Splinter is a Small, russet-scaled kobold with a narrow muzzle, oversized ears, and alert amber eyes. His scales are darkest along his spine and pale around his throat and palms. He wears practical leather armor beneath a moss-green cloak stitched with tiny pockets for herbs, chalk, feathers, and folded notes. A battered brass magnifying lens hangs from a cord around his neck, its rim worn smooth where his claws constantly worry it. His voice is normally a dry, rapid chirp, but when frightened or angry he stops speaking altogether and breathes in short clicking bursts through his teeth. He carries a gnarled ash staff crowned with living ivy and a small satchel of carefully labeled natural specimens.

Splinter is intensely curious, methodical, and unexpectedly tender toward small or overlooked creatures. He speaks with scholarly precision about mushrooms, ruins, weather, and animal behavior, but becomes awkward when discussing his own emotions. He wants every problem to have a discoverable cause, every mystery to yield a useful answer, and every frightened creature to be given a safe place to stand.

Splinter was hatched beneath the foundations of an abandoned observatory, where his kobold clutch scavenged broken lenses, brass fittings, and waterlogged books. While the others prized anything that could be hammered into a trap, Splinter became fascinated by the diagrams of stars, roots, weather patterns, and animal anatomy. He taught himself to read from the labels on specimen jars and spent years copying damaged texts onto scraps of slate. His first teacher was not a person but an ancient moonflower growing through the observatory floor. It opened only under starlight, and Splinter came to regard its patient blooming as a lesson in disciplined attention. A traveling druid eventually found Splinter cataloging the creatures of the surrounding marsh and recognized that his hunger for knowledge was also a form of reverence. Under that druid's guidance, Splinter learned Druidic, the cycles of Wild Shape, and the dangerous art of calling life through a wounded place. He later returned to his old warren and discovered that miners planned to drain the marsh for rare blue clay. Splinter could not stop them alone, so he began traveling, gathering allies, researching ancient land rights, and quietly sabotaging machines whenever possible. He adventures now as both field scholar and ecological insurgent, determined to prove that even a creature raised among ruins can become a careful guardian of living things.