Kayden Cordell (KAY-den cor-DELL)

Race: Human (Rain-Touched)

Role: Bard, Storyteller, Wanderer

Kayden Cordell is the best performer you will never remember.

He is a man of indeterminate age — somewhere around sixty in appearance, though the truth is considerably more complicated than that. He has spent over two hundred years perfecting his craft in taverns, small playhouses, and anywhere else that will have him, carrying a pot for coins and a repertoire of songs and stories that spans the entire eastern continent. He reads an audience the way a sailor reads weather — instinctively, immediately, and with considerable accuracy — and then gives them exactly what they need to hear.

His voice is the thing. When Kayden sings or tells a story, everything else stops. Conversations die mid-sentence. Drinks are forgotten. People weep openly at a song of loss and then, before he can get to something more dangerous, climb onto tables at a lewd one if he isn’t careful. His audiences hang on every word, utterly lost in whatever he is giving them — and then walk away having had the time of their lives, and never think of him again. Not one person. Not once. In two hundred years of performing, not a single audience member has remembered his name the next morning.

The God Rain changed him. It gave him a voice unlike anything in the world, stopped his aging permanently at nearly sixty, and then spent the next two centuries reminding him that fame and real fortune were always just slightly out of reach. He had made peace with this — or something close to it. He had his coins, his stories, his road. It was a life.

Then someone found him in an alley after a show, and everything changed again.

Interesting Facts:

• In over two hundred years of performing, Kayden had never once been asked for his autograph. The night someone finally approached him after a show was the worst night of his life.