Rowen

Rowen is the youngest child of Tanwen, the merchant of Compass Rose Trading, and the younger brother of Seraphine. He is eight years old.

He has red hair like his mother’s — not curly as hers is, only a bit wavy — long enough to fall past his ears and into his face. Hazel eyes, like hers. Freckles. In his mother’s words: you won’t miss him.

The dare

The family came to Sunton from further south to open a trading house, and knew nothing of Tyre or what is said about it. Rowen fell in with the local boys, who dared him to cross the Northern Bridge and go into the ruined city.

He went. He did not come back. As of session 3 he had been missing two weeks to the day, and is counted among the Lost — those who enter Tyre and vanish.

His mother does not blame the boys much. Boys are boys sometimes, and they do stupid things. Of Rowen she says he is brave, and that she is not sure he is quite smart, but that he is her boy.

What may have taken him

Tanwen believes the rainbow bridge took him. When the party confirmed that a pillar of rainbow light still stands in Tyre’s market square, she reasoned aloud that it may still be drawing people in and carrying them across into some unknown world — and that this is what became of her son. She allows the alternative: that he wandered, that he is lost but safe, or that the blink dogs found him.

“I just want to be able to sleep. Even if the worst has happened, I just want to be able to sleep once I know what’s happened.”

She has offered the party anything she owns to bring him home, and has clothes of his that would still carry his scent for tracking. The seven agreed to try, with no promises.

The boy the party brought out of Tyre is not connected to him: asked directly whether the name Rowen meant anything, he said he knew no one like that, and that he is not from Sunton.

Ewein holds the opposing position — that anyone carried across a rainbow bridge is beyond rescue and the way must stay shut.