Once per turn, deal an extra 1d6 damage when you hit with a finesse or ranged weapon attack and have advantage on the attack roll, or when another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it.
Choose two skills in which you are proficient. You gain Expertise in them, doubling your proficiency bonus on checks with those skills. Wren is Expert in Stealth and Sleight of Hand.
You gain mastery over the dagger. When you hit a creature with it, you can give disadvantage on its next attack roll against a creature other than you.
Wren's scraping knife: a narrow-bladed dagger kept in her sleeve, its edge worn from scraping 'tithe' down to 'prayer'. Treated as a standard dagger.
Charlatan background feat: gain proficiency in one skill of your choice (Athletics), or two tool proficiencies, or one language.
You know Thieves' Cant, a secret mix of jargon, code, and hand signals used by criminals and other shady folk.
Human species trait: +1 to three different ability scores (Dexterity, Intelligence, Charisma).
Behind the character
Wren Quill, called the Scraped Margin, is a lean human woman in her mid-twenties with sharp grey eyes and dark hair cut short and unevenly — by her own knife, which is the kind of fact she offers instead of a handshake. She wears a copyist's grey coat over a leather jerkin, ink-stained cuffs rolled back, and keeps a narrow-bladed scraping knife sheathed up her sleeve; its edge is worn from years of scraping 'tithe' down to 'prayer'. Her hands are always slightly inked no matter how often she washes.
She is dry, watchful, and quicker with a knife than with an apology. She counts exits before she counts people, reads rooms the way she once read manuscripts — for the words that have been removed — and trusts paper more than faces. She has a forger's patience, a pickpocket's stillness, and a habit of answering questions with a question that makes the asker leave. Affection embarrasses her; loyalty frightens her more, because everything she has been loyal to has turned out to be edited.
She flinches at the sound of a bell — a coral bell was the last thing the Cathedral showed her before she understood she would never be allowed to leave quietly — and she keeps her back to no door. Beneath the dryness is a grief she handles like a blade: a brother taken by the Hollow Choir six years ago and erased so completely that the family cannot even agree on what he looked like.
She wants his name back. She wants the erasure to stop. She wants, though she would never say it, her sister Tessaly to decide she is worth forgiving. Until then she is useful, careful, and very hard to catch.
Before the adventure
Wren Quill spent her childhood in the Salt Quarter of Lordinium, the middle child of the Quill family of binders, raised among leather, paste, and the smell of rot that comes up through Cooper's Row when the tide is high. Her father taught her to hold a blade against a page; her mother taught her that a book is only as honest as the hand that keeps it. She was clever with her fingers and quieter than either of her siblings, and when the Cathedral of the Twelve offered a copyist's stipend — real coin, steady work, a chance to read the scripture she had only heard from the street — she took it, because taking it was what good daughters did.
Three years in the scriptorium made her an artist of the small knife. She learned the angle at which vellum gives up its ink without tearing, learned which hands scraped and which hands rewrote, learned to do the work without reading the work, because reading it was the first step toward asking about it. Eleven copies of the Borealis scripture passed under her blade, and in every one she scraped the word 'tithe' down to 'prayer' and told herself it was calligraphy. The eleventh copy broke her. She read the whole line. She asked why.
The answer was a windowless room, three days of silence, and a hand-bell of black coral set on the table in front of her — an object she was told to hold, and did, and understood that the holding was the message: we know what you are, and we know what you heard. She walked out of the Cathedral with the scraping knife in her sleeve and never went back.
What she has not told anyone, including Tessaly, is that she took something else out with her: the memory of a tithe-schedule she glimpsed on a supervisor's desk, eleven names a month, and the name of the northern destination written in a woman's hand.
Her brother had been gone six years by then. The Choir took him for 'instruction' — that is the only word the family ever got — and every record of him was scraped out of the parish rolls within a season, so thoroughly that even the priest who baptized him cannot say his name with certainty. Tessaly stayed in the Salt Quarter and collected scraps: receipts, marginalia, the Choir's discarded drafts.
