Alevar

He/him | Elf (eladrin) | Necromancer Wizard / Incantifer

A smartly-dressed necromancer who is quite certain the story should be about him.

Born 1072 DR to the ruling eladrin house of a small Evermeet kingdom called Kimishi, Alevar is a winter-season eladrin whose hair and skin shift color with his emotions in ways he has spent most of his life learning to suppress. He treats necromancy as a legitimate school of magic and paladins as a long-running personal insult.

He is brilliant, funny, sly, vain, deeply lonely, and profoundly angry at the god who made him. He talks too much as a habit, and not enough when it matters. His hands are always moving. He dresses fabulously. He rhymes when he casts. He acts as though he's already won arguments no one else has started, and falls apart in private.

The central fact of Alevar's life is that Corellon, the god of the elves, never appeared to him. Every elf receives a divine epiphany around the age of one hundred. Alevar waited. Alevar begged. Corellon said nothing. This makes him malawain—unawakened, in the eyes of his people—and it has shaped everything he has done since, from his turn toward necromancy to his refusal to let any god decide what happens to his soul. He's gaudy and terrifyingly single-minded, driven by the quiet conviction that a soul once passed over is now owed the loudest possible place in the multiverse.

INVENTORY

Silver Hand Mirror
An enchanted hand mirror that serves as his favorite scrying focus, letting him pull up distant people and places. He uses it so obsessively to watch Dezlyn, Valden, and everyone else that it's less a divination tool and more a full-time stalking habit.

(Designer) Bag of Holding
A bespoke extradimensional purse with a double A emblem, stuffed with spare components, his favorite lipstick, and a small army of undead "party guests" to come spilling out at a moment's notice.

Heels of Adventuring
Even high fantasy can't make adventuring in high heels realistic. With this item, high heels feel and act as regular, sensible shoes, while retaining their fabulousness.

Ardanrion

He/him | Elf (eladrin) | King Consort / Fighter

Alevar and Sage's father. The most approachable person in the family, for whatever that's worth.

Ardanrion is a spring eladrin from House Spiral on the planet Spiral in Wildspace, and a former officer of the Elven Imperial Navy. Astrid married him for his family's Sindiath Line trade connections. He took her name and her kingdom and has been agreeable about both ever since. He gardens and reads trade reports in the lower study while Astrid runs the country. His garden is his pride and joy; he loves plants so much that he named his first son after one.

He is genuinely kind and has never once used that kindness for anything meaningful. Alevar calls him a useless oaf. This is unkind and largely accurate.

Astrid

She/her | Elf (eladrin) | Queen / Bladesinger

The queen of Kimishi. A bladesinger who runs her kingdom and her household, and neither one gets a say in how.

Astrid is a winter eladrin who has been in her winter season for longer than either of her sons has been alive. She decided Alevar would be a wizard when he was a toddler, based on the span of his fingers and the flexibility of his joints, and sent him to the Academy when he got too rebellious to manage at home. She decided Sage would serve Corellon. She has never asked either of them what they want. She loves both of them dearly.

Belertzyd

She/her | Elf (shadar-kai) | Divination Wizard

A diviner who believes that looking at something changes it. She'd know.

Bel is a shadar-kai divination wizard from the Shadowfell and a follower of the Raven Queen. She will read necromantic theory but will not practice it.

Her original work in divination starts from the premise that observation alters what it observes, and she'd been developing this alone for decades before Alevar arrived at the Academy and turned out to be one of the few people who could keep up with her. They are both exceptionally intelligent and they enjoy each other's company most when they're arguing about something: magic, philosophy, whether a spell can be ethical. They can go for hours.

She keeps her own counsel. She's not sentimental. She is controlled, composed, brilliant, and she tends to engage more with the version of Alevar she is building than with the one standing in front of her.

Celeste

She/her | Sylph | Bard / Rogue

Three pen names, two pistols, one pair of wings she can't use.

Celeste is a sylph. Sylphs are born to fly. Titania, Queen of the Summer Court, took that from her when Celeste deserted her spy service forty years ago, but left the wings as a reminder of what she has lost. Celeste has spent every year since on the island of Lantan, surrounded by gnomes too absorbed in their own projects to wonder why a fey creature is living among them. Nothing on Lantan reminds her of the Feywild. That's the point.

She writes journalism under the name Primrose Arran and pulp adventure smut under the name Velouria Duskvane. She lives with her half-tabaxi girlfriend Maybelle and a gnomish automaton named Tangent 9 who will not stop talking, will not do as she's told, and will argue with any instruction she considers beneath her. She learned to shoot on Lantan and she's good at it. She is funny and intelligent and has rebuilt herself from scratch at least twice.

