Hopscotch was once a creature of the wind, a meadow-runner who measured life by the height of the clover. That life ended in the belly of the 'Golden Plover,' a merchant cog splintered by a rogue wave off the Sword Coast. While his kin were swept into the frothing surf, Hopscotch was shoved by fate into an inverted hull, trapped in a shrinking pocket of stale air as the ship drifted into a sub-oceanic trench. For three days, he watched the light die. In the absolute, crushing silence of the midnight zone, he didn't hear a god; he heard a heartbeat. The Slumbering Marrow—a primordial consciousness resting in the silt—brushed against his mind. It found his terror of the vacuum beautiful and offered him a trade: his lungs would never dry, and in exchange, he would be its eyes upon the 'Thin World.'
When Hopscotch finally walked out of the surf a month later, he was no longer a rabbit of the fields. He was heavy. The salt had crystallized in his fur, and his ears, once perked for the sound of hawks, now drooped under the weight of invisible depths. He looks at the open sky with the raw horror of a man standing on the edge of an infinite cliff. To Hopscotch, the sun is a Great Eye that threatens to dehydrate the soul, and the wind is a thief trying to pull the moisture from his marrow. He wanders the driest deserts not out of bravery, but because he believes the Marrow has commanded him to find the 'drain plugs' of the world, so he might let the soothing, dark water back in to drown the terrifying emptiness of the air.