Alaric

Human / Artificer

Submitted character story

This is a character that I played him my friends home campaign, which was abandoned mid way due to all the player moving away. But we got together again for a one shot a final blast to end a 4 year long campaign

Alaric was born into service, but never into servitude. His father, Subhash, was a quiet and dignified man who served as butler to the wealthy merchant Artemis—a man of impossible knowledge, patient eyes, and a workshop filled with wonders. While Subhash attended to guests and duties, young Alaric wandered the halls and spent every stolen moment in Artemis’ workshop, surrounded by ticking clocks, brass limbs, unfinished automatons, and devices no mortal mind should have understood.
There, Alaric learned to build before he learned to fight. He made tiny mechanical birds, wind-up soldiers, and toys that danced when no one watched. Artemis encouraged him with cryptic smiles, never correcting him directly, only leaving tools where they were needed and blueprints where they might be found.
In time, Artemis gifted a grand house to a band of heroes destined to save the world, and Subhash went with it as their butler. Alaric followed his father into the household and watched these legends from afar—warriors, mages, champions of prophecy. He admired them. Trusted them.
They failed.
The gates were broken. Demons poured across the land like a flood of teeth and fire. Cities fell. Kingdoms burned. In the chaos, Subhash tried to flee with his son aboard a desperate ship bound for another continent. They never made it safely. Amid blood, smoke, and screaming waves, Subhash died protecting Alaric.
Alaric survived.
He arrived on foreign shores with refugees and ash in his lungs. There, a powerful artificer consortium took him in—not from kindness, but investment. They fed him, housed him, trained him, and chained him with debt. Every meal, every lesson, every tool was entered into ledgers he would spend years repaying.
By day, he became their craftsman.
By night, he became something else.
Among the few belongings he had saved was an old diary from Artemis’ workshop. Hidden within its pages were personal notes addressed to him. Instructions. Designs. Calculations decades beyond mortal science. Artemis revealed what he truly was without ever saying the words: a being who knew time as others know weather.
The diary contained plans for a machine powerful enough to cross the river of years.
Alaric forged that machine into armor.
A heavy breastplate of steel and arcane conductors. Reinforced gauntlets capable of channeling impossible force. And at the center of the chest, a hollow chamber sized for a single pocket watch—the missing key meant to awaken the engine within.
The final pages spoke of a timepiece Artemis had once gifted to one of the fallen heroes.
So Alaric went searching.
One by one, he found three of the six surviving heroes Artemis had named. Broken people. Bitter people. People who had lost everything. To each he offered the same promise:
"Come with me. Change the past. Save the world. Get back everything you lost."
They believed him.
What he never told them was the truth.
Changing the past would not heal their world—it would only create another one. A branch in time where others might live happily, while they themselves would return to the same demon-ravaged future they came from.
But Alaric never cared about saving *his* future.
He only wanted there to exist **somewhere** a world where his father lived. A world where a younger Alaric laughed in Artemis’ workshop, built toys instead of weapons, and grew up loved and unafraid.

Together they traveled backward through time, defeated the divine corruption that had unleashed the demons, and ensured history turned upon a better path.
Then they came home.
The heroes felt betrayed when they learned the truth. Their suffering remained. Their losses unchanged.
But Alaric only smiled—that gentle smile he always wore, the one that never reached his eyes.
Because somewhere beyond the branches of fate, in a world he would never touch, a boy named Alaric was waiting for his father to come home.