DPortrait of Dustin

Aric 'Dustin Dwint' Stoneheart

Half-elf — Silver Marches

Glamour Bard 3 / Dao Warlock 4

"Every story deserves a soundtrack."
7Level
52HP
16AC
30 ftSpeed
STR8-1
DEX16+3
CON14+2
INT12+1
WIS10+0
CHA18+4
View full sheet on D&D Beyond

Backstory

Young Aric Stoneheart, The early days of the Wanderlust Revue
Young Aric Stoneheart, The early days of the Wanderlust Revue

Aric Stoneheart grew up in Frostvale, a small village in the Silver Marches. Half-elf — his father Gareth was a human hunter and woodsman, his mother Lyariel an elf from the High Forest. He learned music early, playing birdpipes in the woods, and never stopped.

Frostvale

Aric Stoneheart — the boy who would become Dustin Dwint — grew up in Frostvale, a small village in the Silver Marches. His father Gareth was a human hunter who taught him the forest: tracking, trapping, reading the wind. His mother Lyariel was an elf from the High Forest who taught him the older things: patience, listening, the way a melody could carry meaning beyond words. Frostvale was small and safe, nestled between snowy peaks and towering pines, and Aric spent his days wandering the woods with his birdpipes, weaving tunes that echoed through the trees.

It was a good life. It did not last.

The Yak Folk

When Aric was still young, a shadow fell over his village of Frostvale, driving its people from their homes and into the Ice Spire Mountains. There they found the yak folk — the Yaksha — a brutal race of mountain-dwelling slavers who worshipped a being they called the Forgotten God. The villagers were welcomed at first. Given food and shelter in a picturesque valley. On the second night, they were put in chains.

The mines were dark and the work was endless. Most villagers did not survive long. Aric and his best friend Jorlan planned an escape. It failed. Jorlan was taken to the altar of the Forgotten God — a deity so old the yak folk had struck its name from their own records — and sacrificed.

Aric watched. He could do nothing. The guilt of that failure — of leading Jorlan into a plan that cost him his life — would define him for years to come.

The Escape

After weeks of enslavement by the yak folk in the Ice Spire Mountains, Aric prepared another desperate attempt at freedom. That night, he encountered a solitary Goliath who had been watching the slavers’ camp from the shadows. Kürbis Kohl — enormous, calm, and entirely unimpressed by the idea of slavers. He offered to help.

Under cover of darkness, guided by Kürbis’s knowledge of the mountains, Aric slipped away from the yak folk camp. During the escape, he found an old leather-bound tome in the yak folk’s hoard and grabbed it on instinct — a bard’s reflex for anything that looked like it held a story. He couldn’t read it. Didn’t matter. Something about it compelled him to take it.

They travelled together for a time, Kürbis teaching him to survive in the frozen wilderness. A bond formed between the half-elf and the goliath — the kind forged by shared danger and mutual respect.

Jorlan’s Ghost

Not long after escaping the yak folk, while travelling through the Silver Marches with his rescuer Kürbis, Aric began to hear whispers on the wind. Faint at first — easily dismissed as the tricks of a weary, guilt-ridden mind. But the whispers grew louder, more insistent, until they became unmistakable: the voice of his best friend Jorlan, who had been sacrificed by the yak folk after their failed escape attempt. Speaking from beyond the grave.

Kürbis could neither see nor hear the ghost. To the Goliath, Aric’s sudden pauses and whispered arguments with empty air were the marks of trauma, nothing more. But Jorlan was real — as real as a spirit could be — and he was furious. He accused Aric of leading them into danger. Of failing to save him. Of abandoning him to wander the spirit realm alone.

Aric tried to reason with him. Pleaded for forgiveness. But the ghost would not be swayed. His bitterness only grew, his presence a constant weight on Aric’s conscience. Torn between the living friend who had saved him and the dead one who blamed him, Aric pressed forward with a single resolve: to find a way to help Jorlan’s spirit pass on. Whatever it took.

The Wanderlust Revue

While travelling through the Silver Marches with his friend Kürbis Kohl, a Goliath he had been journeying with for some time, they encountered a band of travelling entertainers called the Wanderlust Revue. Drawn by their music and camaraderie, Aric decided to join. It meant parting ways with Kürbis. The farewell was brief — neither of them was good at goodbyes — but Aric vowed to honour the friendship and the debt he owed.