Wren went to work in counting-houses and harbour offices under false names, learning forgery, learning which clerks could be bought, learning that the Choir's people were not fanatics but bookkeepers. She is very good at being someone else now, and she does not entirely like who that is.
She signed Peg Leg Carl's charter for three reasons, in order: the ship is going north, where the tithe-schedule points; the expedition needs someone who can enter a locked room and leave no trace; and Carl pays whether or not anyone finds anything, which means she can keep looking even after the looking stops being profitable. She counts exits before she counts people. She flinches at bells. She has not yet decided whether she is running from the scriptorium or toward it, and the voyage north will decide that for her whether she likes it or not.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Tessaly Quill has spent six years collecting the Hollow Choir's discarded scraps, and she will only hand them to Wren if Wren proves she is finished with the order. In the flooded undercroft beneath Quill's Bindery the sisters find a waxed packet of Choir receipts, and one of them is a tithe-schedule in Mother Sable's own hand naming eleven souls a month and a destination in the north. Following it means going back into the Salt Quarter's Choir safehouse, past the woman with the coral bell, and finding the ledger that proves the Choir has been selling people to the Ashvane Concord for eleven months.
Tessaly gives Wren the scraps she has collected, and the sisters descend into the flooded undercroft beneath the bindery at low tide to retrieve a waxed packet of Choir receipts. Among them is the tithe-schedule in Mother Sable's hand. The tide is coming in, the Choir is watching the street above, and the packet is the only proof that the Choir has been selling people north for eleven months.
Personal quest · 2
Wren took something out of the scriptorium the day she walked: not just the knife, but a folded page from a Choir draft with a name on it that she has never been able to bring herself to read closely. The page is water-stained and the hand is not Mother Sable's. Tracing the hand leads through the Cathedral's outer offices, a disgraced notary named Tamsin Vey with Choir debts, and finally to the scriptorium's night-shift roster — where Wren discovers that the page is not a receipt at all, but a copyist's practice sheet, and the name on it was written by someone learning to scrape.
Wren traces the hand on her stolen page to Tamsin Vey, a notary drowning in Choir debts, who can identify the writer if Wren makes her problem go away. The problem is a hundred and forty gold of Choir loans, and the solution is either coin, forgery, or betrayal.
Personal quest · 3
Mother Ulva of the Drowned Shrine was a Hollow Choir initiate for eleven years, and she still keeps their sign chalked above her door. She knows Wren is ex-Choir and knows Wren knows it. When the shrine's black coral bell is stolen by the Choir — stolen, Ulva suspects, to stop it ringing — she asks Wren to get it back before the spring tide, when something answers it over the water. The trail leads through the smugglers' cellars to the Choir safehouse, and the bell turns out to be a piece of the Tide-Heart itself, cut away and carried south three hundred years ago.
Wren recovers the black coral bell from the Choir safehouse before the spring tide, navigating the smugglers' cellars with a Choir password she gave them herself. The bell is warm, slightly wet, and rings once when she touches it — and she does not flinch, which surprises her more than the ringing.
The schedule names eleven souls a month and a northern destination. Publishing it makes the Choir hostile to the Quill family forever; hiding it keeps the family safe and the crime invisible.
Publish: gain the 'Quill's Witness' trait — advantage on Deception and Investigation checks involving documents, but Mother Sable becomes a personal enemy. Burn: gain Tessaly's full trust and the bindery as a safehouse. Hide: gain a permanent +2 to Sleight of Hand (concealment practice) but lose Tessaly's cooperation on the Ledger of Names.
Her brother may still be alive on the blubber benches of the Frostmarch Camp. The ledger is the only map to him and the only proof of the Choir's crime.
