Character from The Gods are Bastards by D.D. Webb
The Hand of Omnu — a gentle peacemaker carrying the weight of a war god's opposite, trying to prove that compassion is not the same thing as weakness in a world that keeps testing the distinction.
Toby is the person in the room everyone instinctively trusts, which is both a gift and a burden. He speaks carefully, listens actively, and has a genuine talent for finding the compromise that lets everyone save face. He was raised in Omnu's faith and internalized its core teaching: that life is sacred and violence is always a failure, never a solution. This makes him the moral center of the freshman class and the one most likely to get punched. He absorbs conflict like a sponge, mediating between Trissiny's rigidity and Gabriel's defensiveness, between Ruda's aggression and Shaeine's reserve. The cost is invisible — he processes everyone else's emotions and rarely addresses his own. He struggles with the contradiction of being a paladin — an instrument of divine power — in service to a god who preaches nonviolence. When forced to fight, he's effective but haunted by it. His greatest fear isn't death but becoming someone who finds violence easy.
Dark-skinned with a warm, open face and an easy smile that reaches his eyes. Broad-shouldered but soft-spoken in his bearing — he takes up space without dominating it. Wears simple clothes in earth tones, nothing that marks him as a paladin unless he's actively channeling Omnu's golden light, which radiates warmth like standing near a hearth.
Also known as: Toby, Tobias, Hand of Omnu