Forty years copying lunar charts gives Ysolde flawless recall of moonwell inscriptions and star charts: she can perfectly recall any diagram or inscription she has studied for at least 1 minute, and has advantage on Intelligence checks to recall lore about moonwells, lunar magic, and the Lunar Concord's history.
Chosen option: Darkvision — she can see in dim light within 60 feet as if in bright light and in darkness as if in dim light (discerning colors only in dim light). She can swap this option during a long rest.
After a long rest, rolls three d20s. She can replace any attack roll, saving throw, or ability check made by herself or a creature she can see with one of these Portent rolls (before or after the roll).
Prepares spells from her spellbook; casting ability Intelligence. Spell save DC 16, spell attack +8. Can cast wizard ritual spells as rituals without preparing them (Ritual Adept).
+1 Intelligence (applied). She can cast Misty Step once per long rest without a slot (Intelligence), and Comprehend Languages once per long rest without a slot.
When she casts a divination spell of 2nd level or lower using a slot, she regains one expended spell slot of lower level than the slot used (up to 5th level).
After finishing a long rest, she can replace one prepared spell with a different spell from her spellbook of the same or lower level.
From the Sage background: two wizard cantrips (Light, Message) and Shield cast once per long rest without a slot (Intelligence).
After a short rest, regains spell slots totaling up to 5 levels (half her wizard level, rounded up).
She can see in dim light within 60 feet as if in bright light and in darkness as if in dim light.
Advantage on saving throws against the Charmed condition; immune to sleep induced by magic.
Chosen skills Arcana and History: proficiency bonus doubled (+8) on checks with them.
Copying divination spells into her spellbook costs half the normal time and money.
Meditates 4 hours instead of 6 hours of sleep, gaining the same benefit.
Proficiency in the Perception skill.
Ritual Adept: Detect Magic, Comprehend Languages, and Arcane Eye can be cast as rituals without preparation. Magic Initiate Shield and Fey Touched Misty Step/Comprehend Languages are cast once per long rest without slots.
Ranged spell attack: 2d10 fire damage on a hit.
A spectral hand that can manipulate objects up to 10 lb. within range.
Creates a sound or an image of an object no larger than a 5-foot cube.
Minor magical tricks: sensory effects, cleaning, tinting flames, etc.
+5 AC and immunity to magic missile until the start of her next turn.
Target's base AC becomes 13 + DEX modifier for 8 hours.
Senses magic within 30 feet and its school for 10 minutes.
Understands the literal meaning of any spoken or written language for 1 hour.
Teleports up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space she can see.
Interrupts a spell of 3rd level or lower; higher-level spells require an ability check (her DC 16).
Ends one spell effect of 3rd level or lower; higher levels require an ability check.
20-ft.-radius sphere: 8d6 fire damage, DEX save DC 16 for half. +1d6 per higher slot.
Target gains a fly speed of 60 ft. for 10 minutes (concentration).
Creatures in a 30-ft. cube make WIS saves DC 16 or become charmed and incapacitated for 1 minute.
Target is invisible for 1 minute (concentration).
Teleports herself and one willing creature to a location she can visualize within range.
An invisible eye with darkvision scouts for her for 1 hour (concentration).
Sees and hears a known target anywhere on the same plane for 10 minutes (concentration); WIS save DC 16 to resist.
An invisible, immovable wall of force for 10 minutes (concentration).
Behind the character
Ysolde Quill is a tall, slender moon elf in her second century, silver-white hair pinned in a severe knot with a crescent-shaped pin, pale grey eyes ringed with ink stains and sleeplessness. She wears layered midnight-blue robes embroidered with silver star-charts and moon phases, a calligrapher's satchel across her back beside a battered leather-bound spellbook with a moonstone clasp, and carries a polished quarterstaff topped with a crescent of white stone. A small journal is strapped to her wrist like a scribe's tablet, and she writes in it compulsively—everything she is afraid to say aloud goes onto the page in a hand so precise it looks printed.
She is precise, impatient, and quietly heartbroken. She corrects other people's facts before their feelings, a habit that has cost her every friend she failed to keep, and she knows it, and cannot stop. Her humor is dry and arrives late, usually in the journal rather than aloud. Beneath the pedantry is a woman of ferocious principle: she believes knowledge belongs to the thing it describes, that the Concord's burning of the lunar archives was a sin the moon itself remembers, and that a well with a name cannot be killed.
Forty years of copying moonwell charts gave her more than calluses. Her Moonwell Chart-Memory lets her perfectly recall any diagram or inscription she has studied, and the moonwell water Thalia once let her drink wrote the network into her bones—she is, secretly, a living fragment of the living network she is trying to save. Her divination magic is not abstract foresight; it is listening. Portent is the well whispering to its keeper.
Her driving goal is to prove the moonwells are one living network and save the glade before the eclipse drains it dry. Her deepest fear is that she will die a copyist—accurate, complete, and unheard.
