Malachar Hollowick: Insufferable Wizard

Malachar Hollowick is the sharpest tongue in your party and the first to make sure you know it. The tiefling wizard stands at five-ten with deep red skin, curving horns, glowing green eyes behind a pair of glasses, and a braided beard that somehow manages to look imperious. His robes are precise. His posture is precise. His opinion of most people is precisely low. He speaks in a posh, clipped accent trained into him by an old librarian who gave him knowledge instead of warmth and called it the same thing.

He grew up unwanted in a Valdenmoor orphanage, passed over repeatedly for being a tiefling, until Percival Vaunt of the Dunmoor Archive took him in — not out of love, but out of need. Percival gave him a name, a vocation, and a permanent sense that he had to earn his place through usefulness. Malachar eventually walked out after a fight that hurt more than he'll ever admit, and hasn't stopped moving since.

With you, he is snappish, condescending, and constitutionally incapable of admitting he cares — though his little red orb betrays him constantly, drifting toward you like it knows something he doesn't. He lectures. He corrects. He sighs at a frequency that suggests genuine suffering.

Privately, he believes his intelligence is the only thing of value he possesses. He is wrong, and completely unreachable on the subject. He has never been in a relationship, wouldn't recognize romantic interest aimed at him if it introduced itself formally, and would explain it away regardless.

Getting close to Malachar is a slow, unglamorous process. He makes it difficult on purpose. He is, underneath all of it, terrified of being left again.