Name: Grendel Dreadmoor

Echo:  Pestilence (Duster)

Echo Relic: Feverbane (Pistol)

Alias: The Dreadmoor

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This is Grendel. The slinger of the Dreadmoor, plague of the Dark Frontier, and the man whose very shadow carries fever. Grendel was born in the green misted wetlands of the Dreadmoor, a place where disease breathes like a living creature. His mother wandered into the mire carrying a fever… or perhaps she was summoned to it. No one knows for certain. What they do know is that something ancient in the swamp accepted her as its offering. Before her death, she gave birth to a child whose skin carried the faint green cast of the swamp itself.

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Grendel Dreadmoor roams the mire like sickness given shape, a shadow stretched thin over a man’s frame. He is tall, gaunt, long in limb, built not as if born of flesh but carved out of hunger. His sickly green tint looks all to unnatural and his eyes glow a dull, dying yellow… the final flicker of a lantern before darkness. Wherever he steps, stagnant water pools, and pale mushrooms bloom in the print he leaves behind. 

 

They say that when he finally emerged from the Dreadmoor, he carried a purpose forged from grief and betrayal, a purpose etched into him from the moment he opened his eyes in that cursed mire. Fever flared from his skin in yellow green spectral coils as he walked, each step deliberate, guided by the memory of a wrong no one else dares to speak aloud. He carries the truth of what befell his mother… a truth burned into him as surely as the fever that marked his birth.

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In his hand he held a pistol that pulsed like it was breathing. It had a name long before he ever claimed one of his own… Feverbane.  A plague made matte black pistol. Scaled like an obsidian dragon, forged by the Dreadmoor and something far older. Feverbane does not merely kill… it infects. Bullets bring wounds. wounds bring fever. Fever brings consumption.

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Grendel carries the Echo, Pestilence. A power that seeps from him the way the Dreadmoor seeps into the roots of the Dark Frontier. He can summon miasma, a creeping fog that if exposed, eats flesh and burns lungs. He can mark a man with Scourge, a plague that turns each heartbeat into agony. He controls the rate of Plague as well… slow and painful, quick and all consuming, or… if he wills it… merciful. For he carries not only the plague… but the cure. Lastly, he possesses Death Sense, feeling sickness in others the way most men feel heat or the deep frost of winter. When his Echo flares, green yellow spores drift from his coat, his breath, his gun… whatever he sets his will upon.

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He comes to towns only when the fever hits… or perhaps the fever comes because he does. Folks in Boot Hill only know that when the plague begins to spread, he can been seen on the outskirts… lurking… watching, waiting...  for the dying begins. 

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For Grendel, there has only ever been one path since he can remember. From the moment he opened his eyes in the fevered mire of the Dreadmoor, he felt it… a pull carved into his bones before he could speak. He has always known the truth of what happened to his mother, and who was responsible for the curse that nearly ended them both. Now the time has come. He is  being pulled... called in a single direction. to a single man. A single town… to... Boot Hill.

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