Ink and watercolour sketch of an empty leather armchair by a fireplace, an open book on its arm with a lifted page, a leaning candle flame and a faint curl of smoke above the empty seat.

Character

Aurelius

Time traveller and master spellcaster, mentor to the stranger: a theatrical, endlessly curious wizard who rewrote Meliora's history and paid for it.

  • Before the Invasion
  • The Goblin Invasion
  • Dark Times

Description

Aurelius introduces himself as a time traveller and master spellcaster. He is theatrical, wry and endlessly curious, given to lecturing on Rifts and ruins, apologising for the lecture and carrying on regardless. Beneath the jokes lie a genuine fondness for his apprentice and a deep dread of the grim future he once escaped. When something truly astonishes him, he swears by Chaos.

"I'm Aurelius, time traveler and master spellcaster." — Aurelius

Historical context

Aurelius lived in a Meliora conquered by orcs until, decades later, he mastered time travel and stopped the invasion in its early days, creating the present reality. A careless collision with the stranger in the stream of time left him a bodiless spirit for more than a century. Through the goblin invasion he guided the stranger from the Sanctum, and when the other Aurelius fell above Shrike's Lookout he claimed his double's body and left on a long-promised vacation.

A generation later he was back in Meliora, shaken by what he had witnessed on his travels, nothing short of the end of the universe as he put it, and once more at the stranger's side, this time against Abigail.