𝔪𝔞𝑦𝔟𝔢 𝔦 𝔡𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔪𝔱 𝑦𝔬𝔲

STATISTICS
NAME Ronan Niall Lynch
CANON The Raven Cycle
CANON POINT end of CDTH
ALIAS Greywaren
STATUS Unsettled
CLASS Anti-Hero
SPECIES Human (???)
AGE 21 years old
BIRTHDAY november 1
BIRTHPLACE Virginia, USA
ETHNICITY Irish American
HOUSING The Meadows, VA

FIRST IMPRESSION
Ordinary folks find him intimidating in both personality and stature. Those with psychic abilities find him unnerving. "What are you?" is a question that's frequently asked of him. He's all at once a moody young man and a magical creature that reads as god-like to some and demonic to others. And to a depraved few, he's more a coveted object than a person.

When Ronan Lynch came into the world, the rivers dried up and the cattle in Rockingham County wept blood and the trees all grew flowers and ravens laughed. Born in the hamlet of Singer's Falls near Henrietta, Virginia, on a pastoral estate called the Barns, Ronan was the beloved middle son of Niall and Aurora Lynch, and brother to Declan and Matthew. Growing up in extreme privilege as the heir to enormous wealth, Ronan wanted for nothing but his father's attention. Niall was a loving but absent father, always away from home and attending to his mysterious work.

That work eventually led to his murder. Ronan discovered his father's broken body lying in the driveway of their home. As if the trauma wasn't enough, Aurora fell into a catatonic state and Niall's will dictated that his three sons be exiled from the Barns and never allowed to return, or risk forfeiting their entire inheritance. It also left Ronan at the mercy of his resentful older brother. The more Declan fought to control Ronan in the following months, the further Ronan felt driven to delinquency, getting into fights and letting his grades at the prestigious Aglionby Academy slide so low he faced expulsion.

Ronan's only savior was his best friend, Richard Campbell Gansey III. Gansey invited Ronan to live with him at his converted industrial loft, Monmouth Manufacturing, and he made it his mission to ensure that Ronan stayed in school. Gansey, an eccentric rich boy from Washington, D.C., had come to Henrietta in search of the ancient Welsh king, Owen Glendower, whose resting place was said to be somewhere in the area. Legend had it that whoever woke the sleeping king would be granted a favor. Ronan, already familiar with the supernatural, joined the quest without a moment's hesitation. They were soon accompanied by Noah Czerny (their third roommate), Adam Parrish (a fellow student at Aglionby), and Blue Sargent (a local psychic's daughter).

While the group struggled in their search for Glendower, Ronan was also wrestling with personal issues, most of which he was forbidden to share with the others. He knew the secret that had gotten his father killed and he could tell no one about it. His grief over his father's death consumed him, and it was no surprise that when Noah found Ronan lying in a pool of blood with his arms sliced open, his friends assumed he had tried to take his own life.

But that wasn't the case. Ronan was, in fact, developing the same power that had enabled his father to create all of his riches. Except Ronan was a poor user of that ability, and instead of bringing back treasures from his dreams, he mostly just managed to be attacked by his own nightmares. Exhausted and afraid, Ronan was desperate enough to accept the help of his rival, the self-described "dream thief" Joseph Kavinsky.

Following their lessons, Ronan became an even greater user of that power than Kavinsky himself. He would later learn that, although there were many dream thieves, there was only one Greywaren: Ronan. And as the Greywaren, Ronan held a special relationship with the mystical forest on the ley line, Cabeswater. As the search for Glendower continued, it became more and more apparent that Ronan and his friends had been fated to undertake the quest. The Greywaren's presence among them was no accident.

It was revealed that Gansey was destined to die, and when the quest eventually led the group to a tomb filled only with bones, it seemed that there would be no favor granted by Glendower to avoid that destiny. Faced with a demon that was unmaking both Cabeswater and the Greywaren himself, Gansey realized he would be a necessary sacrifice to save Ronan's life and possibly the entire world. This was his destiny.

And he succeeded in it, dying so that Ronan could live, but Ronan refused to let it end there. With Blue and Adam's help, he worked to convince Cabeswater to give its life in turn to resurrect Gansey. This was Ronan's destiny. Gansey rose from the dead, the cycle of sacrifice was ended, and everyone lived happily ever after.