Before the adventure
Ysolde Quill was sworn into the Lunar Concord at ninety years old, a moon elf from the Silvercourt Reach with steady hands and a memory like still water. The Concord assigned her to the archive of the Grand Hall, where she spent her first decade transcribing moonwell charts—star alignments, tidal inscriptions, the spiral diagrams of the lunar network that older sages called decoration and she called a map. She rose exactly nowhere. The Concord's hierarchy valued knights over scholars, and an elf woman with ink-stained fingers was furniture. She stayed anyway, because the charts were true and the knights, in her private judgment, were not.
Everything changed when the Concord sent her north to the Moonwell Glade to copy under Thalia the Hermit, its last true priestess—expecting, rumor said, the old woman to die quietly and the posting to close itself. Instead Thalia taught her to read the water: to listen for the well's name beneath its surface, to sit with a dying pool the way one sits with a dying friend. Thalia broke the Concord's law early in their acquaintance, letting Ysolde drink from the moonwell against all prohibition, and the water wrote the charts into her permanently.
Her flawless recall of inscriptions is not a gift; it is a haunting. She is a living fragment of the network she is trying to save, and the corruption in the pool sometimes whispers to her in her own handwriting.
The wound that shaped her came decades later. Young Ysolde, eager to prove her usefulness, signed the destruction order for the 'redundant' archive folios—the duplicates of the lunar records the Concord's archivists called clutter. She believed she was tidying. She was erasing the only complete record of the moonwell network's true names, including the glade's own. She has never told a living soul. Every obsessive chart she has copied since is a penance, and her second journal—hidden in her spellbook's lining, written in a self-devised old-tongue cipher—holds the confession she cannot speak.
Her closest bond at the academy was Isolde Vael, a girl who snuck her sweetcakes during night study and defended her charts when knights mocked them. Isolde vanished during the archive purges. Ysolde told herself for decades that her friend had transferred to a coastal chapter. The truth—that Isolde was Thalia's daughter, taken as a child and reshaped into the Shroud of Mirrors, the Umbral Court's spymaster—recasts every illusion Ysolde has ever unraveled as a message she failed to read. She still keeps the memory of their sweetcake-song, and she intends to use it.
When the glade's waters first dimmed, Thalia sent warnings and the Concord dismissed them as an old woman's superstition. They recalled Ysolde to Silvercourt to present 'proper' findings. She obeyed—her great regret—and was presenting to half-empty benches when the princess was taken. She returned north to find the grove poisoned, her teacher gaunt and unrepentant, and her life's work dismissed as decoration. Thalia never once said 'I told you so,' which hurt worse than scolding would have.
Now the eclipse looms, the princess is gone, and Ysolde carries three things into the dark: a quarterstaff of white crescent stone, a spellbook full of lunar and abjuration magic, and the guilt of a woman who burned her own life's work and means to speak every true name back into the world before the last well goes silent. She is Lawful Good in the way stone is lawful—unmoved, unglamorous, and load-bearing. She will correct your grammar on the way to saving the world, and she will save the world, and she will never tell you which act cost her more.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Thalia taught Ysolde that every moonwell answers to a true name spoken in the old tongue, lost when the Concord burned its own archives. At the Moonwell Glade, Ysolde can wade the pool, read the drowned inscriptions on the rim, and descend into the grotto behind the waterfall where the naming stone lies beneath the shadow demon's watch. Speaking the name over the water makes the corruption recoil, the pool clears, and Thalia weeps for the first time in years.
Read the drowned inscriptions on the pool's rim and decode the old-tongue syllables using Ysolde's forty years of chart-memory.
Personal quest · 2
The Concord burned its own lunar archives decades ago, and Ysolde believes fragments survived in the Sunken Ossuary beneath Silvercourt, where the drowned dead of the old archive-scribes were laid. She must recover three surviving folios from the flooded crypt before the Bonewretch Crawlers and the Gravebound Warden destroy the last records of the moonwell network.
Locate the archive-scribes' burial alcove in the Sunken Ossuary using Ysolde's Moonwell Chart-Memory.
Personal quest · 3
Ysolde discovers that the Shroud of Mirrors is Thalia's corrupted daughter—and that the woman in the locket was once Ysolde's childhood friend at the Concord's academy, before the mirrors took her. Ysolde must decide whether to destroy her, redeem her with the locket and the true name, or bargain with her for the Moon Sigil fragment.
Recover the Locket of the Lost Daughter from the Moonwell Grotto and identify the portrait.
At the Moonwell Glade, Ysolde recovers the glade's true name and must decide whether to speak it aloud—broadcasting it to every listening shadow—or keep it secret and let the glade linger, dim but hidden.
Speaking the name grants the Vigil of the Named Well (reroll one failed save per long rest against necrotic or shadow magic) and fully restores the moonwell's scrying power, but the Umbral Court learns the name and sends an extra Duskward Knight to the Shadowed Gate. Sealing the name grants a permanent +1 to her spell save DC near any moonwell and keeps the glade hidden, but Thalia begins to fade and the glade's scrying remains broken.
Facing the Shroud of Mirrors—her childhood friend and Thalia's daughter—Ysolde holds the locket that could reach whatever remains of the woman behind the mask.