With the Revue, Aric learned to truly play — not just the birdpipes of his childhood, but the flute and the lute. A senior bard in the troupe took notice of his raw talent and became his mentor, teaching him the intricacies of spellcasting and the ways in which music and magic intertwine. Under this tutelage, Aric became a bard in earnest — learning to channel emotion into power, to weave enchantment into song.

One song in particular — a stirring ballad about a Goliath hero who rescued a slave from the mountains — captured audiences far and wide. He never mentioned his own role in the story. He named it The Ballad of Kürbis Kohl. Older members of the band remembered the Goliath who had been travelling with Aric when he first joined, and smiled.

The song gave him his stage name. Aric Stoneheart became Dustin Dwint — the artist, the performer, the bard who wrote songs about real heroes and real debts.

The Tome

Aric carried an old leather-bound tome he had taken from the yak folk — dense, angular script in a language he couldn’t read. It became an obsession. Every night before sleep, the tome came out. He cast Comprehend Languages on it countless times over the years. The spell never took hold. The tome resisted, as if its secrets were protected by magic older than the spell trying to pierce them.

Years of study yielded only fragments. Rituals of devotion and sacrifice. A Forgotten God — the same deity the yak folk worshipped. A connection between this god and the elemental planes. The words spoke of blood and flesh offered in twisted rites.

The horror of what he read should have driven him away. Instead, it pulled him deeper. The tome became a nightly companion, its pages an itch he could not stop scratching. He told himself he was looking for answers — for his village, for the revenge he had sworn. But somewhere beneath the rationalisation, a darker curiosity was taking root.

Don Juan

In the city of Yartar, the Wanderlust Revue had gained a new member. Don Juan — a half-elf paladin of Tyr, sworn to justice — joined primarily as a guard. He was noble-born, though reluctant to speak of his past, and carried himself with the quiet confidence of someone who had been raised to lead and chosen not to.

His swordfighting drew crowds before he said a word. The Revue quickly put him in the acts — flashy bladework, dramatic flourishes, the kind of performance that made audiences forget they were watching a man who could kill them without breaking a sweat. Don Juan took to the stage with the natural ease of someone who had been performing a different kind of role his entire life.

Dustin and Don Juan became fast friends. They sparred — Don Juan teaching swordplay, Dustin teaching him to read a crowd. Beneath the banter, they recognised something in each other: two men carrying debts they hadn’t settled, searching for purpose in the space between entertainment and justice. Don Juan became the closest thing Dustin had to a brother since Jorlan.

Campaign Chronicle

The Pact

Somewhere in the space between the words, something answered.

It came not as a voice but as a presence — a weight in the air, a vibration in the stone beneath him, a warmth that rose through the floor of the tower as if the earth itself had reached up through the clouds to find him. It was patient and ancient and vast, and it was interested.

Oliaa Hazrat.

The name formed in his mind like a stone settling into sand. A Dao. An earth genie — one of the enslaved, one of the bound, reaching through the cracks in the tome's protective magic to make contact with the mortal who had carried it all this way.

The offer was simple. Not spoken — felt. Power, in exchange for service. Strength drawn from the earth itself, channelled through a vessel. Not the tome — something smaller. Something Dustin already carried.

His hand went to his belt pouch. The tinderbox. An unremarkable thing — brass and flint, dented from years of travel. But when his fingers closed around it, he felt the metal hum. Warm. Alive.

He thought of Jorlan. The mines. The altar. The sound his friend had made when they dragged him away — not a scream, but a silence, the kind of silence that had lived inside Dustin ever since.

The Dao had been enslaved by the same masters. Bound by the same god. Broken in the same deep places where Jorlan had died.

He didn't hesitate.

When he finally looked up, the first grey light of dawn was seeping through the tower walls. The tinderbox sat in his palm, and something fundamental had changed. He could feel it — a connection, thin as spider silk but strong as stone, running from his chest down through the clouds and into the deep places of the world where the Dao dwelt.

He put the tome away. He tucked the tinderbox back into his pouch. He had made a vow, years ago, in a mountain mine that stank of blood and stone. Vengeance for Jorlan. Freedom for those still chained. And now, for the first time, he had an ally who wanted the same thing.

