Dragonwilds:Archmage Alric
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Template:Infobox NPC Archmage Alric was the leader of the Zamorakian magi at Dragonwilds:Dowdun Reach and a senior figure within the Dragonwilds:Children of Shadows.Template:CiteJournal He served as Archmage to Lord Rasmodel until losing authority over the keep's Dragonwilds:Dreaming Stone in the wake of a closed-door confrontation. His covert efforts to circumvent that loss eventually allowed demons to bleed directly into the walls of the fortress.
History
Alric considered knowledge to be a precondition of power, and held that power's true purpose was not the control of others but the freedom of the self.Template:CiteJournal The lectures he left for his apprentices set out a sequential discipline. The apprentice was first to know his own ignorance, then to seek a comprehension of the true nature of the world, and finally to put the resulting power to ambitious task, since power without purpose was a liability.Template:CiteJournal Under his leadership the Zamorakian magi at Dowdun Reach were a noble order committed to chaos, demonology, and destruction.Template:CiteJournal He maintained an unexplained standing order on the keep's ranged forces that the red, glowing ravens of Dowdun Reach were not to be shot, and to do so was an immediate dismissal.Template:CiteJournal
Within the keep's command structure he answered to Lord Rasmodel, and his working relationship with the lord deteriorated over time.Template:CiteJournal Alric had been quietly tracking the casualty rate of his magi for years before he brought his findings to Rasmodel one morning. The ledger accounted for one hundred and seventeen mage deaths drawn from one hundred and seventeen separate incidents, with no incident having claimed more than a single magus.Template:CiteJournal The pattern was no coincidence. Rasmodel had given his Shadow Knights a covert standing order called the 'Demon's Share', under which one mage fatality per unruly demon incident was permitted as a measure for managing mage numbers.Template:CiteJournal Alric's protest accomplished nothing. Rasmodel issued a fresh order the next day raising the per-incident allowance from one mage to two.Template:CiteJournal The episode marked the limits of his authority within the keep.
Outside it, his hand was freer. At a routine trade meeting with an envoy of Dragonwilds:Imaru and Dragonwilds:Xikotal from Dragonwilds:Emberwood, the cleric who had been sent arrived dressed in mystic cloth, a fabric until then reserved for the Archmage and his council. Alric burned the contract she had brought and blasted her off the top of Dowdun Reach.Template:CiteJournal When Rasmodel later sought a way to place eyes among the Dragonwilds:Moon Garou and could not find a human able to pass for one of them, Alric proposed using mystic cloth itself, on the grounds that its tendency to retain and repeat resonance could be turned to the work of surveillance.Template:CiteJournal
Within the keep, the order's discipline held up less well. It broke down when an infernal demon materialised during a Shadow Knight training session and slaughtered the unarmed recruits.Template:CiteJournal Alric and Rasmodel withdrew into the war room and barred the doors. What passed between them was never recorded, but the outcome was that authority over the Dragonwilds:Dreaming Stone and the power it generated passed solely to Rasmodel, with the demon portal placed under strict rationing.Template:CiteJournal Alric and his magi found themselves stripped of their independent power.Template:CiteJournal
Alric did not accept the new arrangement. His faithful began re-routing the Dreaming Stone's energy through the keep, threading it through and around residences and siphoning the Library, which had been built to ward against magical overflow.Template:CiteJournal The flows that had once been arterial became a capillary network spread throughout the Reach, prone to overload, fire, and outbreak.Template:CiteJournal
He paired this work with a new application of his theories of demonic possession. Having observed that demons were drawn to the company of other demons, he reasoned that an infernal gateway might be made self-sustaining if it could be infused with stored demon souls.Template:CiteJournal The gateway gave a different result in practice. The souls intended to power it bled instead into the surrounding fortress until each brick whispered with the avernic, and demons began to summon themselves from any room without prompting.Template:CiteJournal He framed the result, in the manner he had learned from observing Rasmodel, as having been his intention all along.Template:CiteJournal
External events eventually drew his attention as well. He received an assessment of the necroseismic event later known as the Withering, addressed to him as Lord Alric, recommending that Dowdun Reach be sealed against intrusion and all pathways to Dragonwilds:Fellhollow severed.Template:CiteJournal
In his later years he took his thinking to the maple groves of Dowdun Reach.Template:CiteJournal As age made the walk a strain, he took to carrying a maple staff as a portable remnant of the grove.Template:CiteJournal The staff served a second purpose as well. Inside the wood was rolled a defaulted demon pact in which the demon, rather than the human, had failed to keep their side, and Alric had bound the radiating power of that broken bargain into the Dragonwilds:Subjugation Staff.Template:CiteJournal By his own account from this period, his sleep had stopped producing dreams of his own, his flesh felt alien to him, and the voices that surrounded him oscillated between addressing him with veneration and with contempt.Template:CiteJournal