Todun the Deceiver

Todun the Deceiver

Ancient Ruler of the Old-Growth Forestlands

In the deep, tangled heart of the old-growth woods west of the Rock and Silver Rivers, the trees grow too tall, too close, and too silent. There the wind smells of loam and venom, and every root seems to coil like something sleeping. At the center of this brooding wilderness rules Todun the Deceiver, an ancient green dragon whose age is measured not in centuries, but in the rise and fall of civilizations best remembered as half-ruined legends.

Called the Mistress of Murmurs and the Poison in the Pact, Todun wages war not with armies but with offers. She prefers bargains to battle, contracts to claws, and will gladly spare a foe’s life if it can be repaid in service, secrets, or souls. To deal with Todun is to enter a game whose rules she alone knows, and in which every smile hides a snare. She delights in cheating contests, rigging wagers, and twisting the wording of oaths; to her, a fair fight is merely a puzzle solved poorly.

Her lair is rumored to coil beneath the Kewaenaw Ruins, where pale stone and blackened arches rise like broken teeth from the forest floor. Some claim these ruins are the bones of a kingdom that stood before the Dark Elves broke time and shattered history, but no living sage—man, elf, or dwarf—can name its kings or its gods. Beneath that dead city, Todun’s hoard sprawls in vaults too vast for mortal minds: coin and crown from empires erased, relics forged before calendars were counted, and curiosities stolen from across Virendas and beyond. Adventurers whisper that even the Dark Elves once bargained with her, and that she remembers the world as it was before their invasion.

Todun herself is a vast, sinuous terror of emerald scales and shadowed grace. Moss and lichen cling to her horns and spines as if the forest itself has claimed her as its darkest root. Her eyes gleam like wet jade in torchlight, and her breath curls in slow, poisonous veils that smell of crushed pine and grave-soil. Yet rarely does she reveal this true form to the peoples of the Firelands. More often she walks among them wrapped in borrowed flesh: a sharp-eyed merchant, a veiled noblewoman, a quiet pilgrim at the edge of the fire. Wherever stories are traded and wagers made, some suspect Todun may be listening from behind a different face.

Careful, patient, and utterly malignant, Todun treats centuries as other creatures treat seasons. She does not simply hoard gold; she hoards grudges, bloodlines, and debts. A promise made in a forest tavern today may be called in three generations hence, when a great-grandchild stands alone on a misted road and finds the trees suddenly very, very quiet. To enter her woods is to step into an ancient game already in motion—and Todun the Deceiver is very good at winning.