Redemption grants a true-seeing ally and the sigil freely. Destruction grants mirror image 1/day but inflicts a permanent flaw: her reflection sometimes moves independently, imposing disadvantage on the first Deception or Performance check each day. The bargain gains the sigil immediately but alerts Nyxara, adding a Duskward Knight to the Gate of Shadows fight.
In the Obsidian Spire, Ysolde finds Nyxara's study and the Veiled Ledger, which contains the names of every Umbral Court spy in the Concord—including Captain Theron—and, in the margins, the true name of Queen Nyxara herself.
Delivering the ledger earns the Cloak of the Veiled Market and Vex's network, but Theron escapes to become a recurring enemy. Exposing Theron restores Sable Vane's name and gains the Concord's Warding Blessing (+2 AC vs. undead and shadow creatures), but burns Ysolde's access to the Night Bazaar. Destroying the page keeps Nyxara's true name solely in Ysolde's journal, granting her advantage on the DC 18 Persuasion check to redeem Nyxara—but Vex marks her as a debtor, and Veiled Market prices double for her forever.
Speaking the glade's true name over the waters
Ysolde inherits Thalia's vigil, shifting her identity from copyist to keeper; she gains the Vigil of the Named Well and a permanent bond to the moonwell network.
When the glade's moonwell is purified, one of her three daily Portent rolls may be replaced by rolling on the well's surface—a d20 blessed by the restored pool, minimum value 10.
Absorbing the mirror-shard of the destroyed Shroud of Mirrors
A shard of mirror-magic fuses to Ysolde's moonstone clasp; her reflection ceases to be entirely hers.
She may cast mirror image once per long rest without a slot, but suffers disadvantage on her first Deception or Performance check each day as her reflection betrays small truths.
Memorizing Queen Nyxara's true name
Carrying the true name of a fallen guardian changes how Ysolde reads all divinations; she begins seeing the person inside the monster.
When she scrries a creature whose true name she knows, the target's saving throw against her Scrying is made at disadvantage, and she may speak to the target telepathically during the vision.
Ally
Forty years ago the Concord sent a young, over-eager acolyte named Ysolde to the Moonwell Glade to copy charts under its last true priestess, expecting the old woman to die quietly. Instead Thalia taught her to read the water, to listen for the well's name beneath its surface, and to distrust any truth the Concord found inconvenient. They spent four decades in a rhythm of argument and devotion: Ysolde correcting Thalia's star-charts, Thalia correcting Ysolde's certainty.
When the glade's waters first dimmed, the Concord dismissed Thalia's warnings as an old woman's superstition and recalled Ysolde to Silvercourt to present 'proper' findings. Ysolde obeyed—and was presenting to half-empty benches when the princess was taken. She returned to find the grove poisoned, her teacher gaunt and unrepentant, and every chart she had copied dismissed as decoration. Thalia never once said 'I told you so,' which hurt worse. Now Ysolde treats the glade's restoration as a debt she can never fully repay, and Thalia has begun, quietly, teaching her the parts of the vigil no archive ever held: how to sit with a dying well, and how to say goodbye.
Enemy
Before the mirrors took her, the Shroud of Mirrors was Isolde Vael—no relation, but her mirror-name amuses the Shroud endlessly—Ysolde's dearest friend at the Concord academy, the girl who snuck Ysolde sweetcakes during night study and defended her charts when the knights mocked them. Isolde vanished during the Concord's purge of the lunar archives, and Ysolde spent years telling herself her friend had simply transferred to a coastal chapter. Learning the truth—that Isolde was Thalia's daughter, taken as a child and reshaped into the Umbral Court's spymaster—recasts every illusion Ysolde has ever unraveled as a message she failed to read.
The Shroud knows Ysolde's old name for the moonwell network, knows her childhood fears, and uses them in every taunt. For Ysolde, defeating her is not enough: every encounter is an argument about whether a person can be pulled back out of the dark. The locket in the grotto is Ysolde's proof that the girl in the mirrors still exists, and the Shroud both hates and craves that proof.
Faction
Ysolde has served the Lunar Concord for forty years, and the order has spent forty years proving it does not deserve her. She was sworn in as a copyist at ninety, spent her first century transcribing moonwell charts in the Grand Hall's archive, and rose exactly nowhere—the Concord's hierarchy values knights over scholars, and a moon elf woman with ink-stained fingers was furniture. She remains a Guardian in name and wears the crescent out of genuine faith in the moon, not the institution.
The Concord's burning of the lunar archives is the wound she cannot stop picking: the order destroyed its own memory to hide an uncomfortable truth about the moonwell network, and that act of erasure is directly responsible for the glade's corruption now. Her standing with the Concord is functional but cold—Lady Seren respects her expertise; Captain Theron tolerates her as a civilian consultant; the archivists resent that she knows the burned collections better than they do.
Every major decision Ysolde faces runs against the grain of the order: restoring the true name the Concord erased, exposing the traitor the Concord sheltered, redeeming the daughter the Concord failed. If she delivers the network map, the Concord will claim it as their victory; if she withholds it, they will call it theft. Ysolde's arc bends toward becoming the Concord's conscience—or its replacement.
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