Elijah

A young mage in the facility Magnus Velmont ran in Amulta, and the only one of the test subjects there to survive. What is known of him, Gwenivere Velmont told: she was a child in the same building, and she told the whole of it once, twenty years later, in a refugee cave in Idir.

They were children together and they were each other’s only friends, because the subjects spent so much of their lives inside the facility where they trained that there was nobody else to be friends with. He was brilliant. She said she had never met anybody smarter since and used the word genius without softening it. He was there on a separate line of the research from hers.

Her father found a cure and froze the disease itself. What that did to the boy was make him enormously powerful, and she watched it happen: his magic became immense while she was still there, and the cost showed on him as frostbite creeping along his arm. What had to be done to get him to that state she called torture, and she saw it done. His body kept the power and was quietly being eaten out from under it, and he was never going to reach old age.

The Fire

The laboratory beneath the Velmont estate burned. Who set it was never discovered. Magnus Velmont died inside it; Elijah and Gwen got out and were separated in the confusion, and she has not seen him since and does not know whether anyone else lived. She fled Amulta for Idir soon after.

The method burned with the building. When Koa heard the story and reasoned aloud that if the wasting had been stopped once then it could be stopped again, and that this should at least be grounds for hope, she cut him off before he could finish: the method is lost.