...Everyone other than Ronan, who was now faced with the enormity of his power and his own ineptitude in using it, with no one left to guide him and no further destiny to pursue. Rebuilding Cabeswater seemed, naturally, like the next step. But without Cabeswater to help him focus, his dreams became unwieldy and imperfect. While the others left Henrietta and went on to live their lives, Ronan languished by himself, facing a task that felt impossible to fulfill.

Then he began to die.

TYPES
MBTI ISFP
ENNEAGRAM 4w5
ZODIAC Scorpio
TAROT The Moon
SEXUALITY Gay
RELIGION Roman Catholic
ALIGNMENT Chaotic Good

DEMEANOR
He is a moody young man, brooding and surly with a quick temper that manifests in cruel words and physical violence as the situation demands. With little concern for others' comfort, he has a tendency to stare for too long and behave with unapologetic rudeness. He won't go out of his way to hurt others but he follows his own whims and respects no authority.

PSYCHIC IMPRESSION
Ronan's mind is vulnerable to outside influence, easy to both read and control. As a result of grief and exposure to horrific violence, he is heavily traumatized, suicidal, self-loathing, and generally unstable.

Ronan is always looking for a fight. He has an intimidating attitude and frequently keeps others at a distance, even his friends. His own heart hardened by trauma, he has few kind words or reassurances for anyone around him. Once a playful and gentle boy, the brutal murder of his father changed Ronan forever. His grief erupted in the form of rage and that anger hasn't diminished with time. Caught up in his pain, Ronan continues to lash out at the world. He takes pleasure in making others uncomfortable, with unbroken stares and an unfiltered mouth. Sarcastic, bitter, and often downright cruel, Ronan tells the harsh truth without ever softening the blow, and without considering the consequences of his words.

For someone who claims to value honesty, Ronan keeps many secrets, lying by omission to protect them. In the act of hiding his nature as the Greywaren, he allowed his friends to believe he was suicidal rather than reveal to them that it was his dreaming ability which resulted in the accident that nearly killed him. As his power developed, his own mind unleashed violent monsters that literally tried to rip him apart, the manifestations of his insecurity and self-loathing. Through insomnia and inebriation, late-night street races and mind-altering substances, he attempted to avoid those nightmare encounters with his psyche. It was only after he embraced all aspects of his being, even those parts he'd hidden from himself, that he was able to gain control over his magic. When he stopped denying his nature, he finally attained some sense of equanimity. By necessity, however, he remains secretive and wary. Others have killed to obtain the Greywaren: the power to create reality out of dreams. If he isn't cautious, he could end up like his father.

Clandestine supernatural phenomena aside, Ronan has to take care to guard his heart. He is a boy living in constant fear, hunted not only by his nightmares but by the humans who covet his power and seek to either kill or capture him. Ronan, left to his own devices, wants nothing more than to create beauty and care for the innocent. But tenderness puts him in danger and risks the lives of those he loves. He's careful to mask his vulnerability with his rebelliousness, happy to play the thug if that will keep others from digging too deep. He's also young and in the process of exploring his homosexuality, which is at odds with his Catholic upbringing. His faith is difficult to reconcile with numerous aspects of his life, an ongoing struggle as he develops both physically and metaphysically. It's easier for him to throw a punch or hurl an insult than to admit his needs and desires.

Although he is a brutish juvenile delinquent, Ronan is also highly intelligent. With his natural gift for observation, he makes connections that others might not. And with abilities that border on divine, he doesn't like being told what to do. This means he cares very little for his formal education, with the exception of Latin studies, in which he excels to the point of fluency. And the only reason he cares about Latin at all is due to its significance in his dreams. Ronan had no plans to continue his education after he turned eighteen. All he wanted was to return home to his family's farm and care for the land and the livestock until what was likely to be his untimely death.

Ronan was always prepared to give his life for his friends. When someone has earned Ronan's love, he will be theirs forever. He doesn't even understand the concept of casual relationships. With him, it's all or nothing. If he gives his word, he can be trusted to keep it. A promise is binding, always, or else he wouldn't have spoken it. His teeth may be sharp, but Ronan is a good friend to the chosen few, and they'll find him to be a rascal with a sense of humor and a fierce protector capable of deep compassion. His affection for others is displayed through furtive glances, covert acts of generosity, and unflinching loyalty. It's subdued but never precarious, just nearly impossible for people to obtain.

