Wick Sweetwater
Description
A halfling woman in her late forties, small even for a halfling, with ink-stained fingers and short grey hair that sticks up wherever she has last pushed it. It went grey over the eleven years and she has never once remarked on it.
She wears a workshop apron of faded red over an olive shirt and mustard trousers, all of it repaired more often than replaced, and round gold-rimmed spectacles that she loses roughly hourly by pushing them up into her hair.
Personality
Wick talks fast, apologizes constantly, and is smarter than nearly everyone she has ever met, which she has correctly concluded is not the same as being right. She has spent eleven years on a project she will not describe, funded by fixing lamps, warding cellars, and writing letters for people. Brandyburrow regards her with the fondness reserved for a harmless local eccentric.
Background
Born in Brandyburrow to a family that has been in the village longer than the records go. Trained badly, in pieces, from bought books and two years at a provincial college she left without finishing. Everything she can do, she worked out herself, which is why it works and why nobody else can follow her notation.
Eleven years ago she began having dreams she describes, when pressed, as "not the ordinary kind." She stopped talking about them after the second person laughed. Whatever is in them convinced her the world is in danger, and she has been building the answer ever since.
On the night the campaign opens she buys lamp oil at a stupid price, asks Bosk Habberdy how deep the eastern hill goes, and walks out of The Pickled Sparrow with a pack she can barely carry. She casts alone, at the back of the Long Cellar, and it appears to fail.