Black Anvil Books

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Who is Godwick Emberfoot

Godwick Emberfoot is a Halfling Warlock enslaved to the Archfae Aurusel, the Great Gardener.

There’s a lot to parse in that sentence. A warlock is a person who has made a pact with an otherworldly being. The magic he wields is gifted by their power. His pact is one of the chain: he’s subservient to his patron and soul-slaved. When I describe Godwick, he’s shackled at his wrists with a chain that runs between them.

His patron is the Archfae Aurusel. An Archfae is a powerful creature with the influence, understanding, and power to bend the Faewild to its will. The Faewild is a parallel plane where the fae live, typified by magic, chaos, and change. Aurusel maintains a garden in the Faewild and is a powerful creature in his own right.

Godwick is in possession of a magic item that I call a patchwork cloak. It’s nothing special - I imagine it as a dingy patchwork quilt made into a cloak with a hood. Its special power, though, allows Godwick to plane shift, to move between different planes of existence at will.

I see Godwick as a haggard soul teetering on the edge of sanity. He somehow came in possession of the patchwork cloak and wandered into Aurusel’s garden in the Faewild. He wasn’t outright destroyed, but rather enslaved, for Aurusel has work for a plane-shifting halfling. Being enslaved by a powerful otherworldly force and bouncing around between planes of existence rattles the mind, and his is stretched too thin.

Godwick’s face is marred with deep wrinkles and crevices, sullen eyes, and weathered skin. Inky-black, greasy hair, that runs to his back. His use of pact magic wears on his body. I perceive some of his halflingness as eroded in some way.

A part of Godwick’s pact magic allows him to find a familiar, a magicked spiritual companion. Godwick’s familiar is the pseudodragon Greymalken. Greymalken is a twist on Shakespeare’s Graymalkin, an old female cat, a witch’s familiar, mentioned in the opening of Macbeth.

The first story I wrote for Godwick was his connecting origin story to Greymalken entitled Bargains with Dragons.

Godwick is my answer to several characters that I’ve enjoyed in fantasy and science fiction. He wears a multicolored patchwork cloak. This is a reference to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and a comic book character named Shade the Changing Man. He’s also, absolutely, a John Constantine type of character.

His stories will be fantastical, traveling to strange places, and meeting otherworldly creatures in the Faewild.