Bear Eye the Fable is a half-breed wanderer from Darklaf whose broken Sightell and oversized presence turned him from market joke into living legend. Short, loud, and perpetually drowned in Eye Kin garments two sizes too big, he is remembered as the first to openly warn that the Golems of Golemia were feeding on time itself. His warning was laughed off by most – but not by the Golem King – and the Trampling of Withambria that followed bound his name to one of the darkest days in the Land of Black and White. Among half-breeds, scavengers and street prophets, Bear Eye is revered as the first of the EyePhunks, a patron fool for those who speak truth from the lowest place in the room.

Born in Darklaf among ten-thousand half-breeds, Bear Eye was never meant to look important. Standing barely five feet tall, with a head that always seemed one size too large for his frame, he wore stolen Eye Kin robes that dragged in the dust and sleeves that swallowed his hands. His single eye peered out from beneath a mop of hair that could not decide whether it was a mane or a mistake. To most who saw him in market crowds and caravan lines, he was comedy – a scavenger prince of poor tailoring and worse grammar.

Yet while others bent their backs in service or vanished into the outskirts, Bear Eye listened. He drifted from stall to stall and campfire to campfire, collecting rumours the way others collected weapons. His speech came out as crushed Sightell and gutter slang, but somewhere inside the broken words, lords and deities alike sensed a dangerous thing: truth.

When life flourished in the Kingdom of Golemia and the Eye Kin began to suspect that something was wrong with time itself, it was Bear Eye who climbed onto a makeshift pedestal in Withambria. Draped in robes that did not fit, swaying under the weight of his own head, he shouted to a throng of beings gathered from across the land:

"YoOoOo! I am a descendant of the Eye peeps. D'names' Bear Eye de Fable! Me n my peeps, we usual not death at old age, but me sees me bro's dyin one after one, whatcha say be da reason? I knows, I knows! I hearrrrrrd it from me Papi's peeps the Eye Kins, dem Golems are cool, but dey be eatin our time ye hear?! OUR time! Ye and me and m'siblings and our peeps!"

The Eye Kin laughed.

The crowd laughed.

Even some lords, hearing the retellings, smirked at the picture of a stubby half-breed in oversized robes, flailing his arms and murdering Sightell on a public square.

The Golem King did not laugh.

Through the eyes of his children, he saw that the single point of unrest in his dominion was not a royal and not a lord, but a short, loud being whose very ridiculousness made the most dangerous knowledge in Golemia sound like a tavern joke. Fearing that such words would spread and starve his kin of their sustenance, he sent the Fire Golems to Withambria. The first golem-led massacre followed, and at the end of the Trampling of Withambria ten-thousand and one voices were reduced to one.

Bear Eye ran.

Through scorched stone and Barren Land, he fled with nothing but his stubborn will and broken words. Thirst and hunger gnawed at him until he collapsed, alone between dunes, his robes torn, his eye half-closed. It should have ended there, with a nameless half-breed dying face-down in the sand.

The Eyeverse, however, has a fondness for the inconvenient.

Guided by the will of the Eye King and the unseen hands of the deities, Bear Eye's time was pulled back from the brink. An unseen command from the king carried him, step by step, until he stumbled out of the wasteland into Drodzokh, straight into the path of Lord Myst of Black and White. Taken into the Eye King's care and held up as a witness to what had happened in Golemia, Bear Eye's name spread not just as a joke but as a warning.

Among the half-breeds of Darklaf and the scavengers of the beyond, tokens began to appear: rough carvings of single-eyed faces on metal scraps and dust-stone, some daubed with wild colour, some hidden beneath crude bear-shaped hoods in his honour. Those who wore such marks and laughed in the face of kings started calling themselves EyePhunks, and when they spoke of the first of their kind, they always spoke of the same small figure in oversized robes, shouting about time while the world pretended not to hear.