Ailuin, Archmage of Arcane Runes & Sigil Studies

Astral Elf / Wizard

Submitted character story

Ailuin remembers a city that no one else believes existed.

Agrim. A flying city of mages, suspended above a world that has since forgotten it entirely. He grew up there. Studied there. Founded an entire school of magic there. Graviturgy. The study of weight and pull and the invisible architecture that holds everything in place. He built that discipline from nothing and it became the foundation of how his city understood force itself.

Then he touched something he shouldn't have. An artifact in a ruin beneath the city. Light. Silence. And then five centuries of nothing.

He woke up unchanged in a world that had moved on without him. His city was gone. His colleagues were dust. His pseudodragon companion Sahqoviing, the one creature that chose to stay beside him not through spell or obligation but through want, had lived and died in the centuries Ailuin missed. He doesn't talk about that loss. You can see it if you know where to look.

What I love about playing him is the restraint. He doesn't rage or break or spiral. He just carries it. His whole personality sits in the space between composure and grief. His eyes are black with golden pupils and the gold dims when he's sad and sharpens when he's focused and I track that in my notes at the table because it matters to me. Our DM lets me describe how the orb between his hands reacts to his emotional state during scenes. When he's calm it hums. When he's afraid it pulls inward. When he's angry, which has happened exactly twice in three years of play, it cracks the air around it.

I should mention I have aphantasia. I can't picture things in my head. So every detail of Ailuin exists because I wrote it down, described it out, and built him word by word on paper instead of from some image in my mind. This portrait is the first time I've seen him the way I always hoped he looked. The orb. The layered robes. The quiet in his expression. All of it.

He brews tea between long rests. He keeps a grimoire at his hip that rearranges its own pages when he touches them. He wears one glove on his left hand for handling artifacts and a silver bracelet on his right wrist that marks him as a citizen of a city nobody remembers. Every detail has a reason. That's just how I build characters.
He once told an NPC: 'The past is a fixed star. No matter how long you stare at it, its light will never change. Only fade.' Our whole table went quiet. That's the sentence that made me realize Ailuin was more than a character sheet. He was someone I understood.