Around humans she is guarded but not cruel — she guided Accord patrols for years and buried friends of every race — but around elves who speak of vengeance she goes very still, because she left her people over exactly those words and has never been sure she was right to go. She keeps a bone charm against her heart, a stolen ritual book in a hollow oak, and one unspoken confession about the night her grove burned.
She is watchful the way a sentry is watchful: not because she expects an enemy, but because she has learned that the worst fires start in the dark, lit by hands you trusted.
Before the adventure
Maerith Quill was born in a grove-community in the southern Thornwood, third daughter of a fire-warden's line — elves sworn to read the forest's dryness, to cut firebreaks, and to speak for the trees when smoke rose. Her childhood was bark and moss and the long patience of things that grow slowly, and her mother taught her the fire-warden's first rule: the forest forgives wind and rain and beast, but it never forgives fire, and neither should you.
Maerith was sixty years old and newly sworn as a border scout when the orc war came out of the Spine of the World, and the Thornwood's edge became a front line. She guided Accord patrols — humans and dwarves mostly, tired and frightened and mostly decent — through trails no map recorded, and she learned to read human faces the way she read broken twigs. Then, in the war's second year, human fire took her grove.
She was a mile away, guiding a patrol on the long route she had chosen herself, and by the time she ran home there was nothing to save. Her mother's body was never found. The Concord called it war-loss, an accident of the front. Maerith did not believe it then and does not believe it now, and the years since have proven her right: the fire was paid for, planned, and sealed with a forged Accord order.
She spent the rest of the war guiding patrols, hunting the fire's origin in her off-hours, and learning the human border roads so well she could walk them blind. When the orcs broke and the alliance began to crack, the Concord's council hollow filled with talk of repayment. Malrec Thorn — the fire-warden who had carried her mother's body from the ash, the elf she owed the most grief and gratitude to — argued that the correct answer to a burned grove was a burned farm.
Maerith stood in the hollow and spoke against him, the first voice to do so, and the silence that followed was worse than any argument. She left the Concord the next dawn, taking nothing but her bow, her swords, her mother's fire-warden training, and a bone charm holding her grove's last unburned seed. She has not slept under a Concord roof in two years. She took work where neutrality was worth coin: guiding Accord Remnant couriers, tracking deserters for Captain Eldrin Voss, and quietly following the trail of wax, silver, and forged seals that led from her grove's ashes toward something larger.
What she found — a cult called the Ashen Choir, human coin, a paymaster called the Chancellor's shadow — was bigger than her grief, and it was aimed at starting the war she had spent her life trying to end. She came to Accord Hall for the treaty signing because it was the closest thing to a battlefield she could still fight on: a room where evidence mattered more than arrows.
She carries the fire-warden's rules like scripture — never forgive fire, cut the break early, one warning then the flame — but she has added a rule of her own, learned in the council hollow: the person who wants to burn first is rarely the person who was burned. She is quiet, watchful, and slow to forgive, and she is here because someone lit fires on the human border in her people's name, and she intends to find out which of her own people handed them the torch before the Thornwood answers fire with fire and everything she has left burns with it.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Lia Woodswhisper has tracked the humans who burned Maerith's childhood grove to a Choir safehouse at Thornwood Edge, but she will not move without a Concord scout's word, and Maerith no longer carries Concord authority. Maerith must scout the Hymn-Ruined Outpost alone, recover the forged Accord orders stored there, and bring them to Lia before Malrec Thorn's rangers find the same evidence and twist it into justification for the ritual at the Forest Heart. The quest forces Maerith to walk the ash of her own history and to decide, in the dark of the ruined outpost, whether she is still her people's scout or something new.
Meet Lia Woodswhisper at Thornwood Edge and accept her terms: proof, not vengeance.
Personal quest · 2
Riel, the hot-headed scout who ambushed the party at Thornwood Edge, was once Maerith's student in the Concord's tracking rites before she left the Concord. If Riel survives the ambush, Maerith must decide what to do with him: he carries forged orders he believes are genuine, and Malrec Thorn has marked him for a suicide mission against Burning Ford. Maerith must shadow Riel through the Thornwood, uncover who fed him the forged orders, and either turn him against Malrec or put an arrow in him before he kills civilians in her name. The hunt is as much about Maerith confronting the disciple she abandoned as it is about stopping an atrocity.
Track Riel through the Thornwood using Survival and the old Concord trail-signs they shared.
Personal quest · 3
Maerith has kept a single unburned seed from her family's grove for years, carrying it in a bone charm against her heart. Druid Theris Mossbeard tells her the seed can only grow in ground that has been forgiven, not just avenged. To plant it, Maerith must trace the surviving human family who lit the torch — not the Choir agents who paid them, but the desperate border farmer whose name the Concord has cursed for years — and bring them to the grove's ashes.
There, in the char, she must choose between the Concord's demand for blood and the seed's demand for peace. The ritual at the Forest Heart looms over everything: if Malrec burns the borderlands, the farmer's village dies with it.
Consult Theris Mossbeard at the Forest Heart about the seed and learn the rite of planting.