The College of Glamour

The night after Rosa died, Dustin sat alone in the common room of Northshield House. His hands still smelled of stone dust from the courtyard. Don Juan had gone to bed. Kürbis was snoring somewhere. The fire was low.

He kept thinking about the way the room had leaned toward Rosa at the dinner — the guests, the staff, everyone pulled toward her like iron filings to a lodestone. She had been a monster. She had tortured a man and drained the life from people who came to her willingly. But the power — the way she held attention, bent perception, made a room full of people feel exactly what she wanted them to feel — that was something else entirely.

There is great power in this kind of charming, he thought. Especially combined with performance. He had spent years dreaming of the College of Valor — becoming a Skald, a chronicler of heroic deeds, the bard who stood at the edge of battle and made sure the stories survived. It was a noble ambition. It was also, he was beginning to realise, the wrong one.

He thought of the Talking Troll. Of the way the crowd had gone quiet when he played. Of the current he had felt beneath the music — the pull that wasn't in the notes but in the spaces between them. That was the same power. Smaller, rougher, untrained. But the same.

This could be the breakthrough I am looking for, he thought. Maybe I should forgo my dream of becoming a Skald telling tales of Valor.

He stared at the dying fire for a long time.

This feels right.

A Dream of the Feywild

That night, Dustin dreamed.

A forest, but not one he recognised. The trees were too tall, their bark pale as bone, their canopy so high it dissolved into a sky that was neither day nor night but something in between — a violet twilight that hummed with colour. The air smelled of rain on warm stone and something sweeter underneath, like honeysuckle, like music given a scent.

The sounds of Triboar were gone. No wind. No insects. Just a silence that wasn't empty but full — the way a held breath is full.

A pixie appeared first, no larger than his hand, wings catching the light like wet glass. She circled him once, twice, and landed on his shoulder. Her weight was nothing. Her presence was a tuning fork struck against his ribs.

Then the sprite, darting between the pale trunks — a smear of green light and mischief, grinning, beckoning him deeper.

He followed. He didn't choose to. His feet moved the way his fingers moved on the strings — not because he told them to, but because the melody required it.

The clearing opened like a breath. And she was there.

An eladrin. Tall, golden-haired, standing in the centre of a ring of mushrooms and moonlight. Her face was — he couldn't hold it. Every time he looked directly at her, the features shifted. An elf woman with his mother's jaw. A stranger with ancient eyes. A face he had never seen but knew the way he knew the sound of his own voice.

She didn't speak. She didn't need to. The clearing was the lesson.

The light between the trees pulsed, and he understood that it was music — that everything here was music, the colours, the growth, the way the branches curved and the mushrooms leaned toward the moonlight. The Feywild didn't have music in it. The Feywild was music. And the power he had felt at the Talking Troll, the current beneath the notes, the pull that had made a room full of strangers lean toward him — that was this. A thread of the Feywild, woven into his blood by a mother he barely remembered.

The eladrin raised her hand. A melody rose from the ground — not played, not sung, just present, the way gravity is present. It moved through him and rearranged something. Not his knowledge. Not his skill. Something deeper. The part of him that reached for an audience and found them reaching back.

He opened his mouth to ask her name. She smiled — sad, warm, familiar — and the forest folded in on itself like a closing eye.

He woke in his room at Northshield House. Grey light through the shutters. His blanket twisted around his legs and his heart beating as if he had been running.

But the world sounded different. Every sound — the creak of the floorboards, a bird outside, Kürbis's breathing from the next room — carried a faint shimmer at its edge, like an overtone he had never noticed before. As if someone had tuned the world a half-step higher in the night.

He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, listening. When he hummed — just a few notes, almost involuntarily — the sound that came out was not quite what he used to play. Not quite the dark resonance of his warlock magic, either, though it was there underneath, the way it always was now. This was something else layered on top. Elegant, strange, fey. A sound he had never made before.

The Ironwood Flute

Something about the ironwood called to Dustin — the weight of it, the grain, the way it felt alive in his hands since the pact. He bought a block at Lion's Share in Triboar and commissioned a custom holster from Othovir, like a sword scabbard but shaped for a flute, so the instrument would always be within reach. He couldn't explain why it felt so urgent to have it close. It just did.

