Virkais

Virkais has many titles.

Virkais the Ravenous, Eater of Lords, Master of the House of Mirrors, Shepherd of the Glacier, Magister of the Reflective Society, Virkais the Thousand-Fanged.

Long ago, before the eternal winter, when he was still mortal, Virkais was a mage and spellcaster of noble birth. Skilled, certainly. Remarkable as compared to the next mage, certainly not.

He craved notoriety, and power, and equated the two as the same. Power would bring notoriety; notoriety was power.

He bargained with every sorcerer, mage, and two-bit magician he met. That they were more or less powerful than him, he didn't care. He wanted every trick and spell and secret he could collect. Even a trickster knew more about some things than Virkais, for they could trick his senses.

And trick by trick, lesson by lesson, he improved. The more he understood, the easier it was to take in the next teaching.

He soon surpassed good, became known as a great mage. Still, he hungered for more. He existed only amongst other great mages, many his equal, some his superior. He needed to be the greatest.

This was how he became known as Virkais the Ravenous: His thirst for power and knowledge was insatiable.

In a distant land, he learned of a powerful sorcerer who was said to have bested death itself, and to have ceased aging entirely. oh, Virkais wanted that power. He needed that power. He was already middle-aged and he wasn't getting any younger, yet his acquisition of skills was only slowing down. He'd already scooped up the easier and more obvious things, and the harder to come by lessons were slow to reach now.

But to beat death, to halt his aging, to live forever...not only was this something he desperately wanted, it was not something that could wait. He needed immortality now.

Virkais dropped everything in pursuit of this goal.

He found the immortal sorcerer, who had nothing to teach him about magic. As a sorcerer, he was skilled, but not nearly Virkais' equal. His immortality came not from his skills in magic, but from vampirism.

Virkais had no interest in warnings, he cared not for the consequences. For immortality, any cost was worth paying. And as far as he was concerned, this would cost only others, not himself. So he must avoid the sun, it'll forever be overcast where he goes. And the blood? As if ending another's life was a cost he had to pay! As if it wasn't a cost he'd already forced others to pay!

The sorcerer could have told him it would have cost every one of his limbs, and he still would have done it, for surely with time he would have learned to regrow them.

And so, the vampire-sorcerer made another like himself.

With immortality under his belt, Virkais ascended to a whole new level of confidence. He was so assured of his strength, his beauty, and his resilience that he became ever more bold, charming, and reckless.

Soon, he was chasing down knowledge that did not wish to be known. Ancient secrets, well-guarded secrets, lost knowledge, things long thought myth.

More than once, he promised to pay some obscure noble for their sorcerous ways with the immortality he bore. More than once, he drank blood of a station higher than his and did not stop until life no longer ran through those veins. You don't get a reputation as a breaker of promises if no-one lives to spread it.

The promises he broke may have stayed under wraps, but his hand (or rather, fang) in these deaths did not. The Eater of Lords, a mysterious charming beast from a foreign land which sated its hungers on royalty and nobility, was a well-known legend that spread far beyond the Eater's influence. Few ever learned that it was Virkais, though he did delight in the stories and took great joy in feeding them increasingly incredulous details.

The more he learned, the harder it was to find anything new to learn. Having become one of the most powerful mages in the realm, a living legend, no longer could he follow the easy path of taking knowledge from others. Virkais now had prospective apprentices coming to him to learn his secrets!

He gave none, of course, save the merest morsel; and even then, nothing rare, nothing special, nothing they couldn't have learned from some other sorcerer.

He had sucked dry old tomes and old crones. Becoming greater than himself was Virkais' whole reason for being. Once, he sought power so he might control others. This was a skill he had long since mastered. What else could he want? Worship? He had it. Riches? He could conjure up an infinity of riches, and needed none of it. Companionship? He could bewitch anyone he wanted.

There was nothing else left to want but more. More power, more knowledge, more blood, more secrets. But where to find it? He had turned every stone, plundered every ruin.

The only mysteries left were the gods themselves. The very nature of magic, of the realm, and the realms beyond.

There was no-one to learn these from. No book was ever written on it that had anything but supposition and guesswork. He would have to figure it out for himself.

So, Virkais began to pick at magic. He entered every religion, prayed to every god. He gave sacrifice, he took vow, he made pilgrimage. All for naught. The priests' promises were emptier than his own.

