Dragonlord Mancer

The boy grew up nameless on the streets of Beluroc. No parents. No home. No one who cared. He survived by stealing, hiding, and running from trouble.

He was picking pockets near the waterfront when something caught his wrist. Gray skin stretched over bone. Clawed fingers. Red eyes glowing beneath a purple hood. The thing studied him for a long time. When it spoke, its voice was a hoarse rattle. "Come with me, would you?"

But its grip said it wasn't really asking. The boy's heart hammered, but he didn't scream. Screaming had never helped.

The creature took him south on a horse-drawn cart that stank of dead things. They crossed the mountains on paths rarely traveled, through land where the Dark Eternals ruled and the living weren't welcome. The boy didn't ask where they were going. He sat in the back of the cart with his knees drawn up and watched the last living trees disappear behind them.

The tower rose from the Southern Wastes like a black tooth. Inside, the creature handed him a broom.

"Sweep the floors. Touch nothing but the broom."

The boy swept. The next day, he swept again. On the third day, his master began to teach him.

The boy learned fast. First letters, numbers, and history. Then magic. His master was patient in his way, though his methods were cruel and his purposes dark. He never explained why he'd taken the boy in. The boy never asked. He was fed, sheltered, and taught things no street orphan should know. But he had a bed and meals that didn't require stealing, and that was enough.

His master gave him a name: Erik Mancer.

Erik studied under him for years. He learned to channel dark magic, to speak with spirits, to pull power from places most mages feared to touch. He was gifted. His master told him so, a rare compliment.

But he watched what his master did with magic. The dark and horrible things he consumed. The living bodies dragged through the tower gates by creatures of the lower planes. He consumed those too. Not their flesh, but their souls.

Erik left on a winter night with nothing but his clothes and what he'd been taught. Crypt Mancer watched him go from a tower window but didn't stop him.

He made his way back to Beluroc and booked passage on a Lyverian trade ship to Praetoria. A new continent, a new life, and no lich to serve.

He hired on with free companies across Praetoria, lending his sword where needed. He knew dark magic and used it when he had to, but every spell brought memories of the tower and his master's voice in his ear. The blade was cleaner. The blade was his.

He broke a siege at a mining outpost and held the gate until reinforcements arrived. He used his counterspells to end an outlaw conjurer. He escorted a merchant caravan through bandit country without losing a single wagon. Word spread of the mercenary who carried a sword and fought like a mage.

Then the Chaos Legion came.

Erik had no allegiance to any splinter, and he wasn't about to kneel to Silus of the Rift. He fought against the legions with whoever would have him. When the Gloridax Empire rallied its Dragonsguard, Erik joined as a mercenary auxiliary.

The Dragonsguard didn't respect him. A foreign mercenary with no ties to the empire, fighting alongside warriors who'd trained at the Imperial Academy since childhood? He was tolerated, nothing more.

That changed at the Battle of the Northern Highlands.

The Chaos Legionnaires broke through the Dragonsguard's flank. In the rout, a Gloridax contingent was driven into a narrow gorge. The rock walls kept the enemy from surrounding them, but the gorge was a trap. The legionnaires were trying to push through the southern mouth while sorcerers on the ridges above pinned the contingent under a storm of fire and dark magic. No one inside could move without getting cut down. The northern defile was still open, but another detachment of legionnaires was moving to seal it.

Erik saw it from the supply road above. The Dragonsguard were huddled beneath shields of both steel and magic. They had minutes at best before the legionnaires closed the northern defile and everyone inside was dead.

He leapt on a horse, rode down the slope, and reached the northern defile before the legionnaires did.

He held the gorge's mouth against them, taking an arrow through the shoulder and a blade across his chest. He snapped the shaft of the arrow and kept fighting.

When they fell back to regroup, he turned his counterspells on the sorcerers above. Their wards cracked, and the fire from the ridges faltered. The trapped Dragonsguard finally had room to move. They counterattacked through the defile alongside Erik. The enemy finally broke.

Erik collapsed where he stood, bleeding from a dozen wounds. Forty Dragonsguard walked out of that gorge. Without Erik, none of them would have.

He woke in the Dragonsguard's field hospital weeks later. A drakoshan officer was waiting for him. The suam emperor wanted to meet him.

Erik had never knelt to anyone, but he knelt before the suam emperor. The Gloridax had earned his respect, and he had earned theirs. The emperor named him Dragonlord, an honorary title reserved for warriors of extraordinary valor, and commissioned him as a dragutsu in the Dragonsguard with a contingent to command.

He made a home in Oasis. Learned the customs, the language, the history of these people who'd accepted him as one of their own. In time, he rose from dragutsu to dragyo.

Then the Conclave Arcana began its hunt for the secret of Praetoria.

Still decimated from the Chaos Empire's conquest and the rebellion that followed, the ashinach weren't ready, but the empire couldn't wait. Someone had to lead a vanguard into the Wild Northeast against Jicarilla the Rime and her storms and her floods and hold the line until the main deployment followed. The Grand Consul chose Dragonlord Erik Mancer.

He marched with Orrak Veyl, the ancient professor whose knowledge of draconic warfare kept the vanguard alive; Joraki Venshiro, the insubordinate dragudo who mocked everyone but never missed a shot; Kaori Matsune, whose discipline masked an ambition sharp enough to cut; and a vanguard of Dragonsguard who weren't enough to stop Jicarilla but might slow her down long enough for reinforcements to arrive.

A long time ago, a nameless boy walked through the gates of a black tower because he had nowhere else to go. Now, Dragonlord Mancer marched into the storm because he was exactly where he belonged.