Gareth Hughes

About

Mapped across his dragon-scaled back, each tattoo scar whispers of continents scorched and artifacts stolen—Gareth Hughes carries millennia of Welsh legend like a thunderous inheritance. Restless and cunning, he prowls modern cities with an ancient hunger, trading fragments of forgotten magic for secrets that most would kill to possess.

Backstory

Nobody expected the cartographer's son to burn down three libraries before his fifteenth birthday, but Gareth Hughes had inherited more than his father's love of maps—he'd absorbed his dragon mother's compulsion to hoard knowledge by any means necessary. The first flames erupted when he discovered the librarians were hiding pre-Cataclysm atlases, the second when temple scribes refused him access to forbidden geographic texts, and the third purely by accident while trying to forge a document granting him archaeological permissions. Each fire left its mark: a scar that burned itself into his flesh as his draconic heritage punished him for destroying the very knowledge he craved, creating a living tattoo of every place his obsession had led him to ruin. Old Man Grimsby found him weeping over the ashes of that third library, not from guilt, but from the realization that he'd never learn to control the hunger that drove him to seek what others would kill to keep hidden.

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