The months of relative isolation following the end of the quest for Glendower shifted Ronan's personality in subtle ways. Rather than explosive bursts of rage, he's become more inclined to turn his pain inward and suffer in silence. He's bitter over being abandoned by his friends, but he doesn't blame them for it. It strikes him as an inevitability, something he's always expected that's now come true the way he always feared it would, and he's in the process of mourning what he's lost.

He sees Cabeswater's revival as a way to restore some of the warmth that's missing from his life, but he's incapable of even doing that much, and he resents himself for his own failures in that. He's so ashamed of that failure that he even lies to Adam about it, preferring to let his perfectionism literally eat away at him than to create something that would be subpar when compared to the beauty of what they've lost.

He's tired. He's done everything he was destined to do and now he can't conceive of a future for himself, trapped in the past without anything to look forward to. It's left him somber and fragile and more withdrawn than he's ever been, because as difficult as life was before, he at least had someone to lean on. Now the burden of divine purpose is all on his shoulders. He doesn't know where to begin.

DETAILS
HEIGHT 6 ft 2 in / 188 cm
WEIGHT 170 lbs / 77 kg
BUILD Tall & Muscular
HAIR Dark Brown
EYES Light Blue
SKIN Very Pale
FACE Richard Harmon

SCENT
He smells heavily of alcohol, usually whiskey or beer, along with hints of hickory smoke, boxwood, grass seed, and lemon.

SOUND
His voice is cold and brittle, alternating between a hiss, a growl, or a purr. He sings at an unexpectedly beautiful tenor pitch and speaks with an extremely subtle Virginian accent.

A pale boy of Irish descent, Ronan is twenty-one years old and stands at a towering height. He has the body of a boxer, bearing a sinewy physique and long limbs. His facial features are sharp, with an aquiline nose and a sly mouth prone to menacing, serpentine smiles. His eyes are an icy blue. His hair is a brown so dark it can appear black, shaved at the sides and styled into a messy mohawk.

He has a tattoo that spans his entire back and creeps up his neck and shoulders. In black ink, it depicts various figures from his dreams, including ravens and feathers and claws and winding roads and flowers twisted around Celtic knots, all seeming to change from moment to moment. His arms bear numerous scars, including some from an incident that was mistaken as a suicide attempt, and he always wears five black leather bands on each wrist in a halfhearted effort to mask those scars. Traces of old cuts and gashes also mar his face, though not to an obvious degree.

Ronan is described as fiercely handsome, bearing a notable resemblance to his father and sharing no features with his mother. Besides his alcoholism and occasional drug use, Ronan is in perfect physical health. He is athletic, exercises regularly, and eats a vegetarian diet. He tends to dress in punk fashion, with combat boots and ripped jeans and muscle shirts in shades of black, sometimes with a jacket or hoodie thrown on top. According to others, he manages to make his clothing look vulgar no matter what he's wearing.

POWER SUMMARY
He can take anything out of his dreams and make them reality. This gives him the ability to create sentient life as well as magical items and illogical concepts. He is claircognizant, able to know things without learning them, and he can exist as a dream outside of the mind or within someone else as a source of power and knowledge.

INHUMAN NATURE
Ronan is a creature made from magic and, to those who can sense it, very obviously not human. As a dreamer, he is overflowing with the power of creation, sometimes compared to a god, though his aura makes psychics uneasy. There is a consensus that something like him should not exist.

MUNDANE SKILLS
Even tougher than he looks, Ronan is adept at street brawling and trained in boxing. He is experienced in manual labor and farm work. He speaks Latin fluently and he's knowledgeable in other areas related to the classics. As a musician, he's skilled at piano, highland bagpipes, tin whistle, harp, bodhran, and guitar. He's a dancer as well as a singer, primarily focused on Irish tradition. He displays some degree of eidetic memory for aesthetic and tactile information, and he's highly observant of emotional cues and others' psychological states.

GREYWAREN

As the Greywaren, Ronan is capable of bringing anything out of his dreams and into the real world. Likely due to his inhuman nature, being half-dream himself and unlike other dream thieves, he is capable of communicating with his dreams so that he can create objects with their cooperation rather than stealing them. In order to do this, he must be able to perfectly visualize an object in his mind and negotiate with his dreams to bring that object back with him out of his subconscious. The dream objects he creates are not bound by the laws of physics. If an object is capable of doing something in his dream, then it is capable of doing the same thing in the real world, regardless of whether it makes any physical sense. This ability can even be used to create living beings, although if Ronan were to die, those creatures would then fall into an eternal sleep.

