Few now remember the name Leomaer Vrammyr, once a promising young mage of Tyrian in its final century of glory. Born in the twilight of Tyrian’s golden age, Leomaer was never seduced by riches or status like most of his peers. Instead, he was gripped by an obsessive curiosity about the Isle of Plenty—not just its bounty, but its unnatural rhythm, its vanishing act, its unnamed origins. Even as others prospered, Leomaer asked the one question nobody wanted answered:

"What is the island taking in exchange for what it gives?"

When the island exploded, Leomaer was aboard a skiff off the coast, studying the sea around it. The blast hurled his boat across the waves. His crewmates died. He survived—barely. Clinging to wreckage, he drifted through churning, smoke-wreathed waters. For hours—or perhaps days—he floated unconscious, until a whisper found him in the dark.

Leomaer awoke not on land, but in the dream of a place beneath the sea, where strange structures of coral and bone towered in geometries that made no mortal sense. There he met his patron, though even now he cannot describe them clearly. A thing vast and slow, patient as the pressure of the deep, older than the Isle, older than the sea itself. It offered him knowledge in exchange for a wound, and he accepted.

When he was found days later, half-mad on a piece of driftwood, he could speak only in riddles and prophecy. He bore a strange symbol carved into the inside of his left palm, as though by his own hand.

Leomaer disappeared soon after returning to Tyrian. He spent decades in hermitage, dwelling in lonely cliffside towers, sea caves, and island ruins. He traveled widely, always seeking fragments of the island, but not for wealth or the crown—he sought answers. He became known to coastal villages as the “Salt-Wizard” or “Tide Hermit,” always reliable when danger loomed, yet unnerving in his behavior—whispering to barnacles, feeding messages to the surf, laughing at storms. But his warnings often proved true. Ship captains came to trust him, though they rarely invited him aboard.

He has walked sunken ruins, spoken to sailors who drowned and rose again, and once spent an entire month beneath the surface in communion with something that wasn’t dead, but dreaming. Some believe he’s more sea ghost than man. Others say he went mad from seeing too far. Leomaer doesn’t correct them.

Now, nearly two centuries after the fall of the Isle, Tyrian comes knocking again. The royal family seeks to reclaim their shattered past, and Leomaer has answered—not for gold, but because he’s seen signs in the currents, omens in the gulls’ flight, and whispers in his sleep that say:

"When the island was broken, the gate was weakened. And what lies beyond the gate is not done.”

Isilmiel is the daughter of a well-connected noble family in the elvish city where she has lived most of her life. Always physically active, it was an easy choice for her to pursue training in martial skills.  While still young, she joined the military and started training. Given her family's position, she secured a more prestigious position in Guard that protected the city.  However, that did not mean that she did not have any experience being sent out into the field. She fought in a number of skirmishes, including one where her poor decisions led her into getting trapped and severely injured.  The woman that was her commander managed to rescue her.  She always remembers what she did for her and seeks to repay that by looking out for others in battle.  

Over time Isilmiel moved up the ranks, becoming a Captain in the Guard.  She had distinguished herself in a number of ways, investigating a smuggling operation with the city and fighting off a cult that had set itself up nearby her city.  Her superiors were always pleased as she was eager to follow orders and diligent about executing them.

She was also very aware of the political intrigues within her city and the nobility there.  Her family was very much entangled with it.  As a result, she tried to keep an eye on the social climate and interactions between Houses.  But inside, she absolutely hated such things. She was much happier leading her Guardsmen out into the forest to fight off incursions of horrible creatures rather than having to pretend to be nice to someone to maintain some political pact.  So, although Captain Isilmiel is proud of the position she holds and the work she does as a Guard, there is something inside of her that makes her wonder if there is something more she might do. 

When Tyrian was at its height with its towers gleaming, trade routes bustling, gold flowing like water, there was House Leclair. They held a unique position among the nobility. They weren't warriors or courtiers. They were scholars, the kind of people who disappeared into their libraries for months at a time and emerged with theories that made the kingdom's infrastructure possible.

The Leclairs understood magic in ways that most wizards never bothered to attempt. While others memorized spells, the Leclairs mapped the underlying patterns. They built the containment wards that kept the Isle of Plenty stable. They developed the refinement processes that turned raw magical energy into the enchantments that kept Tyrian's cities from crumbling and its people prosperous.

Their estate was more laboratory than manor. It was filled with astrolabes, planar instruments, and texts that hurt to read if you weren't prepared for them. They were the quiet architects of Tyrian's golden age, content to work in the shadows while others took the credit.

Then the Isle shattered.

The sound reached every corner of the known world. Tyrian's economy collapsed within weeks. The king started selling everything, land, titles, favors, just to keep the kingdom functioning. But the Leclairs had nothing to sell. Their knowledge was too specialized, too theoretical. No one wanted to buy research into planar harmonics when they could barely afford bread.

The decline was brutal in its mundanity. Colleagues stopped returning letters. Funding requests were denied. Bills went unpaid. One by one, the family's libraries were sealed off, their research gathering dust. The nobles who had once sought their expertise now whispered that the Leclairs should have seen the catastrophe coming. After all, if anyone understood the Isle's magic, it was them.

By the time Lumian was born, House Leclair was a shell of its former self. The family clung to their crumbling towers and half-empty halls, living off the sale of old texts and minor enchantments. But his father never stopped believing that the family's true legacy lived on in Lumian's older sister, Aurore.

She was everything their father had hoped for; brilliant, dedicated, obsessed with the old ways. By fifteen, she was solving magical equations that had stumped the family's greatest minds. But Aurore's genius had a different focus than her ancestors'. Where they had sought to understand and control magic, she wanted to heal it. She believed that fragments of the Isle still existed, scattered across the planes, and that if she could trace their magical signature, their fundamental resonance, she might be able to call them back.

Her final experiment was meant to do exactly that.

Lumian was there when she attempted the ritual. He remembers her voice growing distant as she spoke the incantations with the runes carved into the floor blazing white-hot. Then her foci went flying from her grasp like a shooting star, and everything went silent.

Aurore was gone. Not dead, gone. Her body had been completely annihilated by the ritual's backlash. By sheer luck, a nearby soul-gem had caught her essence before it could dissipate, and now it thrums faintly with violet light whenever he holds it. She was trapped between life and death. A terrible fate.

He carries the gem with him everywhere. He's spent years trying to decode her research, following the tangled paths of her reasoning, but it's beyond him. He could never be a Wizard like her. In desperation, he's turned to darker sources of knowledge, finding a patron among the Hells who promises the power he needs to bring her back.

Lumian has paid dearly for that power. He has hunted rogue devils, retrieved infernal relics from cursed ruins, and burned heretical texts in shrines where no priest dared tread. He’s struck down summoners and scholars alike at his patron’s command, just to earn another whisper of forbidden insight. The work has left scars on his soul, but he endures them; for every contract, every spell, every favor bought with blood and fire brings him closer to bringing Aurore back.

When the king recently called for adventurers to recover the scattered fragments of the Isle, the soul-gem trembled in Lumian's hands for the first time in years. A low, harmonic hum, as if it recognized something familiar. Maybe this is his chance; to save his sister and fulfill her dream of restoring what was lost to their country.

Maybe this time, the Leclairs can succeed where they failed before.