Aelion

Aelion is a young human sorcerer, only weeks into Aristonia when the party found him and still carrying himself like a man not yet sure the city is home. He came to the capital to work a quiet scribe's desk in the Civic Quarter, and he would probably have stayed quiet if a construct hadn't come through a wall near him. His magic is the first thing anyone notices and the last thing anyone expects from a spellcaster: where others in Arcadia describe their power as something that fights them, Aelion's answers easily, a calm blue light that never looks like it costs him anything. He is precise about the difference, too — Randy has called him a wizard more times than either of them can count, and every single time Aelion corrects him. Wizards learn magic; sorcerers are born with it. "Somebody once said, baby, I was born this way. It's a great motto."

In a fight he leans on that innate fire — a Sorcerous Burst that lands like two fireballs in quick succession, the odd ice knife or gout of burning flame — and he is still learning to aim it, having nearly caught his own friends in the blast more than once. But the party's first read on him was softer than the spells: in his very first outing he spent his last motion dragging Biz's unconscious body out of danger, muttering "For you, Randy, I will." A shared dose of moon petal in Randy's room later sealed the three of them as best friends, and it stuck. He also carries a subtler edge the others have leaned on hard — a knack for reaching into a mind and reading what sits at the top of it, which is how the party confirmed, straight from the captured Fixer's own thoughts, who had really commissioned the killing at the Ashveil estate.

What has come to define him, though, is the lens — the intact Second Epoch survey instrument the party pulled from the Fixer's satchel. Of everyone, it answered to Aelion. Once he had attuned it, its clouded crystal cleared and its rings began to turn, and it has treated him as its keeper ever since. The moment it cleared it drew him into a vision — a field of lavender under a blue moon, silver lines burned across it to mark six points, with Aelion standing at one of them and others he could feel glowing in directions he could not see. A presence whose voice seemed to come from the moon itself spoke two words into his mind, Not finished, and he came away certain the lens is a single piece of a set of six, and that someone is already gathering them. In the Vex Caves the whole party watched it work: it hummed loud enough for all of them to hear, pulled him steadily toward a sealed inner room, and when the throttle was finally lifted from its cradle the lens flared bright enough that everyone had to shield their eyes. The scholar Bevin named the thing precisely — the finest example he had ever seen — and told them it belongs to a matched set. Aelion has become quietly single-minded about that set, treating the lens as a compass for the pieces still out there and growing possessive enough of it that the others trade looks whenever he takes it out.

That single-mindedness is also why he keeps his distance from the one other person chasing the same relics: the ancient elf collector known only as V. When the party went to meet V in Saltmoor, Aelion alone hung back, keeping the lens and the throttle on his own person rather than carry them anywhere near the man — and V, unbothered, noted the empty chair at once, remarking that the party looked "about one short."