Tanglebeard
Tanglebeard is a figure that invokes both pity and discomfort in the villages he haunts. Appearing one cold morning with the dawn mist clinging to his tattered robes, his entrance into village life was as silent and unnoticed as a leaf falling in the forest. With his hair a matted nest of gray and his face a map of lines and scars, age sits heavily upon him, though none can say for sure how many winters he has seen.
His eyes, a startling pale green that seems out of place on his weathered visage, flicker with the light of unseen fires or perhaps unspoken knowledge. They say he speaks in riddles and rhymes, a nonsensical patter that fills the silence but rarely invites understanding. Children are both fascinated and frightened by him, and the adults are wary, unsure whether to offer charity or avert their gaze. His origins are a mystery; some whisper he may have wandered out from the depths of The Old Dark woods, a lost soul cast adrift by the capricious fae.
At night, he sleeps wherever he falls, under the eaves of houses or in the hay of stables, always alone, always on the outskirts. His presence is a constant yet overlooked part of life, a reminder of the thin veil between reality and madness, between the known and the unknowable. For all his ramblings, there is a consistency to his madness, a pattern that might hint at a truth too complex or too harrowing for the unscarred mind to fathom.
