Overview
Amlooi Alvaldi was the brother of Nordvik Alvaldi. He spent the bulk of his life as an itinerant knight, having been disowned by his bloodline in his earliest years and serving instead under a succession of chosen lords. He is best remembered as the master who trained Vetis Veltol in the sword, as a longstanding figure in the inner circle of Huge Larry’s kingdom in its final years, and as the author of Amlooi’s Diary, the document through which most of his interior life is known. He was killed by Seraphine du Roscarte in the closing stretch of the epoch.
Appearance
Amlooi was rarely seen out of armor. A close-fitting mask covered most of his face for the majority of his public life, with only his green eyes visible through it. He was guarded about his unmasked appearance, a self-consciousness he traces in his Diary to the rejection he suffered as a child at the hands of his own family. By the time he settled into the kingdom of Huge Larry he was visibly weathered, his bones beginning to give him trouble, though his strength with the heavy blade remained intact.
Background
Origins and Disownment
Amlooi was born into the Alvaldi line and rejected by it almost immediately. The Diary records that he was driven out of the family estate as soon as he could walk, having brought what those relations regarded as shame upon their name from his first breath. The Diary names the figure who pronounced him unfit only as a dark-eyed, white-haired, crown-wielding patriarch, who called him “Loki, the god of mischief” and dismissed him as weak. Amlooi never reconciled with that side of his blood, and considered his ties to it severed in everything but biology.
Service to His First Emperor
The man Amlooi credits for the only proper life he ever had was the lord he refers to in the Diary as his “first emperor,” a figure he describes as a true descendant of the Forge Gods Volkar and Kaelix. Amlooi served this lord as guard, messenger, and aide, lived within his sacred castle, and witnessed what he calls miracles performed there. It was this lord who forged the original core of the heavy blade Amlooi would later complete as “Druskar”.
The lord eventually departed to, as he understood it, return to the higher deities. Amlooi spent months searching for him after, training relentlessly, and never found him. Few official records of this emperor exist, and many believe he passed in secret.
Wandering and the Winemaker
In the years that followed, Amlooi drifted through Caldora. He became a regular customer of a noted winemaker, Isaac Acentino, who took to him and considered him both top buyer and personal confidant. Amlooi later recorded that the wine was the most genuine comfort available to him during those years. His brother, in this same span, inherited a nation and shaped from it a duchy, an act Amlooi notes in the Diary as the best decision that brother ever made.
Training Vetis Veltol
In what the Diary marks as his middle age, Amlooi took on an apprentice for the first and only time, a young aspiring knight he refers to by the pseudonym Amethyst and who is identified outside the Diary as Vetis Veltol. Vetis had sought him out in New Terranova and pressed him repeatedly for instruction. Amlooi agreed.
The training ran for roughly seven years. Vetis lost every sparring match between them throughout that period, with the understanding that no permission to forge his own weapon would be granted until he won one. When he eventually did, Amlooi made good on the agreement and opened the whole of his accumulated wealth to the young knight for the work. The sword Vetis produced from that allowance was a pair of twin blades built on a private recipe Amlooi shared with only two others besides his student.
Amlooi names the conclusion of Vetis’s training as one of the few moments in his life he was unambiguously proud.
Completion of Druskar
The blade Amlooi’s first emperor had begun for him had remained unfinished for decades, lacking a single perfect core component. The piece that finally completed it came from Vetis himself, in the form of a pristine nether star offered as the stakes of an early sparring match. Vetis lost; Amlooi accepted the star; and with it the weapon was finished. Amlooi named the completed blade Druskar, the Hell-Forged Bane, and carried it for the remainder of his life.
Years in Huge Larry’s Kingdom
After Vetis’s training ended, Amlooi resumed his wandering. He eventually arrived in the monochromatic kingdom co-ruled by Huge Larry’s two emperors and was accepted there with a warmth he had not previously encountered. The emperors arranged a permanent residence for him, a mansion he was to share with another armor-clad citizen, and Amlooi was for the first time in his life given a home of his own.
He was inducted into Larrism, received the religious bread “22” and the blessed waters that came with it, and described his time in the kingdom as the most genuinely comfortable stretch of his life. He took care never to disclose his prior service to a descendant of the Forge, given the kingdom’s official hostility to those who honored the Forge Gods.
The Night of the Veil and After
The events of The Night of the Veil killed one of the kingdom’s two emperors alongside the winemaker Isaac Acentino and several of Amlooi’s other close friends. Amlooi himself was not in attendance and survived the immediate strike.
In the weeks that followed he watched the surviving emperor’s brother, a man who had been part of the inner circle that had accepted him, lose himself to a worsening psychotic episode. The Diary records the brother whispering of “the quartz lady” and her powerful ideas, and unraveling further each time Amlooi returned from short trips away. Eventually the brother acted: a series of explosions destroyed the mansion Amlooi had helped build, the wine cellar of his late friend, and the chapel in which he had received his blessed bread. The surviving emperor was killed in the same event.
Amlooi searched the ruins for survivors and found none of the friends he had kept there. He left soon after, with no destination, and resumed the wandering that had defined the bulk of his life.
Death
Amlooi was killed by Seraphine du Roscarte in the late epoch, some time after the events recorded in his Diary. The Diary itself eventually reached his brother Nordvik Alvaldi, who preserved it.
His estate, by arrangement, transferred to Vetis Veltol on his death.
Sources
- Amlooi’s Diary (his own retrospective account, the primary source for his interior life and most of his service history)
- Nordvik Alvaldi (his brother and the eventual custodian of the Diary)
- Vetis Veltol (his sole student)