Interlude: Sebastian Aurofili
Recollections of Brelish soldiers from the Last War
If you asked most of his squad mates, there was probably something a little wrong with Seb’s brain. Sure, he was a nice enough guy, and he fought like a demon on the battlefield — but when you spend your small amount of leave digging through the rubble of the repositories your squad just blew up and intensely studying anything magical you can find, rather than drinking and whoring in the nearest town, people start to talk, you know?
And yeah, he was a little intense, and had maybe a little too much knowledge about historical cults and their rituals, but they liked the little guy. If you did manage to get him drunk and talking, and ask him what he wanted to do with his life, he would always say he wanted to be a wizard. A little pie-in-the-sky, a bit like saying you want to be a five-star general, but the way he talked about it was… romantic. He would get this look in his eye, something between hunger and awe, when he would discuss the spells he wanted to be able to cast: grand works of wonder and change.
It wasn’t completely impossible, and he had spent basically his entire life hunting down spells to add to his rinky-dink grimoire, but all he had to show for it so far were two cantrips, a collection of esoteric knowledge, and six spells barely worth the name. Still, he dreamed big.
The whole squad called him Sparky, and it wasn’t because of his skill at maintaining and using artificer-tech, which he did have. One day, when he was a rookie, the squad’s combat sorcerer had asked, half joking, if anyone wanted to help him test a new lightning spell he’d figured out how to cast. The gnome had jumped forward before anyone even had a chance to respond. Pretty soon the kid was arcing off static electricity for a week, and his hair still sometimes stood on end for no reason, years later.
I suppose we really should have seen it coming.
When he came back after a day of leave with a gleam in his eye and some instructions for a weird ritual scribbled down on a piece of notebook paper, and refused to say where he’d gotten them, no one really took it seriously. Then, when he went to the squad’s sorcerer and asked for help interpreting them, we all figured it was settled when the mage couldn’t make heads or tails or it.
When he vanished that night and came back the next morning with magical tattoos up both forearms and the ability to summon his weapons back to his hands… well, we all took him a little bit more seriously after that.
There was probably still something a little wrong with him, but he was a nice guy, and he fought even more like a demon on the battlefield. None of us gave him shit for digging through rubble anymore, though.
Next: Sebastian joins Nyden’s team for a mission into the underworld.