Use of the Greywaren's power requires a nearby energy source, and the amount of energy needed depends on the size of the object being created or the frequency with which Ronan is creating objects. In his own world, Ronan utilized a nearby ley line to feed his power. Without access to the ley line, his power must instead feed on electricity or other supernatural sources. This means that his dreaming may cause blackouts in his immediate vicinity or may weaken the powers of other imPorts who are close to him while he's sleeping if the object he's creating is large or powerful.

Dreaming has a draining effect on Ronan, as well. Every time he brings back an object from his dreams, he's paralyzed upon waking. How long this paralysis lasts also depends on the size of the object he just created. It could be a few seconds or it could be an hour. The draining effect will impact him more severely if the object of his creation has something other than mundane use. Though in his world creating something magical had no greater cost to him than any other dream, it now leaves him paralyzed for twice as long upon waking and low in energy for hours after.

Even for the Greywaren, dreaming can be dangerous. When Ronan is experiencing emotional turmoil, his nightmares can manifest as monsters and cause injury to him or others. More than once, these night horrors have nearly killed him. Even if Ronan accidentally brings back one of his nightmare creatures, he is still subjected to the increased draining effect now associated with his magical creations, leaving him in danger as his paralysis will make him unable to defend himself. For this reason, he will be more likely to dream only in the presence of another person who might be capable of defending his body while he's unable to. His nature also makes him vulnerable to spiritual attacks and corruption. A strong supernatural entity could potentially invade his dreams and destroy him from the inside.

Despite the dangers of dreaming, Ronan also risks his life by not dreaming. Because he is a creature meant for creation, if he ceases to create, then he ceases to exist. After a month of refusing to dream at all, Ronan's body begins to break down and unmake itself. Unless he dreams something again, this deterioration continues until there's nothing left of him.

CLAIRCOGNIZANCE

Ronan knows things he couldn't have possibly learned for himself. This is not the same as active omniscience. He doesn't know everything there is to know about anything, right off the top of his head. Rather, information sometimes enters him subconsciously, seemingly out of thin air. It's as if he's an antenna for ideas, picking up signals even from far-off places and relaying them to his dreams and often into his waking life.

This ability gives him a latent insight not just about the world, but about the people around him. The knowledge he receives is often disorganized or altogether indecipherable to him when he's awake, though his dreams can piece it all together for him. Essentially, this power's a kind of widespread one-sided telepathy that picks up information from the collective consciousness, but imprecisely and randomly. Sometimes it's completely useless. Sometimes Ronan knows exactly what's going on or what he's looking at or what he should do.

DREAM FORM

With this power, Ronan's dream nature comes to the forefront, overtaking the human half. A dream, in the physical world, resembles something like light. But it also reflects the viewer's expectations. It is difficult to look at because it's difficult for the mind to comprehend. Somehow, what at first looks like a spark of light can be mistaken for a book, a bird, a planet, a mirror, a whisper. When this light shines on other objects, it can also cast them with an image of beauty or terror. A dream is a living hallucination.

When Ronan takes this form, his appearance behaves in a similar way. Like light, but also not. He becomes a spark of magical energy born from a ley line, a wild idea looking for expression. In practice, this makes him a source of power that others can draw from to work their own magic, amplifying their abilities. It also makes him a thing that can take root in someone else's mind. He can live inside their thoughts, communicating with them there in a telepathic and empathic way, experiencing the world through them and imparting his own perceptions. They can experience his dreams together and work in tandem to pull things from those dreams, the way Ronan is capable of doing on his own. He's essentially possessing them without taking control of their motor functions, only granting them his own knowledge and his abilities as the Greywaren.

His dream form makes him intangible as long as he's in it. That doesn't make him immortal or invulnerable, because he's actually more vulnerable to supernatural forces and certain powers when he's in that form, compared to his human form. Someone with an energy manipulation power could capture him the same way they'd manipulate electricity, to pull him out of a vessel or to drain him or to use his energy the way they would use any other. A magician could fashion an artifact out of him. Someone with demonic abilities could snuff him out completely. Lingering as an unformed idea waiting to be snatched up in astral space isn't more appealing to Ronan than fighting someone off with his own two hands.