At the Hymn-Ruined Outpost, Maerith holds the forged orders that prove humans were paid to burn her grove. Malrec's rangers are hours away. She can deliver them to Lia as proof of the Choir's plot, or let Malrec's people find them — evidence that would ignite the war Maerith has sworn to prevent.
If delivered, Maerith regains Concord standing and gains the Cloak of the Thornwood plus Concord ally support in later acts. If destroyed, she permanently loses Concord favor but gains the 'Ashwalker' trait: +2 damage against Choir cultists and immunity to the hymn-wisp's paralyzing wail, born of hardened resolve.
At the Forest Heart, Maerith has Malrec Thorn at arrow-range during his ritual. He is her people's champion and a murderer in the making. Nyx Thorn hesitates beside her, and the ritual stone pulses with corrupted green fire.
Killing Malrec grants Maerith the 'Heartless Aim' feature (+2 to first attack against a marked enemy each combat) but makes the Concord hostile and closes his testimony. Capturing him preserves evidence against Vaelor and grants Maerith Malrec's poison-craft (poisoned arrows). Yielding to Nyx earns Nyx's permanent loyalty: she fights beside Maerith in the finale, but Maerith loses her own claim to vengeance and gains no combat boon.
At the Throne of Ash, the corrupted artifact lies within reach. Caelum's ritual can destroy it; the Forest Heart stone can seal it; and Maerith's grove-seed reacts to its power, whispering that it could regrow everything she lost — if she lets the artifact feed the seed.
Destroying it breaks the Choir but forfeits evidence. Sealing it preserves the treaty trail and grants Maerith the Forest Heart's ward (resistance to necrotic damage). Channeling it regrows her grove instantly and grants her the 'Grove-Bound' feature (regain 1d6 hit points when in forest terrain each short rest) but leaves a splinter of corruption in the seed — the Choir survives in miniature, and Maerith carries a hook for future corruption.
Completing The Grove That Remembers
Maerith's Favored Enemy shifts from Humanoids to the Ashen Choir, reflecting her redirected hunt.
The choice at the Forest Heart
Maerith's relationship with the Concord is permanently defined: daughter, exile, or executioner.
The artifact choice at the Throne of Ash
Maerith either becomes the grove's restorer or its final avenger.
Ally
Lia and Maerith served together in the Thornwood's border watches during the worst years of the orc war, when the Concord's scouts guided Accord patrols through forest the elves no longer trusted to outsiders. Lia taught Maerith the deep trail-signs — the bent saplings and moss-marks that say 'friend passing' — and Maerith taught her the human border roads she had memorized as a girl. When human fire took Maerith's grove in the war's second year, it was Lia who pulled her from the smoke and Lia who stood silent when Maerith swore her oath of the hunt.
Their bond cracked when Maerith left the Concord over Malrec's talk of burning farms; Lia stayed, believing she could restrain him from within. They have not spoken in two years. Now Lia has tracked the grove's arsonists to a Choir safehouse and needs exactly one thing she cannot have: a Concord scout's word on evidence she cannot verify alone. Maerith is no longer Concord, but Lia knows no one else who can read the outpost's elven ward-marks and walk out alive. Their reunion is wary, wordless, and absolute — the old signs still pass between them before either speaks.
Enemy
Malrec was the Concord's fire-warden when Maerith's grove burned; he carried her mother's body from the ash and spoke the mourning rites. Maerith owed him grief and gratitude in equal measure, and for a year she followed him as the Concord's most reliable scout. Then she heard him argue, in the council hollow, that the correct answer to a burned grove was a burned farm — that mercy was a human invention designed to keep elves weak.
She spoke against him before the elders, the first time anyone had, and he looked at her with something worse than anger: disappointment, as if she had failed a test she did not know she was taking. When she left the Concord the next dawn, Malrec let her go without a word, which she understood as a sentence deferred. Now he gathers rangers for a ritual at the Forest Heart, and he has told his followers that Maerith Quill is a traitor who sold the Thornwood's grief to humans.
He wants her brought back alive — to recant before the council, or to burn with the rest. Maerith knows his habits, his caches, and his poison recipes, and he knows hers; every ambush either sets, the other might have taught them. Their war is a family quarrel with a hundred miles of kindling under it.
Faction
Maerith was born under Concord law and served eleven years as a border scout, guiding Accord patrols through the Thornwood when no elf else would. The Concord's elders knew her name; Malrec Thorn himself taught her the fire-warden's rites. All of that ended the day she stood in the council hollow and denounced his plan to burn human farms in repayment for the groves. She left the Concord that night and has not slept under a Concord roof since — two years of exile, sleeping in Accord Hall boarding houses and hollow trees, carrying a bone charm with her grove's last seed.
The Concord has not declared her traitor, but it has not forgiven her either; scouts who meet her on the trail give the old signs of 'watched stranger.' Her standing is fragile and transactional: Lia Woodswhisper will work with her, Theron Outcast hopes she will speak for his amnesty, and the elders will listen to evidence she brings — but only evidence, not loyalty. Every act of the campaign tests whether Maerith can win her people back without becoming the thing she left them to avoid. If she delivers the forged orders, the Concord may restore her scout's standing. If she destroys them, or if Malrec completes his ritual, the door closes forever.
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