Livenuto

Livenuto is a travelling winter player

The majority of players - a term that generally means actor, but can also encompass bards, singers, dancers, acrobats, jugglers, and almost any form of entertainer - generally tour in late summer, early autumn, when the harvest is over but the weather's still fine. This is the time when the villages have the most resources to give, and are feeling the most happy, full and generous. They also tend to travel in packs - or troupes, being the preferred term.

Livenuto travels alone, and arrives several months later, in the darker part of the year; coming in a small one-person bowed caravan covered with a vivid pink canvas, pulled by his delicate willowmane deerling.

His arrival often coincides with the preparations or aftermath of the riot of rot, although he himself does not affiliate himself with the Plaguebringer. He is a cool, slick creature more similar in manner to the Icewarden; but he does not affiliate himself with the Icewarden either. This is unusual for a player; most of them are foreign-born or otherwise have ties to other shores, and therefore generally some allegiance to the panuniversal flight gods, not the homeland's own specific iterations of elemental avatars that have now become subsumed by them, officially.
It is unknown what Livenuto's allegiances are.

Riot of Rot has it's own odd duality of being the month of celebrating infection, disease, and spoilage of food, especially meat, largely in the cathartic sense, and then also the time just before the coldest part of winter when one finishes bottling and salting and preserving for winter. It is a time when one is inclined to particularly cagey, but the charming Livenuto is able to cadge enough to live on, village by village.

He is indeed a multitalented, dazzling entertainer, and makes believable claims that he could talk his way into the palace if he wanted to; and perform for Queen Setae herself, eventually. In fact, he claims to have had some dealings with aristocrats and the wealthy before now, and off stage, is happy to tell dark, secretive, hissed little tales of the waste the rich happily generate in their own celebrations of the Riot: the overwhelming smell of rotting meat.