Glarunk Geraldo Grimsby Gimlick III rested his head on a plush round chair of deep green, feeling comforted in its egg-shaped center. This was not just any chair - his brother had it specially made for the long hours he would spend sitting in the bowls of that blasted castle; it had a hole precisely placed in the back to allow for his thick tale to hang freely without the binding that he felt in conventional seating. At least it allowed him some measure of peace within his alcove. It was dark, dank, damp, disgusting, damnable, and any other 'd' word Glarunk could think of that spoke negatively of his stony home beneath the witch's lair. A boy should feel frightened living in a castle where a known insane murderer and conjurer lived, but it didn't bother him in the slightest. He was lazing in the snuggling folds of the chair only half-watching what was going on in his crystal ball.

With his crystal ball, he could watch anything that was going on in the castle and a small area beyond it. It could only 'see' places it was near enough to. He could also cast spells and have them take effect on wherever the orb was viewing at the time. Except he couldn't cast spells, normally anyway. His species never had mastered that particular ability, though they had found ways around it. They were clever little beasties (most of them, anyway) and found a way to capture the spells of others and keep them in little vials for their own use later. It took precise timing to catch the spell before it hit them. His own father had died trying to entrap a particularly lethal one. But he had lived a good, long life of 436 at the time. That was old by their standards: most only lived to be 500. No one really knew how old they could live to be, however, because not a one had died of old age. They might be clever, but they were also reckless and senseless at times. Glarunk was 150 years old himself, but was only just reaching adolescence. He recalled this fact as he looked down at the floor sourly: flakes fell all over from his scaly little body. In adolescence the Sprunkle body undergoes a period of molting, where it loses its dull scales from youth, in a process not unlike exfoliateing, to be replaced by shiny new scales with some measure of protection and impermeability to water. They didn't like rain, not a single one of them, and so had developed that adaptation throughout the millennia in lieu of other, more trivial adaptations, such as sharp claws or poisonous slime. At least if they were caught outdoors (which was a rarity, as they preferred comfortable, regulated temperatures and surroundings) they would not be completely miserable.

If those attributes and characteristics were not enough to make a person curious, their employment was also a topic of discussion as well. They were the species to be left with all the strange and rather pointless jobs that other species found too trivial for their efforts. Glarunk's family, specifically, was the Keeper of Tales. They went around and kept stories going where they otherwise would have died. Some may see this as pointless, but they would just be too narrow-minded to understand that keeping tales alive were an integral part to the way societies functioned. Ever wonder about the troll under the bridge and why he didn't die off? Well, he simply died one day, drowned in a puddle when he tripped on a rock and fell down on top of the bridge, knocking himself unconscious. He wasn't able to return to his senses to pull himself from the puddle before he met his maker, whomever that may be for trolls. (That was another reason Sprunkles didn't like rain - it caused puddles. And puddles, they knew, caused death.) Glarunk's sister had taken over the Lair Under the Bridge to Nowhere so that the story could live on, bless her heart. She wasn't particularly beautiful, and that along with her scales made her not unlike the troll before her. If she wouldn't have taken over the bridge lair, people would have been unafraid of that particular locale and traveled needlessly into the land beyond, which she knew lead to Nowhere, a deserted land indeed. A few unfortunate individuals had to be sacrificed to perpetuate the fear of the Bridge and the troll, but they were willing to make that sacrifice for the greater good.

Glarunk glanced haphazardly back at the crystal ball, muttered an oath under his breath before he stood, and walked slowly to the Wall of Incantations and Magical Happenings, as he liked to call it. He had sat one full hour on that topic until he found out just the name he wanted to use. Times were slow then...but not anymore. A group of trespassers was caught by the orb's all-seeing eye and had to be dealt with. "The walking dead; 100 strong" read one bottle. Yes, that should do the trick. Unfortunately for Glarunk, some spells lose their potency with time, and these particular dead were about as fragile as a stacked pyramid of cards - one push and the whole thing collapses. But no matter. Should that fail, he had plenty of nastiness to inflict on them, not to mention the overlord who guarded the door to the castle. No on had ever made it past the overlord.

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Took the "What Element are You?" quiz and got 75% Earth and 58% Holiness.
It's pretty accurate - take it to find out what you are!