Sora no Kongen’s Bio

Kong came for his sister.

That is the whole of it, the root and trunk and every branching consequence. Everything else, the Foundation, the mission, the companions, the river, the horrors, all of it grew from that single, stubborn fact. His sister Yoru walked the gates. She changed. She was recruited by Ritalson. And when Ritalson’s betrayal split the organization open like rotten wood, Yoru went missing searching for colleagues lost in the aftermath.

Kong was not old enough then. Not strong enough. He knows this the way younger siblings always know it, with the particular bitterness of someone who watched a door close and could not follow. He does not know if he is strong enough now. But he signed on with the Limina Foundation anyway, because the alternative was standing still while his sister’s trail went cold, and Kong has never been capable of standing still.

He is Tengu. Raven-blooded. Black feathers and sharp eyes and taloned feet that click on wooden floors in a way that makes humans stare. He moves like a bird even when he isn’t trying to, hopping when he could walk, tilting his head at angles that only corvids and the deeply confused can manage. He is curious to the point of foolishness, brave to the point of recklessness, and loyal to the point of walking into a river full of fey because someone he cared about might be on the other side.

The Wood flows through his body. This is not metaphor. Kong is a kineticist, and wood is his element, his medium, his weapon and his shield. He can command timber to bend and break and grow. He can summon sentinels from raw lumber, wooden guardians that absorb blows meant for his companions. He can coax vines from water itself, thorned and poisonous, to entangle anything foolish enough to attack his allies. He can heal with it. He can protect with it. He can cleanse with it. His connection to the forest is his greatest strength, and he speaks of it the way some people speak of faith, with absolute certainty and no particular interest in explaining himself to doubters.

But the Wood is also why the things in the river want him.

Kong joined the party aboard the Cestus heading downriver through Ustalav. He fought gargoyles on the water, summoned thorn-covered river kelp to drag stone horrors into the current, and sent his timber sentinels to shield wounded sailors. He explored the Toll Tower of Caromarc with the others, blasting creatures with kinetic force while his wooden guardians took the punishment meant for softer bodies. He stole a copper stud from Jorato’s coat because he was convinced it was magical. It was not magical. Kong did not return the stud.

He was brave and strange and generous, offering enchanted fruit to heal a bleeding sailor clinging to wreckage in freezing water. He was the one who always volunteered for the dangerous job, always stepped forward when someone needed to go first, always placed himself between threat and companion with the particular fearlessness of someone who has already decided that finding his sister matters more than anything that might happen to him along the way.

And then the Mourntray took him.

It happened at the Toll Tower of Caromarc. The others were inside, fighting their way through black sand horrors and caustic tentacles. Kong stayed behind to guard the rowboat, the only way back to the Cestus. He stood on the rocky shore with his timber sentinels flanking the vessel, taloned feet planted, watching the mist curl across water that moved too slowly for a river this wide.

The Vergesslings feen came first. Memory-eating pixies with mouths where their hands should be, crystalline and giggling, feeding on his thoughts. They took small things at first. The name of a childhood friend. The color of the door to his family’s home. The sound of Yoru’s laugh. Each stolen memory made the next one easier to take, and each loss made the world a little quieter, a little less sharp, a little more like drifting.

By the time the rusalka’s song reached him, Kong could not remember why he was supposed to resist it.

Miroslava. The river fey. She rose from the Mourntray like something the current had been hiding, green-glowing and ancient and beautiful in the way that deep water is beautiful when you have forgotten that you cannot breathe it. Her fingers were white as peeled birch. Her voice was the loneliest sound Kong had ever heard, and it promised that the water was warm, that the current was gentle, that she would keep his memories safe where nothing could reach them.

Kong’s timber sentinels did not move. The wood in them had gone cold and still as driftwood, dead things that forgot they were alive. His taloned feet stepped off the gunwale. The river closed around his ankles, his knees, his waist. It did not feel cold. It felt like coming home.

The Mourntray closed over his head without a splash. The surface smoothed. And on the shore where Kong’s feet last touched stone, something sat that had not been there before: a small doll fashioned from river rushes and black feathers, with two dark seeds pressed into its face for eyes.

But Kong is alive. His companions knows this because the fetch doll weeps river water when no one is watching, and because fey do not keep dead things as pets. He is somewhere beneath the Mourntray, in Miroslava’s garden, a guest or a prisoner or something in between that has no human word because fey do not distinguish between the two. His memories may be scattered. But he is alive, and the party carries his fetch doll wrapped in iron with them hoping that old Petra Dragan in Kronwald knows what they should offer the river fey to gain his freedom.

Kong came for his sister. The river came for Kong. And somewhere beneath the current, a Tengu kineticist waits in a garden that no air-breathing creature was ever meant to see, surrounded by wood that thinks, wood that wants, wood that remembers his name.

Yoru, your little brother tried to come.

The river got in the way.