Zar'koth was born Zar'koth Xylos'zar, a son of a minor noble house in a drow city deep in the Underdark. House Xylos'zar was a mid-tier power — not great enough to challenge the ruling families, but proud, wealthy in fungus-farms and slave-taken ore, and ruthless in the way all Lolthite houses must be to survive. As a male, Zar'koth was never destined for power; he was trained as a hunter and scout, a useful instrument of the house's will, sent into the lightless tunnels to track rivals, recover stolen property, and quietly make problems disappear.
It was work he excelled at. His keen senses, his patience in the dark, and his instinct for the signs of aberrant things lurking in the deep passages made him one of the house's most reliable blades.
His downfall was not ambition, as it is for so many drow, but love. Zar'lissandra, heir to the matron mother, was meant for a political marriage that would elevate the house. Instead she found in Zar'koth something the web of Lolth had never offered her: affection without calculation. Their affair was long, careful, and ultimately discovered — and it produced a child, an act of treachery against the house's designs that could not be hidden once the matron learned of it.
In the brutal arithmetic of drow justice, Zar'koth should have died. But killing him outright risked scandal, and Zar'lissandra's value as a marriage pawn was too great to waste on a public execution. The matron chose a crueler sentence: the child was taken and sent to be raised by other drow, its parentage erased, and Zar'koth was exiled to the furthest reaches of the Underdark, stripped of his name and forbidden to return on pain of death.
He took the name Nightwolf in exile — the wolf being a surface beast he had only heard of in stories, a creature that hunts loyal to its pack, something he had lost and could never reclaim. For decades he survived in the borderlands between known drow territory and the truly lightless deep: hunting, scavenging, avoiding the patrols of houses that would profit from returning an exiled Xylos'zar head to their matron.
He learned the Underdark the way surface folk learn a forest — its water sources, its safe hollows, the migration patterns of its monsters, the tell-tale tremors and wrong-angled shadows that mark the presence of aberrations. He became, in truth, what the house had only used him as: a ranger of the deep dark, belonging to no one.
Then came the dream. In it, a dark figure stood surrounded by a swirling cloud of winged creatures, and it laid a single hand upon Zar'koth's shoulder — a gesture that was somehow both claim and blessing. He woke at dawn (or the Underdark's approximation of it) to find a small black dragon hatchling sitting near him, staring at him with amber eyes, as if it had been waiting for him to wake.
It has followed him ever since — scouting small passages, sharing his camps, perching on his shoulder with the possessive confidence of a creature that has decided something about him. Zar'koth does not know what it means. Dragons do not simply appear for exiled drow. Whatever the dark figure in his dream was, it has marked him, and the hatchling is the first sign of a destiny he cannot yet read.
Now he wanders both the Underdark and the surface world, taking work as a guide, a tracker, and a blade for hire when coin runs short. He tells no one his true name. But beneath the caution, two fires still burn: the hope of one day finding the child taken from him, and the question of what the dream-figure wants — and whether, when it comes to collect, the small black dragon at his side will be his salvation or his doom.