Dezlyn

He/him | Genasi (earth) | Abjuration Wizard

Alevar's apprentice and partner. He sells secrets and keeps them.

Dezlyn grew up behind the counter of his family's shop in Huzuz, selling oudh and grey-market planar goods to people who looked down on the business and came through the back door anyway when they needed something. It made him observant. He pays attention to everything, and he learned early not to let anyone know he's doing it.

He is intelligent, curious, and protective. He asks good questions and waits for answers that most people would rather not give. He is stubborn and not much shocks him. He was raised in the margins where respectable society gets its hands dirty, and he's never pretended otherwise. Dezlyn is drawn to the way Alevar thinks—dangerous, controlled, unafraid of ideas other people won't say aloud. Necromancy and the wrong side of society don't scare him; he's lived in that margin his whole life. What hooks him is the honesty of it, and the curiosity that keeps getting him into trouble.

INVENTORY

Dusty (Scimitar)
A blade he bartered off of a dao caravan. The steel is a matte, charcoal black, inlaid with thin veins of gold that look like cracks in sun-baked earth. The hilt is hammered gold wrapped in worn camel leather. Its edge is deceptively rough, cutting with a jagged, tearing bite that leaves a fine trail of silt in its wake.

Phanta Prototype
The very first batch of Dezlyn's desert cactus "Phanta" soda: sharp, mineral-sweet, and (according to Alevar) "like licking alchemy runoff." Alevar grumbled through the taste tests, but still distilled it, because loyalty trumps palate. Dezlyn keeps it sealed, half for nostalgia and half because the carbonation is technically explosive if you shake it.

Elephant Charm
Tala slipped this hand-carved soapstone elephant into Dezlyn's pack, saying it would bring luck on his travels. Bought on a trade run so long ago no one recalls which caravan sold it, the little figure is now polished smooth from miles of quiet worrying.

Fang

He/him | Crawling claw | Purse gremlin

Alevar's pet. He lives in a purse and knows sign language.

Fang is a crawling claw—an animated severed hand—and Alevar's most pampered possession. Alevar took the hand off a tiefling who lost it mid-encounter in the Plane of Air and decided it was a great time to make a new friend. He taught Fang basic sign language, named him, and has treated him like a beloved lapdog ever since.

Fang lives in Alevar's bag of holding, where he hands Alevar components, lipstick, and whatever else is needed on short notice. He gets curious about other undead thralls. He gets scared of loud noises. He learned how to breakdance on Earth. Alevar thinks all of this is adorable.

Fantastic

He/him | Elf (eladrin) | ???

He came out of a dream. He won't go back in.

Fantastic is a clone of Alevar, made by accident when Valden's soul fractured in the Ethereal and pulled a younger version of Alevar out of his memories. Dream!Alevar rolled a natural twenty on realizing he didn't exist and forced his way into the material world through sheer stubbornness—the one trait he kept from the original. Everything else that makes Alevar who he is got stripped on the way out. Alevar got returned to factory settings: curious, guileless, and spectacularly powerful for no justifiable reason.

He got his name when someone told him "Don't worry, you're fantastic" and he assumed they were introducing him. He calls Valden "dad." Valden hates this. He has a "sister" named Roxette, a half-drow artificer who makes music with rocks, who came out of the same dream and who he adores. He has been recruited by a group of paladin gym bros into the Harmonium and is rapidly becoming a lawful good jock who thinks necromancy is creepy and wrong.

Alevar is aware of all of this. Alevar watches it in his silver mirror. Alevar is going to do something about it.

Fatimah

She/her | Human | Sha'ir

Dezlyn's mother. Married a dao. Spends her days out-bargaining extraplanar entities and her evenings appraising people like uncut gemstones.

Fatimah is a sha'ir—a Zakharan spellcaster whose magic comes from bargaining with genies rather than studying the Weave—and an enlightened follower of the Loregiver. She considers the western arcane tradition arrogant, a system that takes from the world without asking permission, and she has said so directly to Alevar's face. She sources rare goods from the Elemental Plane of Earth, she married a dao named Ghareb, and she runs the family business with the same authority she brings to negotiating with beings who could crush her.

She respects people who argue back more than people who try to impress her.

Fenris

He/him | Elf (eladrin) | Paladin of Corellon

A paladin of Corellon who gave up everything for his god.

Fenris is a summer eladrin from Kimishi, son of the captain of the royal guard, and a paladin of Corellon Larethian. He gave himself to Corellon young, received his epiphany at ninety-five, and has never once doubted that he was doing what his god wanted.

