A small, wiry goblin with moss-green skin, oversized amber eyes, and a crooked smile full of uneven teeth. His ears are pierced with tiny copper rings, and a stripe of white clay runs from his brow to the tip of his nose. He wears patched leather armor beneath a weather-stained sage's robe, with bundles of herbs, feathers, and stolen-looking scraps of parchment hanging from his belt. His quarterstaff is carved with cramped Druidic symbols and topped with a smooth black seedpod.

Mzeki is bright, restless, and cheerfully inappropriate in serious situations. He treats every mystery as an invitation, every locked door as a personal insult, and every animal as a potential informant. He is genuinely kind beneath the mischief, especially toward outcasts, frightened creatures, and anyone being ignored by people with more authority than sense.

Mzeki was born beneath the floorboards of a ruined observatory, where his goblin clan scavenged copper wire, broken lenses, and anything else that could be carried without making too much noise. While the other children learned which locks opened with a kick, Mzeki learned which moss grew on north-facing stones and how to read the stars through a cracked brass tube. An elderly hermit scholar named Othessa caught him stealing pages from her notebooks and, instead of turning him in, taught him letters, dead languages, and the important difference between a poisonous mushroom and a merely disgusting one. When Othessa died, Mzeki inherited her field journals, her calligrapher's tools, and a warning that the local forest had begun forgetting its own name. He joined a druidic circle to investigate, though he still insists that he is not a proper scholar because proper scholars do not write notes on tavern menus, tree bark, or the backs of wanted posters. Mzeki travels now because the woods are sick, the answers are probably somewhere inconvenient, and doing something is usually better than waiting around while important people argue about it. His guiding philosophy is simple, just doing shi.