Ink and watercolour plate of a gaunt bald sorcerer with a ravaged face and red-scarred skin, in a tattered dark red robe-coat, one hand raised commandingly.

Character

The Other Aurelius

Aurelius's doppelgänger from the future: the sorcerer behind the goblin invasion, bent on revenge against the realm that rejected his invention.

  • The Goblin Invasion

Description

The other Aurelius is a version of Aurelius himself, a sorcerer with his face, though so ravaged that Aurelius likened it to his own desiccated corpse. Dramatic, scornful and consumed by his grudge, he commands the dragon Asper through a binding spell and treats the stranger as a meddling peasant.

"My revenge upon Meliora will not be stopped!" — the other Aurelius

Historical context

He claimed to come from the future, as the stranger did, and said its people had ruined his good name out of fear of his invention, the time-travel platform; Aurelius came to believe it was the High Council that rejected it. In revenge he set out to destroy Meliora. He worked a ritual beneath the Pinewood ruins, kept a laboratory in the cursed castle beyond, and opened the portal in the Healand Mines through which the goblin horde was summoned.

Defeated with Asper above Shrike's Lookout, he lost his body to Aurelius, and his soul was sealed in an artifact for the Sanctum. Aurelius saw poetic justice in it: by averting the orc conquest, he suspected, he had created the very monster who caused it.