Croissant

Croissant is a werewolf from Murmurin and the brother of Chocolatine whose blunt appetite, physical power, and survival-minded pragmatism make him one of the village’s most memorable local figures. He first appears as a ranch-dressed man welcoming Victor Dalton to the settlement, but his introduction quickly reveals the instability beneath that ordinary surface: he is both a potential enemy of Vainqueur Knightsbane and a man capable of abandoning resistance when the balance of power turns decisively against him.

Identity and Introduction

Croissant meets Victor Dalton at the entrance to Murmurin alongside his younger sister, Chocolatine. He is a powerfully built man in his late twenties, with brown skin, brown eyes, a mane of black hair, and dirty rancher’s clothing. Victor reads him as resembling a figure from a Western, an impression that gives Croissant an immediately recognizable frontier persona even though the village is surrounded by supernatural danger. Croissant identifies himself and his sister as locals and welcomes Victor to Murmurin while Chocolatine assumes that the newcomer is an adventurer intending to hunt the dragon.

Victor’s suspicion leads him to use Monster Insight on Croissant. The result identifies Croissant as a werewolf with a humanoid and beast classification. He is strong against Moon, Beast, Madness, and Fairy effects, establishing that his monstrous nature is not merely cosmetic: it gives him specific resistances within the world’s system of supernatural abilities. His later transformations confirm the scale of that nature. In wolf form, he becomes a monstrous black wolf roughly the size of a car, a physical change that sharply contrasts with the apparently ordinary rancher who first greets Victor.

Conflict with Vainqueur Knightsbane

Croissant’s hostility toward Vainqueur Knightsbane is personal rather than abstract. When the villagers bind Victor to an olive tree for sacrifice, Croissant is among the werewolves gathered around the ceremony, but he is also one of the few people who questions whether capturing Victor is wise. Chocolatine warns him that Victor is the dragon’s chief of staff and that Vainqueur is already angry. Croissant answers that Vainqueur burned their previous home, making clear why he resents the dragon and why the village’s decision to sacrifice Victor carries an immediate risk of retaliation.

His transformation during the confrontation turns that resentment into a visible threat. Croissant shifts into his enormous black-wolf form and glares at Victor with seething hatred. Yet the scene also exposes the limits of his defiance. When Croissant compares himself with Vainqueur and recognizes that the dragon is twenty times smaller than he is only in appearance, the actual power difference becomes unmistakable. Faced with the dragon’s superiority and the villagers’ refusal to stand with him, Croissant decides to cut his losses. He apologizes to both Vainqueur and Victor and asks them not to eat the villagers.

The exchange captures Croissant’s characteristic mixture of aggression and pragmatism. He does not retract the fact that Vainqueur destroyed his former home, nor does he suddenly become loyal to the dragon. Instead, he recognizes that continued resistance would endanger himself and his sister. Vainqueur’s answer, that the villagers will be spared unless the dragon runs out of sheep, leaves Croissant’s survival dependent on the conqueror’s appetite rather than on any moral settlement. Croissant therefore becomes an unwilling subordinate to the new order while retaining the grievance that first made him oppose it.

Relations and Recurring Behavior

Chocolatine is Croissant’s closest visible relation and the person whose judgment most directly moderates his conduct. She argues against Victor’s capture because she understands the danger it poses to the village, while Croissant initially emphasizes the destruction of their old home. His glance toward her helps prompt his eventual apology, suggesting that his decisions are shaped not only by self-preservation but also by concern for his sister. Their shared history makes the village’s danger familial as well as political.

Croissant’s relations with Victor Dalton are marked by hostility, mockery, and forced proximity. He is implicated in Victor’s capture, yet he later appears among the people drawn into Victor’s wider circle. His bluntness repeatedly creates social friction. When he sees Charlene, he immediately comments on her attractiveness and addresses her through a language of appetite that Victor finds disturbing. Croissant tells her that he loves mature women with plenty of meat, a remark that makes his predatory instincts impossible to mistake and leaves Victor shuddering. The scene connects his werewolf identity to an aggressively literal hunger, while also turning that hunger into grotesque comedy.

That appetite becomes more dangerous in the later drinking episode. After Croissant drunkenly admits that he fed Charlene cakes in order to fatten her for dinner, Victor remembers having comforted Charlene afterward. The admission transforms Croissant from an embarrassing flirt into an actual threat within the group’s social world. Charlene’s response is not forgiveness but revenge: she says that Croissant tried to fatten her for dinner and therefore deserves what happened to him. Their relationship is consequently defined by antagonistic intimacy, with Croissant’s appetite provoking Charlene’s anger rather than securing affection.

Comic Violence and Incompetence

Croissant’s physical strength does not make him competent or reliable. After Victor has gained six levels as a Necromancer, Croissant enters a room in human shape with a bloody hand, reporting that he found a sword lying on the ground, tried to pick it up, and was bitten by it before the weapon ran away. The incident turns a potentially dangerous magical object into a farcical injury, while Croissant’s reaction reinforces his role as a man who repeatedly encounters the supernatural through appetite, impulse, or bad judgment rather than mastery.

His later drunken state extends the same pattern. Victor wakes after trying to drink himself into oblivion and remembers a chaotic sequence involving the dragon system, Soul Nethermart, Beer Pong, Cybele, a gnoll fight, and Charlene’s distress. In the dirty bedroom where Victor awakens, Croissant is fully clothed and snoring on the floor with a bottle in one hand and Victor’s scythe in the other. Furibon complains that Croissant used him to scratch his back, reducing a sentient and dangerous weapon to an improvised scratching tool. Croissant’s carelessness therefore affects both allies and objects, and the scene’s comic indignity undercuts the menace of his werewolf form without erasing it.

War and Changing Allegiances

Croissant’s survival instinct becomes politically significant when Murmurin faces a larger military threat. After an initial strike, dozens of minions are dead and hundreds of minions and citizens have gathered in the town square awaiting instructions. Red warns that thousands more enemies are coming. Croissant, standing beside Charlene in wolfish form and carrying the visible burden of his transformed identity, insists that the inhabitants must evacuate. Charlene is troubled by his appearance but still stands with him wielding a spear, while Savoureuse points out that the town is already encircled and Allison notes that enemy cavalry would catch anyone attempting to flee.

The exchange places Croissant between private fear and collective responsibility. Earlier, he had protected himself and Chocolatine by submitting to Vainqueur; here, he voices the practical conclusion that the town cannot simply remain in place and hope to survive. His proposed evacuation is blocked by military circumstances rather than disproved as judgment. Croissant thus functions less as a heroic commander than as a danger-sensitive local who recognizes catastrophe early, even when the surrounding forces make every available choice desperate.

Croissant’s trajectory never becomes a clean conversion from enemy to friend. He begins as a werewolf whose former home was destroyed by Vainqueur, participates in a ritual against Victor, apologizes when resistance becomes suicidal, remains entangled with Victor’s companions, and later stands with them during the defense of Murmurin. His allegiance is therefore conditional and situational. The character’s continuing significance lies in that instability: Croissant is not purified into nobility, but neither is he reduced to a monster. He is a hungry, frightened, violent, occasionally perceptive survivor whose family ties and changing calculations keep him attached to the same powers he once had reason to hate.