Wren looks like a slender elf harpist in her early thirties, with cool brown skin that catches a faint green sheen in riverside light. Her hair falls in long, dark waves threaded with pale willow catkins that never seem to wilt. She moves as if stepping around sounds only she can hear, graceful but not fragile; when she turns, her sleeves and hair arrive a heartbeat after her. Her hands are broad-palmed and callused at the finger pads from centuries of harp strings, with tiny pale grooves that resemble a map of river tributaries. A small, battered wooden cup hangs from her belt, its rim worn nearly flat on one side from being worried between her teeth. The overall impression is of someone beautiful in the way a half-remembered melody is beautiful, and just as difficult to hold onto.

Wren can be generous with strangers and mercilessly exact with someone she loves. In a calm mood she is curious, funny, and willing to trade stories; when she feels mocked, she turns every word into a test of intent. She delights in harmless misdirection but hates being treated as a pretty source of songs. Her anger is active rather than cold: she presses the issue, names the injury, and makes it difficult to look away.

Wren came from the Feywild to Faerûn following a tune that had crossed a river at midsummer. At the old willow by the river ford, she met Aldous, then a young innkeeper's son with a cracked voice and a gift for remembering melodies. She gave him The Lantern by the Water, a lament about keeping a light for someone who might not return. Aldous promised to sing it only as she had taught it, and to meet her again at the willow on the next midsummer night. He did neither. He reshaped the lament into the cheerful tavern song Lantern Lad, which made him famous locally and turned Wren's grief into a joke. Years later, when he became the inn's proprietor, she returned and cursed its patrons: each hears the song they most regret failing to sing, and cannot leave the inn until they acknowledge what they have withheld. Wren is not trying to kill anyone. She wants Aldous to admit what he did, restore the lament's true words, and meet her at the willow without an audience or an excuse. Her relationship with Aldous remains tender beneath the anger, which unsettles her more than she admits. She has also grown fond of the inn's night cook, who leaves a cup of water beneath the willow, and worries that the curse is beginning to ensnare people who were never part of the old promise.