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

That night, while the others slept and the tower drifted through a sky of stars, Dustin sat alone with the tome across his knees. He had read it before — in the Ethereal Plane, where Comprehend Languages had finally pierced its outer layers. But now, armed with what Zephyros's books had taught him about the Yaksha and their enslaved Dao, the passages he'd struggled with before came into sharper focus. The elemental connections. The pathways between planes. The genies, bound and broken and waiting for someone to reach back.

He read deeper than he had before. And 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

After witnessing the charming power of Rosa — the fey creature at the Everwyvern House whose enchanted wine could bend the will of anyone who drank it — Dustin made a choice. He had dreamed of becoming a Skald of the College of Valor, chronicling tales of heroic deeds. But Rosa's magic spoke to something deeper: the power of performance itself, of commanding attention, of bending reality through sheer presence. He chose the College of Glamour.

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.

During the long rides from Triboar to Yartar, he retreated daily into his genie vessel — six hours of warm, quiet workspace while the tinderbox bounced along in Kürbis's belt — and carved. Slowly, carefully, shaping the ironwood into a flute.

Myriam of the Hand

Before leaving Yartar, Dustin befriended a member of the thieves' guild — a woman called Myriam of the Hand. He asked her to teach him lockpicking. She was reluctant. "Write me a song," she said, half-joking, clearly expecting him to fail or forget. Dustin performed one on the spot — improvised, charming, and good enough to stop the conversation in the room. Myriam was impressed enough to agree to the training, and threw in a special set of thieves' tools as a bonus. Finely made, clearly well-used, and unmistakably stolen from someone who deserved it.

The Flute Is Finished

Somewhere on the road between Yartar and Everlund, Dustin held the completed ironwood flute up to the light 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.

That night, studying the tome again, he found it — the Pact of the Tome. Three new cantrips, drawn from the Dao's knowledge. One of them was Shillelagh. When he cast it on the ironwood flute, the wood hardened, the grain tightened, and the instrument became a weapon. 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.