Willem

Willem is a Half-Elf Warlock who joined the party near the conclusion of their mission to defeat the Phantomorph.

* Willem grew up in a small forest village. He was a curious child who tended to get himself into trouble by digging into all sorts of matters that others wanted left alone.

* A year ago, he heard a story from an old man in the village that there was a “bottomless” lake deep in the woods. He doubted the truth of the matter, but just HAD to find outage source of the rumor, so he hunted it down.
* What he found was a small pond in an odd clearing… none of the trees of the surrounding forest were rooted within several paces of the shore. Cautiously, he sat and watched the water for signs of danger. All he noticed was that the water was incredibly still and looked perfectly clear. Going closer, he gazed down into unfathomably deep water from extremely steep looking banks. The pool couldn’t be more than 100 feet across, but looked to be impossibly deep. He was enraptured by the mystery of the place… and so he began to visit it to learn more.
* Over the coming weeks, he made himself a rough camp so he could study it closer. He tried dropping stones in, used as much fishing line as he could borrow, anything to find the bottom of the strange pool… but he could not. He scribbled notes constantly in an old journal. What he did not do was go in… there was something that made him hold back.

* One night, when the moon was new and the sky was dark, Willem woke with a feeling that he was being watched. He went to the waters edge and had a strong sense of vertigo… he felt almost like he could see himself from a perspective high above looking straight down at the pool… which he saw as a huge, fathomless eyeball. Some impulse made him kneel beside the water and gaze down in again… but this time he felt as if he was being studied right back. COME… DOWN… came a call within his mind. And so Willem bent forward and dropped down through the water as if it wasn’t there. He thought he was falling for hours… and then he suddenly stopped, all sense of direction lost… he floated before an enormous black form that writhed around in the dark. He waited… trying to be still and invisible, but he felt in his bones the moment when this terrible, unknowable, mysterious being looked upon him and knew of him. In an instance he knew two things: first, that all the world that Willem knew and studied was nothing to this entity and second, that nothing that Willem could ever do would have significance to it… unless…
* He woke on the shore, soaked, but not cold. He found his journal beside him, also soaked, but still bound together. The book was now filled with pages written in script that swirled like oil in water, sometimes forming words and images that Willem could understand. Studying the text that morning, he came to understand three words that were his first instruction from his new Patron: Learn to Read. And so he did, he started studying languages to try and find ones that matched what he saw in the book… so far, Primordial seemed to help unlocked further words.

* Since those days, Willem has used the journal as a guide. Recently, he believes he deciphered a significant message: “Find the knight with a key for the tower. Beware the orc with the golden eye”. It’s entirely possible that Willem is misinterpreting the text… or that it’s complete gibberish, but he’s committed to the idea that the messages are real.

Physical Appearance:

* Willem is little short for a male half-elf, has messy shoulder length black hair, and dark eyes. His elven features aren’t obvious at all.
* He wears a dark gray cloak over his clothing/armor and has a blue scarf made of terrycloth around his neck, which he uses frequently to *attempt* to mop up excess water.
* Willem seems to be perpetually damp… the source of this is unclear to anyone else, but he knows it’s a result of his pact. His journal (which is his Tome of Secrets) is particularly wet, especially when open and being read.
* His Eldritch Sight invocation causes his eyes to appear to become black pools of deep water when he uses it.

Personality:

* Willem still maintains a sense of curiosity about the world… though it’s tempered now by a strong sense of impending doom that borders on nihilism.
* He is currently pretty zealous in his desire to follow the “instructions” he has received and to find more such messages/signs. He’s also still motivated to learn more languages and lore in order to help him in his interpretation.