Inside the vessel he worked the block with the woodcarving toolset he had bought at Lion's Share — gouges and chisels in a leather roll, a small mallet, the smell of oiled wood still on them. The wood took an edge slowly. The grain ran dark and refused to splinter. He measured twice and cut once. The flute was in no hurry to emerge from the block, and that was fine.

Glamoured Leather

He had taken it on instinct — the way a bard takes anything that hums right.

Later, drier, he tried it on. The fit was uncanny, the kind that makes you wonder whether the leather had been waiting for someone specifically and you had been the one to walk in. He learned the rest of it by accident. A thought, and the leather looked like a velvet doublet. Another thought, and it was back to studs and dark hide. Glamoured armor. He could shift what it looked like without changing what it was.

For a bard who was about to spend a great deal more time on stages than was strictly safe for a warlock, that felt like a gift.

Myriam of the Hand

He met her at the Wink and Kiss the next morning, as agreed. Eleventh hour, small fingers, patience.

She made him work for it. Picks were not strings — they did not bend the way fingers wanted them to, and the wards in Yartar locks were meaner than any door he had ever picked open in a song. He failed, and kept failing. Eventually he had two locks open and a third half-defeated, and Myriam was sitting back in her chair with a cup she had not been drinking from, watching him the way you watch a stranger turn out to be a horse you might consider stabling.

"Find me again," she said when he left. "Leave word at any tavern with a coin on the bar and your name on a napkin. The Hand will get it."

He has not used the line yet. He has thought about using it more than once.

The Flute Is Finished

Somewhere on the road between Yartar and Everlund, Dustin held the completed ironwood flute up to the firelight for the first time. The wood was dark, dense, warm to the touch — alive with the Dao's connection. It slid into the custom holster on his hip like it had always belonged there. When he played it, the tone was deeper than any wooden flute had a right to be. Earthy. Resonant. As if the notes came not just from the instrument but from somewhere beneath it.

Later, on his watch, he opened the tome again and found it — the Pact of the Tome. New magical insights, drawn from the Dao's knowledge. One let him turn wood into something harder — to swing it as a weapon, but an extension of himself. He tried it on the ironwood flute. The wood hardened, the grain tightened. He swung it experimentally. It had the heft of a quarterstaff and the balance of something that wanted to be swung. He packed away the rapier. The flute would do both jobs now.

He packed away the old silver flute too. It had served him well, but this — this was something else entirely.

Composing on the Road

The long ride from Luskan to Fireshear — frozen moors, grey skies, the horses unhappy and the wind unforgiving — gave Dustin nothing to do but retreat into the vessel and write. The ironwood flute was finished. His head was full of melodies he couldn't quite place — darker than what he used to write, driven by rhythms he hadn't learned from any teacher. Celtic drums. Bass undertones that hummed like the earth breathing. He composed feverishly, filling parchment with notation, testing phrases, discarding and rewriting. By the time they reached Fireshear, he had a set list of new material that sounded nothing like the Wanderlust Revue.

The Sound Is Changing

Something had shifted and Dustin knew it. The songs he was writing now — the ones he performed at the Silver Vein in Fireshear — were not folk songs with a darker edge. They were something new. The Dao's influence threaded through every note, and the Glamour training gave him the stage presence to make people feel it. Not just listen — feel. The warlock and the bard were no longer two separate things fighting for the same voice. They were merging into something he didn't have a name for yet.

Thoughts & Reflections

The Right Audience

Don Juan was right — the song was good. Better than good. But my mind was already turning it over, testing it against the world outside this tower. An ode to the glory of giants, performed in taverns full of people whose homes had been flattened by boulders from the sky. I could picture the silence. The cold stares. The half-eaten bread rolls thrown at my head. No — this one would have to wait. The right audience, the right moment. It would come. For now, the song existed, and that was enough.

The Ethereal Plane (a note from the table)

Not every adventurer can make it to every session. When a player can't join, their character slips into the Ethereal Plane — a grey, muted echo of the world where they can observe but not interact. There's no deep lore behind it and no quest to escape. It's simply how our table handles absences without breaking the story. When the player returns, so does their character, stepping back through the veil as if waking from a strange dream. The bloodstone that Dustin found in the hag's house serves as the in-world anchor for these transitions — a convenient bit of magic that none of the characters fully understand, and none of the players need to.