Trade: her brother lives but the erasure continues — Wren gains the 'Debtor's Silence' flaw and loses the codex's protection. Use: keep the evidence and rescue him by force. Destroy: gain 'Nothing Left to Scrape' — she can never be blackmailed with records again, and gains permanent advantage on saves against fear effects tied to bells and Choir rituals.
The gate opens for a life given freely, or for certain relics including the black coral bell. Wren has flinched at bells her whole adult life; giving it up is giving up the last proof of what was done to her.
Offer the bell: the fog accepts it and Wren gains 'Unbelled' — immunity to fear caused by sound, and she can hear the fog's singing without harm. Refuse: the party must find another price, and Wren keeps the bell, which later rings of its own accord at the Tide-Heart and can be used to disrupt the tithe-circle once.
Reading her brother's name in the Hollow Choir's ledger.
From copyist who obeyed the blade to forger who wields it: after reading her brother's name in the Choir ledger, Wren stops scraping words down and starts writing them back in.
Becomes Expertise (Stealth, Deception) after the Choir safehouse infiltration — she stops hiding from the Choir and starts hiding among them.
Offering the coral bell at the Gate of the Twelve.
From someone who flinches at bells to someone who rings them: after giving up the coral bell at the Gate of the Twelve, Wren stops being marked by the Choir and starts marking them.
The knife is re-honed on the Harrow Light's black rock and becomes 'The Margin's Edge' — counts as a magic dagger (+1) that deals an extra 1d6 damage to Hollow Choir agents.
Ally
Tessaly and Wren grew up in the bindery on Cooper's Row, two of three siblings raised among leather and paste. When the Choir took their brother six years ago, Tessaly stayed and fought with paper — collecting the Choir's scraps, keeping the last pre-Expurgation codex in a flooded cellar, waiting. Wren left and fought with silence — three years in the scriptorium, scraping the word 'tithe' down to 'prayer' without once telling her sister what she was doing or why.
Tessaly learned about the scriptorium from a Choir watcher's taunt, not from Wren, and the six years since have been conducted in unopened letters and returned money. Tessaly has not decided whether to forgive her. What she cannot decide, and what makes the anger worse, is that Wren's scraping was the single most useful thing a Quill has ever done for the Choir — and that Wren walked out the moment she understood, which is the single most useful thing anyone has ever done against them.
They are sisters who have been on the same side the whole time and have never once been on the same page. The bindery is the only place Wren can sleep without counting exits, which she has never told Tessaly, and which Tessaly has guessed.
Enemy
She was Wren's supervisor in the scriptorium for three years: the one who taught her the angle at which vellum gives up its ink, who never raised her voice, who gave Wren the coral bell in the windowless room and understood exactly what the giving meant. Wren does not know her name — only her hands, which were always inked, and her habit of remembering the copyists' families by name, which Wren found kind at the time and monstrous afterward.
The supervisor knew Wren would break. Wren is now certain of it. Whether she let her break because the Choir wanted a deserter to watch, or because she was herself once the copyist who asked, is the question that keeps Wren counting exits. The supervisor has been asking after 'the Quill girl' since the codex came up out of the water, and she still works the Salt Quarter with the same bell.
Wren's knife is worn from scraping words; the supervisor's bell is worn from ringing them. One of them taught the other everything, and neither of them has decided what that means.
Faction
Wren spent three years inside the Hollow Choir's scriptorium as a copyist, and the Choir spent three years teaching her everything she now uses against them. She knows their passwords, their draft procedures, the angle of their scrapes, and the fact that they are bookkeepers rather than fanatics — eleven names a month, filed north, receipted. The Choir regards her as a deserter who might still be recoverable, which is why they have not moved on the bindery: Mother Sable's policy toward broken copyists is patience first, the harbour second.
Wren holds a unique and dangerous position — she is the Choir's own product, turned, and she carries their methods in her hands. Every document she forges is in a hand they trained. Every lock she picks is a lock they installed. And the Choir knows that if she ever publishes the uncorrected codex alongside their own ledger, the erasure of three centuries ends in a single afternoon.
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