At one such temple, after completing the proper ritual and giving his blood and an item of value (a trinket, really, all trinkets), he again found nothing but disappointment. At this, Virkais felt himself slip into a deep melancholy. A chasm yawned open before him, his soul laid bare before his mind's eye. Here he was, monster, mage, man. A killer, a breaker of oaths, with no regard for any but himself. He would raze a city to the ground if he thought it would give him the barest hint of the nature of magic. He wouldn't even have to lift a finger. He could talk the city into razing itself.

And he would feel nothing when it was done. Not pride, not guilt, not the weight of lives lost or history burning down around him. He'd barely register the heat of the flames.

The god he had prayed to saw these things, weighed the aching void within the vampire in the palm of one hand, the weight of the world in the other.

And with a crooked grin that lit up the night sky, the god found these things equal in weight, and tipped the scales by placing them both in the same basket.

Virkais found that he could run his fingers through reality like he was fisting the fur of a wolf. He dove deep and found skin. He gripped tight and sank his fangs into that skin, drinking greedily of the world.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, he was sated. Bloated with magic, the blood of the world, he drew back and rested.

And out of the pinpricks he had made in the edge of reality, fat drops of worldblood dripped.

And oh, what horrors Virkais unleashed with a single hungry bite. How hungry they were for this side of things, how readily they gobbled.

They ate mountains, and time, and life, and size. They drank oceans and belched stars.

Seeing this, Virkais at last experienced fear. Any one of these horrors could swallow him as nothing, a speck on a leaf on a tree they devoured in a single bite.

A speck though he was, the world was soon at his doorstep.

Famous Virkais, powerful Virkais, unkillable Virkais, insurmountable Virkais, wise Virkais, sorcerer above sorcerer, mage of mages, O mighty Virkais surely you know of these unknowable horrors? What knowledge can you impart upon us, what skills, what spells? Where did they come from? What curse laid them upon our lands? How do we best them and send them back from whence they came?

On those matters he had knowledge, he claimed not to; on the matters he knew nothing of, he claimed to be most educated.

These problems would not go away in time. The people were right. Surely if anyone could best these horrors, it was he.

Virkais had prayed for something new. He had his wish. It would cost him the rest of his life.

The great wounds he had punctured in the world had scabbed over. Nothing new dripped out, but he could not send back the horrors to their home. He dared not open a new wound lest he unleash something worse in attempting to put back what he already had.

They couldn't be killed, could barely be harmed, and ate magic at a ravenous pace so that any spell aimed their way only strengthened them.

They must be trapped, then.

For a magic-eater, the best trap is surely an environment without magic, but such a thing did not exist.

Except, perhaps, winter, a time when magic seemed to sink out of the atmosphere, chased away by snow. Its very movement seemed to slow, and all life suffered the abominable cold until it finally passed and magic was allowed into the world again.

But winter moved about the realm, and a trap that had to move with it would be no trap at all. Too many moving parts, to much opportunity for something to go awry.

Better to make the winter come to him.

His instinct was to lie, to trick, but the herald of winter Virkais summoned needed no deception. The truth of the matter was more than sufficient. Frostbite came when called, and stayed when bidden, and has remained ever since.

Luring the horrors into the trap was a difficult and costly measure. Whole armies were lost, entire countries swallowed up and forgotten. There was no cost too great.

The horrors, one by one, were led into the land of eternal winter, and slowed, and starved, and froze, until at last they were all entombed in one massive glacier.

What Virkais had unleashed in a few seconds, it took him decades to clean up. In a fraction of that time, a house sprang up in the winter grounds. He became Master of the House of Mirrors, not by him trying or anyone inviting but simply because it was obvious.

The glacier moved, as glaciers do. Virkais moved it back, and fenced it in as best he could with magics and mountains. Still, it moves, and still he threatens it back into place. It is an eternal task, to be Shepherd of the Glacier.

Mages flocked to him, wrapping the slow-growing, slow-moving glacier in layers of magical traps, not to keep the horrors in, but to keep anything else out. Each one of them hungered for the secrets the horrors held; each one of them was each other's minder, ensuring no-one broke in because they were all too busy making it so that no-one else could.

The house became a manor. Filled with the highest of nobles and the greatest of mages, it soon developed into a society devoted entirely to keeping the ice in place, maintaining the status quo forevermore. As the single most powerful being anyone knew, the bearer of so much already, it only stood to reason that Virkais become the Magister of the Reflective Society.

These days, Virkais is much-changed from what he was when the society was founded around him. But perhaps, how he got from there to here, is a story for another time.