A small, round-faced halfling with warm amber eyes, a perpetually rosy nose, and dark curls usually pinned back with a practical brass clasp. Their traveling vest is embroidered with tiny stitched herbs and little family initials, and their holy symbol hangs beside a dented hip flask. They look like someone who has spent as much time tending bruised knees as they have surviving collapsed rafters, soot, and celebratory wine.

Warm, earnest, and comfortingly nosy. Merry treats everyone like family after about three minutes of conversation, laughs at the worst possible moments, and has a habit of offering practical care with a cup in the other hand. Beneath the easy tipsiness is a stubbornly observant healer who notices pain before people say a word.

Born the youngest child in a house that believed tending the body was a form of prayer, they grew up wrapped in the sort of affection that can feel like armor. Their parents were the sort who checked for fevers with one hand and tucked snacks into every pocket with the other. By the time they could read, they were already helping mend scrapes, soothe headaches, and carry broth to neighbors who had no one else. Healing was never a calling shouted from a mountaintop. It was a family habit, passed along with recipes, hymns, and a healthy respect for clean bandages. Somewhere between their first blessing and their first accident, they developed an uncanny talent for appearing exactly where things were going wrong. Falling beams, tavern brawls, cart wrecks, magical mishaps, if destruction was brewing, they were somehow already there, sleeves rolled up and muttering a prayer with one hand while the other held a flask. They are not a reckless drunk, just pleasantly, habitually tipsy enough that the world seems softer at the edges. In the ruins of other people's disasters, they became a calm little light, a healer who can laugh while pulling splinters from a goblin bite or blessing a friend back onto their feet.