Lonely Wanderers
General
The Lone Wanderers are one of the persistent mysteries of Áváhé. They are romoured to be closely related to the Old Ones and could to a degree count as a subcategory, but they're still not the same thing. A lone wanderer is characterized by sharing many traits with the Old Ones, such as a remarkable magic sensitivity, but unlike the Old Ones, Lone Wanderers aren't born with that sensitivity, but rather are "afflicted" by it. One thing all Lone Wanderers have in common is an extraordinarily long life span. Many of them live for many centuries, with some of them being claimed to be alive for over a millennium. What exactly causes a Lone Wanderer to come to be is unclear, but it is rumoured that all of them actually are Revenants, having survived their own deaths. It is said that there are only about a dozen of them on Áváhé at any given time, but seeing that their sheer existence is clouded in mystery and distorted by centuries of folklore and tales, that claim is seemingly impossible to confirm or deny.
There are some facts about the Lone Wanderers that are persistent in all the tales being told about them, hinting at those claims having at least some truth to them. Among those facts are:
- all Lone Wanderers died violently or in an unnatural way before their time
- they have an extraordinarily long live span, but aren't immortal or invulnerable
- Lone Wanderers seemingly can be members of all intelligent races; interestingly, there are no known records and legends of neither Draconic Lone Wanderers, nor of Old Ones
- the trauma of their death seems to scar them, leaving them to mostly abandon society to follow their own schemes
- they're magically sensitive to a point where they're said to be magically active themselves
- the Lone Wanderers' motifs, motivations and behaviours are controlled by something that lies beyond the grasp of "normal" beings
- being virtually immortal causes them to "fall out of time"
Due to their particular nature, the reaction of different peoples to seeing a Lone Wanderer can be highly diverse. While some peoples consider the Wanderers to be guardians and oracles, others see them as harbingers of bad times to come and resolve to hunt the Wanderers down and kill them.
List of known Lone Wanderers
