Mayor Severin LinhardtRetired Hexhunter

Mayor Severin Linhardt – Retired Hexhunter

The mayor of Limlight. Severin lived a life as a Hexhunter for many years prior, travelling across Tharador to offer his services. After one contract led him to Limlight, he fell in love with the woman who hired him, Eleanor. He quickly became a favourite of the locals, owing to his deep knowledge of lore, hunting and craftsmanship. He was voted as mayor after six years of living there, and was responsible for keeping the village mostly unaffected during the first Dragonblight outbreak two years ago. Now, with one sprouting from the heart of his home, Severin has lost his family, his wife, and his mind. He has picked up his swords after years of gathering dust, and anyone who stands before him will face his mindbroken rage.

Severin Linhardt spent the better part of two decades as a Hexhunter, travelling the breadth of Tharador with little more than a pack, a pair of blades, and a reputation that preceded him into most taverns before he did. He was not a man built for roots. Contracts took him from the frozen parishes of Formen to the sun-baked roads of Sudd Tohst, each one bleeding into the next with little to distinguish them beyond the nature of the thing he was paid to kill. It was a contract in the small riverside village of Limlight that would finally stop him in his tracks. The woman who hired him, Eleanor, had a problem with something lurking in the woods at the edge of her farmstead. Severin dealt with it in two nights. He stayed for the rest of his life.

What followed surprised even him. Severin had always assumed that the skills of a Hexhunter translated poorly to civilian life, that a man who spent his years reading the language of claw marks and corrupted soil would find little use for such things in a quiet village. He was wrong. The people of Limlight took to him quickly, drawn to his deep knowledge of lore, his aptitude for craftsmanship, and the particular calm of a man who has faced genuinely terrible things and come back from all of them. Six years after hanging up his swords, his neighbours voted him mayor. He accepted it, though was not entirely sure he deserved it. He served well regardless, and when the first Dragonblight outbreak swept through Draksborne two years ago, it was Severin’s foresight and knowledge of disease containment that kept Limlight from the worst of it. Eleanor stood beside him through all of it. The village held.

It does not hold now. Phrenic Concordia came quietly, as Vahlen always intended, and by the time Severin understood what was happening it had already taken Eleanor, and his children, and whatever version of himself had existed in the years between the old life and this one. The swords came down from the wall where they had gathered dust for the better part of a decade. His hands remembered them without hesitation, which is perhaps the most terrible thing about a Hexhunter, that the killing never truly leaves the body even when the mind has long since tried to move past it. Severin now is not the man Limlight voted for. He is not the man Eleanor married. What stands in the village now is something older and more dangerous, a lifetime of learned violence with nothing left to lose and nowhere left to direct it, and anyone who comes to Limlight looking for answers will find him long before they find anything else.