Telvanius

Background

The Peren were engineered by the Mól Empire to serve it and held as slaves until they rose, and Telvanius began where his people began, an enslaved servant in an imperial house.

What he had was an aptitude for study, and an empire with no use for a slave’s ambitions found a use for that. He was raised to a standing few in the Empire could rival: a naturalist first, then a trusted adviser and historian, traveling the imperial lands and setting down what he found with a precision nobody has matched since. The libraries were opened to him without restriction. He went where he liked and researched what he liked, and the emperor allotted him an annual budget larger than those of the Empire’s three foremost generals combined.

The Thirty Volumes

The Mól Encyclopædia runs to thirty volumes and was written about a century before Peredhel was founded, which is to say well before the uprising it helped make possible. On its face it is the Empire’s account of its own life: social custom, education, economy, flora and fauna, trade. It is written in Peren, in a form of the language old enough that reading it at all is a piece of scholarship, and the layer beneath the words wants Taal besides.

It flatters. Taken straight it is an admiring survey of a great civilization by a man grateful to have been let near it. Taken once you know what he was, it inverts into mockery and stays there. Beneath entries on fauna and trade routes he set hidden codes, cryptic symbols and archaic references, running across letters and across whole pages, which assemble into the Empire’s strengths, its weaknesses and its secrets. Only a reader who can break the writing and follow the buried references gets any of it, and that was the point.

The set is alphabetical, which is what a layman wants of an encyclopedia. The filigree on the spines is not. Its color indexes a second subject entirely, and volumes sharing a subject are spaced along the shelf, sometimes two together and sometimes a dozen apart, so that the arrangement reads as accident. There are five subjects and six volumes to each: alchemy, the Emperor’s court, faith, foreign affairs, and the military. Aligned correctly the spines carry one continuous device across the whole run, the Empire’s own emblem of a pentagon set with a pentagonal star, overlain with the outline of a honeysuckle. It is worn now and still legible.

Across all thirty he never names an emperor, including the one whose treasury paid for the work.

Relationships

He was a covert ally of the Peren resistance, and by the accounts that came afterwards he was instrumental in the uprising itself rather than a sympathizer at its edge. The volumes were written and widely circulated before the revolt, which means the intelligence was already sitting on shelves across the Empire by the time Vëné raised it.

One witness to the man himself survives, and barely. The Elder, a Peren spirit who outlasted the Empire by seven centuries and remembers almost nothing of it, recognized the name at once, and felt frustration and love together on hearing it. Beyond that he could retrieve nothing, and said so.

Campaign Updates

His reputation has outlived him intact and unsuspected. Collectors know him as a celebrated naturalist and an excellent writer, and Torgun Kurvroc, told to his face that Telvanius had hidden things in his own books, answered that it did not sound like anything the man would do.

Kurvroc burned some of them himself soon after. Drunk and frightened, he began feeding his volumes to a fire to lure out a thing he believed was hunting him, and most of the collection was pulled back off him. Some was not, including a borrowed volume that was the last one needed to finish a subject. The ciphers in them had already been broken by then. What was lost was the books.

The rest are scattered and quietly held. Nathan Fox owns several and will not say which. Katalia keeps two in Haudh-Gwenn. Yullen Gemsmith owned one and traded it away years ago, and the library at Vigil holds a collection. Volumes still turn up in estate lots and private libraries at prices that suit a reference work rather than a weapon.