Ewan
Ewan
At the table
“Ewan, if you heard them. Warden, if you need one.”
Voice
Ewan's voice sounds as if it has spent years pushing through cold air and roadside dust: chesty, dry, and lightly rasped at the edges. He gives directions with the practiced force of someone used to being heard over rain and cartwheels. When the Barguests answer, their second voice comes from an implausibly small nearby space, close enough to make listeners check their pockets.
His ordinary voice is dry and chesty, shaped by years of calling warnings over wind and wagon noise. Words catch slightly at the back of his throat, like gravel shifting under a boot. The Barguests answer in a second voice from nearby cracks and hollow spaces; the pair do not harmonize, but finish each other's sentences with unnerving precision.
Speech patterns
How to play them
Approach Ewan as a capable but guarded road warden. Showing care for stranded travelers earns his trust faster than flattery. Ask about the road and he becomes talkative; ask directly about the Barguests and he may answer with both voices at once. He will trade safe passage or useful warnings for help protecting the route.
Goal
Prevent the road survey from erasing the old route and find the survivor of the coach wreck.
Motivation
Ewan is driven by a stubborn belief that a road is a promise: someone made it so another person could get home.
Appearance
Ewan resembles a lean, weather-beaten traveler assembled from ordinary road details: damp wool, pale grit, and the dull shine of old boot leather. His skin has the rough, dry texture of a map left in the sun, with tiny flecks of gravel embedded along his temples. He walks with a pronounced favoring of his left side, but his shadow takes each step a heartbeat late. His hands are broad and blunt, their palms polished smooth as road stones from decades of handling mile markers. The unexpected detail is that he carries a tiny, brightly painted wooden duck on a ribbon, and checks that it is still there whenever anyone mentions a river.
Clothing
A patched brown road warden's coat, a faded yellow scarf, mud-stiff trousers, and boots repaired with mismatched leather. His coat pockets contain chalk, twine, and a few small stones sorted by shape.
Body language
Ewan stands with his weight settled over his right leg and turns his whole body rather than his head. His hands repeatedly measure the width of nearby gaps. When he is deciding whether to trust someone, he watches their feet instead of their face.
- Height
- 5 feet 8 inches
- Build
- Lean and sinewy, with the compact strength of someone accustomed to lifting stones and pulling people from ditches.
- Eyes
- Dull hazel, with a faint dusting of gray at the edges
- Hair
- Dust-gray, cut short and usually hidden beneath a battered cap
- Skin
- Weathered beige with a gray, grit-dusted cast
- Age
- Appears about fifty years old; claims to have been walking since the first milestones were planted.
- Gender
- Man, or something that remembers being one
- Size
- Medium
Distinguishing features
Personality
12 traits and drivesEwan is hospitable in practical ways but suspicious of easy charm. He will share his last dry blanket, then interrogate a guest about why they are traveling after dark. In calm weather he is patient and dryly funny; in danger he becomes brisk and directive. When the Barguests speak through him, his concern for individuals pulls against their cold interest in the road as a whole.
- Alignment
- Neutral
Quirks
Habits
Traits · 3
Flaws · 3
Fears · 3
Wants and needs · 3
Combat
AC 11 · HP 9 · 30 ft.Ewan avoids a fight unless someone threatens a traveler or damages the road. He uses Call from the Verge to keep a foe from escaping toward dangerous ground, then strikes with his cudgel and retreats toward a culvert, hedge, or milestone. If reduced below half his hit points, he tries to end the conflict by offering directions, a warning, or a bargain.
Ewan
Actions
Reactions
Services they sell
Rewards they can give
Equipment
- Ashwood cudgel (weapon)A short, knotted length of ashwood used for probing soft earth and, if needed, striking an attacker.
- Broken survey chain (tool)A brass survey chain with several missing links; the chain twitches near unsafe ground.
- Wooden duck (keepsake)A tiny painted duck, chipped at the beak and carefully wrapped in cloth when not worn.
Possessions
Background
No one agrees on when Ewan first appeared beside the Old Survey Road. He remembers being a human road warden who kept a stretch of highway passable through three wet seasons, but his memories fold into one another like tracks in mud. The turning point came when a coach overturned at a flooded culvert. Ewan heard two children trapped beneath it calling from opposite ends of a space too narrow for either voice to fit. He pried the wreck apart, but could not save both. Afterward, the paired road spirits known as the Barguests began speaking through him, and he stopped aging in any way that mattered. They call him Ewan, though he cannot tell whether that was his name before or the name they gave him. He now tends the route, warns travelers away from treacherous crossings, and quietly searches for the surviving child, now grown, who is said to live somewhere beyond the road. His current trouble is a new survey crew that plans to straighten the old bends, which would erase the places where the Barguests can safely speak.
Role in the story
A wary guide and unsettling witness to the old road's history. Ewan can point the characters toward a lost traveler, reveal what the Barguests know, or ask them to stop the survey crew before the spirits lose their footholds.
“The turning point came when a coach overturned at a flooded culvert.”
- Faction
- The Barguests, though Ewan describes this as an obligation rather than an affiliation.
Known connections
Media
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