Human-sized and unmistakably fey, Phrakvili stands with the patient stillness of a tree deciding whether to fall. Its skin is deep umber, roughened into fine, barklike ridges by centuries of wind, rain, and blood-red pollen; narrow seams between those ridges glow like damp crimson roots. Its jaw is broad and slightly too long, with square, red-stained teeth that show even when its mouth is shut. It eats berries one at a time, crushing each with deliberate, audible clicks, and laughs with a dry rasp that sounds like a branch dragged over stone. Its movements are economical until it turns, when its shoulders and head pivot at subtly different speeds. The unexpected detail: Phrakvili keeps a tiny, carefully tended patch of blue meadow flowers growing in a cracked clay cup at its belt.

Phrakvili is patient enough to hear a stranger's full defense, yet stubborn enough to treat the defense as evidence against them. It can be tender with living plants and merciless toward people who dismiss the old imprisonment. In calm moments it is precise and almost hospitable; when grief takes hold, it becomes theatrical, offering terrible choices as if conducting a ritual. It wants acknowledgment, but distrusts anyone who offers it too quickly.

Phrakvili was once a minor guardian of a spring-fed grove. Generations ago, the orcish settlement of Dargat drove iron stakes through its heartwood and bound it beneath a shrine, hoping to make the grove's healing water serve their warband. Phrakvili endured generations of prayers, chains, and offerings before a fire broke the shrine and freed it. It emerged into a changed forest, with the settlement gone and the grove dying around it. Rather than let the wound close, Phrakvili fed its grief into the trees; the forest turned blood-red, and a curse took hold of the descendants of those who had imprisoned it. It speaks of this history calmly, but its account omits that it once helped the settlement survive a winter famine. It still tends flowers left by a child who visited the shrine. Its present trouble is that the red forest is spreading beyond its roots, poisoning farms and threatening the very thing it claims to avenge.