Coriander Thorn

A native of the Summer Court, Coriander Thorn had been a smooth-talking Fairy and a trickster who thrived on games, secrets, and bargains. His life in the Plane of Faerie was full of music, feasts, and endless revels, and he played the part of a charmer well. Though he was not thought of as a leader, he had a way of getting others to listen. That life ended when a mad Lizardfolk Druid of the Murkmire Marshlands dragged Coriander and hundreds of other tiny Fey into the Prime Material.

The druid tried to bind them to her will, but Coriander resisted. He rallied the others, and together they swarmed and killed their would-be master. When the battle was done, they found that nature of the magic she employed in their summoning prevented them from returning to the Feywild. With no way back, the fey lived out of the druid’s cave, flying in and out while learning of the forest and the villages of the Smallfolk beyond it. When part of the tunnel roof collapsed into a sinkhole, the fey claimed the hollow as their home. They built a small town inside its walls, no more than a hundred feet across, and called it the Faeriefort. To guard themselves from the dangers of the forest, they created an easily-defendable fortress above the town.

Coriander was respected as a hero of their "rebellion", but the elders of the town such as Laceleaf Flashlashes wanted only safety, while he pushed for power; despite a brief romantic tryst with Laceleaf, he found himself increasingly at-odds with her direction of the town. As they took to excavating and planting Sprite's Hollow, he broke with the elders and left the fort. He took a band of loyal followers and went to Cliffsunder, an extremely large port city north of the Murkmire. There, his crew began thieving along the dockside, stealing from docked ships on the Grandport. With stolen coin, he bought a small home near the water and turned it into his headquarters, which eventually became the infamous Pixis Palace. What started as petty theft grew into organized crime, as Coriander’s crew bribed guards, demanded protection fees from merchants, and made deals with nobles who wanted quiet problems solved.

Over time, the criminal racket became known as the Glitterati, an organization with influence across all of the Fencrest Foothills, and Don Coriander was its infamous leader. He adopted powerful allies into his fold such as the Giantborn fairy Snapdragon Poplarchop and he established the Pixis Palace as one of Cliffsunder's most famous crime dens. More fairies from his old home would follow, including Sassafras Flashlashes, who he felt a strange connection to; rumors abounded that Sassafras was secretly his daughter, but Coriander silenced any fairy who brought up such notions.

In his dealings with other criminals, Coriander met Vex, a representative of the Fold, a cult that the Don never even heard of. Over time, the fairy gangster met other minor cult members, and from different conversations, pieced together an idea of where the Fold kept their treasure. Disparately, he learned that they protected a massive hoard behind the Undermire Dwarf-Door, had a hideout in tunnels below the Murkmire Marshlands that connected to the Deepways, and finally, that they kept an important key in Bleak End. 

Coriander believed that this key opened the door in the Undermire, and that generations of the Fold's riches lay behind it. He became obsessed with acquiring this treasure, and developed a plan for how to steal it.