History

Fdule was born into a small kobold clan in the Grey Elven forests. They were less a tribe than a loose association of dirt-caked thieves united by the shared conviction that everything belonging to someone else was better than everything belonging to them. The clan selected targets based on one criterion: quality of shinies. Shaitan, a human wizard of considerable power, kept a tower in the nearby town of Sindar, and his home had the best shinies in the area. He was also one of the most dangerous people within fifty miles. The clan had fully researched the first of these facts. The raid was, predictably, not a success. Fdule was the only one who survived it, which at the time felt like bad luck. Shaitan caught him in the act, and instead of killing him, kept him.

For the first few months he was put to work around the household, where it quickly became apparent to everyone involved that he was not good at anything. He could not cook, could not carry things without dropping them, and had a talent for being underfoot at the worst possible moment. What he could do, and had in fact been doing his entire life with some expertise, was survive. In his previous living situation this had required vigilance, speed, and a willingness to sleep with one eye open. In Shaitan’s household it required showing up and not breaking anything irreplaceable. He was fed. He was sheltered. Nobody tried to stab him for his share of the cave mushrooms. Several of his former clanmates were still around, technically, patrolling the tower’s lower levels with the glazed dedication of the newly undead.

In time Fdule became a fixture of Shaitan’s household in the way a piece of ugly furniture becomes a fixture: everyone agreed something should be done about it but nobody ever got around to doing it. When Shaitan came into possession of an ornate four-poster bed that radiated magic, Fdule was the natural choice for testing. The bed produced dreams, vivid, disorienting, and deeply unpleasant, and nobody with better options was going to sleep on it voluntarily. Fdule had no better options, a situation he was well accustomed to.

He slept on the bed for a week. Each night the dream-fog showed him the same things: tall shapes in dark robes, their faces a mass of writhing tentacles, close enough that he could see the white of their eyes. He could not make out anything else. He did not want to. They attempted to communicate with him at length. He understood nothing. What he did observe was that Shaitan and his apprentices were using him as a conduit, Fdule’s sleeping body apparently providing whatever bridge these things needed to communicate. Messages went through him. Responses came back through him, and at no point did anyone consider that sleeping on a haunted bed for a week deserved some kind of compensation.

Over the course of that week the creatures cast spells on him, apparently attempting to establish a more stable connection to whatever it was they were trying to reach. It never worked. What it did do was leave Fdule with a phenomenal resilience to magic that stuck with him permanently, which is a remarkable outcome for a kobold whose primary contribution to the household at that point was occasionally locating things that had rolled under furniture.

Shaitan, noting that Fdule had survived a week of dream visitations from unknowable entities and emerged essentially unchanged except for the magic resistance, began using him as a test subject in earnest. This was, from Shaitan’s perspective, a practical decision. From Fdule’s perspective it was a significant downgrade from finding things under furniture, but the food remained good so he endured it. Years of ritual and alchemical experimentation followed, sometimes deliberate, sometimes Fdule simply being in the ritual chamber when things went wrong. The accumulated effect, compounded by whatever the dream creatures had done to him, was transformative in ways nobody had planned for. Shaitan was likely the only one who fully appreciated what was happening. Fdule had not studied magic any more than a mine canary studies coal gas. He had simply become saturated with it, through proximity and persistence and a complete inability to be anywhere else, until the magic and the kobold were more or less the same thing.

Shaitan had rivals. Years of dangerous experiments, stolen ritual components, and a personality that did not invite friendship had seen to that. One night, one of them came to collect, and the tower went off like a firecracker, lighting up the night sky in cascading bursts of magical fire and colour that could be seen for miles. The bed was destroyed in the fighting, along with the rest of the household. Fdule, after years of being marinated in unsolicited magic from creepy fish-people and wizards alike, found himself protected during the attack and ran.

Generations of his fellow kobolds had been watching the whole time. Scouts from the clan had been lurking at a distance for years, constitutionally incapable of leaving an interesting situation alone. What kept them at a distance was most likely the steadily decomposing corpses of their former clanmates still dutifully patrolling the grounds. What they reported back became, in the retelling, considerably more heroic and intentional than the facts suggested.

These kobolds, now deprived of their most interesting story after the tower’s destruction, improved it the way kobolds improve everything: explosively, and well beyond what the original material could reasonably support. By the time the tale had passed through enough caves it had acquired prophecy, divine selection, and a detailed account of the glorious army Fdule would one day lead to kobold dominion over all other peoples of Arthos. Any kobold who could have offered a more grounded account has since died (as kobolds do), leaving the legend uncontested and vulnerable to additional embellishment.

In the years since his absence the stories have only gotten larger and show no signs of levelling off. Fdule has, according to various accounts, defeated Baagh in single combat, stolen Roland’s crown, and talked Rathenoch the Red into giving him a ride across the mountains. Sometimes on the same day.

Current Status

Fdule’s whereabouts are unconfirmed. Rumours place him in the highlands west of Gerdain, though a handful of observers have pointed to certain irregularities in the Conclave’s upper leadership: uncharacteristic decisions, an unusual fondness for acquiring objects that catch the light, and at least one unexplained explosion that was attributed to a failed experiment. Loose evidence perhaps, but if he is still alive he would be among the oldest kobolds ever recorded, which the prophecy crowd considers final proof of divine favour.

Whatever happened to Fdule, some kobold theologians have argued that an embodiment of entropy and destruction who cannot be found and cannot be killed is exactly what the Great Kaboom would look like. The fish-people are conspicuously absent from the theological literature.