During the Second Unhuman War, the elven military asked for volunteers willing to undergo a transformation that would fuse their bodies with an insect form. Fenris volunteered. The temples approved. The dispensation was renewed. He believed Corellon wanted it, and he was willing to become something other than what he was born as if that's what the war required of him.

He is contemplative, loyal past the point where loyalty serves him, and more thoughtful than most people give him credit for. The sincerity of his belief is the thing that will eventually break him.

Ghareb

He/him | Dao | Genie of Elemental Earth

Dezlyn's father. Enormous. Tells terrible dad jokes. Left an entire plane of existence because he fell in love with a human who argues with genies for a living.

Ghareb is a dao—a genie of elemental earth—and by dao standards he is deeply, persistently strange. Dao find cruelty funny. Ghareb finds puns funny. He once told a trading partner that the reason the lower vaults kept flooding was that the stone had a drinking problem. The trading partner did not laugh. No dao has ever laughed at one of Ghareb's jokes, and he has never stopped telling them.

He grew up in the outer tunnels of the Sevenfold Mazework at the heart of the Great Dismal Delve. He left when he married Fatimah, which embarrasses every dao who ever knew him, but they keep doing business with him because the margins are right. His natural form is massive stone with a churning lower body of dust and gemstone. He can shapechange to legs for indoor use. He prefers not to.

Jakob

He/him | Human | Paladin of Lathander

A paladin of Lathander who has, at various points in his life, been worse than the people he's chasing.

Jakob came to the Morninglord late. He doesn't talk about it much. He carries the proof of what he once was under his shirt.

Lathander is the god of dawn and new beginnings. Jakob desperately needed one. He is patient, genuinely kind, and dryly funny when you're not expecting it. He can tell the difference between people who chose evil and people who wandered into it, and he's most interested in helping the latter.

Maybelle

She/her | Half-tabaxi | Bookkeeper / Lady-in-waiting

Celeste's partner. Keeps the books, keeps the household running, and doesn't ask about the parts of Celeste's life she isn't shown.

Maybelle is a half-tabaxi bookkeeper on Lantan. She met Celeste at a book signing eleven years ago and has lived with her since. She is practical, slightly sarcastic, a terrible cook, and the person who makes sure the rent is paid and the automaton gets wound on schedule. She doesn't know everything about Celeste, but she knows enough. She doesn't push for the rest.

Sage

He/him | Elf (eladrin) | Paladin of Corellon

Alevar's older brother. Corellon's favorite. Everyone's favorite, actually.

Sage received his divine epiphany at seventy-five—decades before most elves. He is crown prince of Kimishi, a paladin of Corellon, handsome, and charming. He loves his god, his kingdom, and his family, and he is the cruelest person Alevar has ever met. He does it all with a smile and a brotherly arm around your shoulder while he tells you it's for your own good.

Second Chance

She/her | Tabaxi | Cleric

Alevar's first follower. She was dead when they met.

Second Chance is a tabaxi and a former priestess of Zaltec, the Maztican god of war and sacrifice. She served faithfully. When she stopped being useful, the faith put her on the sacrificial altar. A foreign elf who had crashed his spelljammer in the wrong part of Maztica burned a revivify scroll on her corpse within the minute. He's still not sure why he did it.

Her original name was Necahual. She chose her new name, Second Chance, after she was returned to life. She is loud, commanding, theatrical, and completely devoted to Alevar. She has never once doubted that he was worth it.

Tala

She/her | Genasi (earth) | Fighter

Dezlyn's younger sister. Looks like a golem. Isn't one.

Tala got more of her father's dao blood than Dezlyn did. Her skin is unpolished granite and her hands are heavier than the rest of her. She's shy around strangers, and Zakhara is more tolerant than most of Toril, but dao have a reputation and people who don't know the family tend to keep their distance. Dezlyn has been putting himself between her and that for most of her life.

She loves rocks. Go figure.

Tangent 9

She/her | Gnomish automaton | Scribe

Scribe automaton. Ninth prototype. The first eight worked fine.

Celeste found her in a scrap cart eleven years ago, partially disassembled and arguing with the merchant about her own resale value. She speaks at volume, needs winding every three days, and will argue with any instruction she considers beneath her. She transcribes Celeste's novels and keeps a ledger of objections in pencil, which she edits when no one is looking.

valden

He/him | Elf (eladrin) | Horizon walker ranger

Sage and Celeste's younger son. He likes rats and mice because nobody else wants them either.

Valden was born in 1244 DR to a king who thinks sensitivity is embarrassing and a mother who is usually in another room. His older brother Rapherial is everything a prince of Kimishi should be.

He is quiet, attentive, and sad. Alevar took one look at him and saw his own childhood staring back. He became the parent Valden needed. What comes later makes that complicated.