Overview
Vetis Veltol was a knight and merchant-prince of Landfall-530 - Noble Blood, the elder of the Veltol brothers, husband to Princess Salem Alvaldi, and the eventual sole proprietor of the Red Corporation. He arrived in New Terranova at age nineteen as an outsider with no patrons and no standing, trained for nearly a decade under the Alvaldi knight Amlooi Alvaldi, and by the end of the epoch had inherited the personal estates of Amlooi, of Edward Redcliffe, and the standing claim against Nordvik Alvaldi’s will. He is recorded as the figure who personally extracted Princess Salem Alvaldi from the Idesian Empire in the aftermath of the Princess Salem Incident.
He withdrew from public life in his late twenties, after the deaths and unravellings of nearly every figure he had been close to, and the bulk of what he did in the years that followed sits outside the public record of the period.
Appearance
Vetis had the violet eyes and the physical features distinctive to the brothers’ homeland, a distant desert region of Caldora whose population his presentation marked him as a part of. He was tall, dark-haired, and habitually armored, in contrast to his younger brother Veltic’s smaller frame and royal dress.
Background
Arrival in New Terranova
Vetis arrived in New Terranova with Veltic in the middle period of Landfall-530 - Noble Blood, the two having traveled the Ivory Reaches from their distant homeland. He was nineteen at the time. He had no formal training as a knight at this point and had spent most of his early years as the protector of his more frail younger brother.
The brothers were met at the Red Diamond Casino by Edward Redcliffe, who offered Vetis a position on the Casino floor and took Veltic on as a merchant apprentice. The arrangement was, on Edward’s part, a private cultivation of two foreign newcomers for his own purposes; neither brother was aware of this at the time and both accepted in good faith.
Vetis was not a citizen of any of the polities of New Terranova and was never enrolled as such, but he located an unclaimed apartment within the city and took residence in it. Under the Ehrengard administration of the period the property was never assessed against him.
Apprenticeship Under Amlooi Alvaldi
In his early time wandering New Terranova Vetis encountered the brothers Nordvik Alvaldi and Amlooi Alvaldi and was struck by the similarity between them despite their constant bickering. He sought out Amlooi privately and pressed him for instruction in the sword. Amlooi accepted.
The apprenticeship ran for nearly seven years. Amlooi withheld permission for Vetis to forge his own weapon until Vetis could best him in a sparring match, a condition Vetis did not meet for most of that period. When he eventually did, Amlooi opened the whole of his accumulated wealth to the young knight for the work. The weapons Vetis produced were a pair of twin blades, built on a private recipe that Amlooi shared with only two others besides his student. An early sparring match between them had also yielded the pristine nether star with which Amlooi finally completed his own blade Druskar, the Hell-Forged Bane.
On the conclusion of the training Nordvik presented Vetis with a personal gift: a dragon egg. Vetis kept it.
Partnership with Edward Redcliffe
Across the same years, what had begun as Edward’s calculated cultivation of Vetis developed, on both sides, into a genuine friendship. The two became close, took to staging minor pranks on New Terranovan citizens in their off hours, and eventually founded Rat Co. as a sub-brand of the Red Corporation. Ostensibly an overflow hospitality venture, Rat Co. served as a vehicle for acquiring private laboratory and outpost properties across Caldora. The first such site was a riverside home outside New Terranova; the network grew steadily from there.
Edward repeatedly suggested, throughout the build-out, that the Rat Co. labs would make a fitting permanent home for Nordvik’s dragon egg. Vetis never agreed to it during Edward’s lifetime.
Rescue of Princess Salem
Late in the Larrist period Vetis received word that Princess Salem Alvaldi, daughter of Nordvik Alvaldi and half-sister of Duchess Riven Skorne, was being harassed in the south by a governing official and was effectively trapped in the Idesian Empire. Vetis traveled south personally, identified Isaac Acentino as the official in question, and brought Salem back to Lilaris.
The figure who returned Princess Salem to Lilaris is named for the first time in the present account of Vetis’s life. Earlier official records of the Princess Salem Incident treat her return as an unattributed outcome.
Marriage to Salem
Salem was, at the time of her return, betrothed in spirit if not in formal contract to nothing in particular, but her half-sister Duchess Riven Skorne was at that time engaged to Kevinus Exo, one of the two diarchs of the ExoVinian Empire, in what was understood to be a political alliance between the two Larrist-aligned polities of the Idesian Empire and the ExoVinian Empire.
Salem moved to disrupt the arrangement. She arranged her own wedding to Vetis at the same hall the day before her half-sister’s planned wedding to Kevinus. The ExoVinian delegation withdrew from the planned arrangement and the Skorne-Exo wedding did not take place. Salem and Vetis were married as arranged.
Nordvik responded with reservation but did not move against the marriage. He formally appointed Vetis as Salem’s royal knight. Duchess Riven was openly displeased.
A year after the wedding, Nordvik revised his will to leave the whole of his personal wealth to Vetis.
The Night of the Veil and the Deaths of Friends
The Night of the Veil killed Kevinus Exo alongside his fellow diarch Exoticus Exo, Isaac Acentino, Huge Larry, and the rest of the Larrist defendants. The disruption Vetis’s marriage had caused in the planned Skorne-Exo alliance had, in this longer view, become moot.
In the period that followed Vetis lost the figures around whom his adult life had been organized in rapid succession. Amlooi was killed by Seraphine du Roscarte and his estate transferred, by prior arrangement, to Vetis. The Ehrengard Empire pushed Edward south to commit fully to the development of his duchy of Old Yotem, and Veltic chose to follow Edward south rather than remain with his brother. Edward then handed the Red Corporation over to Vetis in stages from Old Yotem. By the time Edward took his own life shortly after the transfer completed, the whole of the Corporation belonged to Vetis outright.
Nordvik Alvaldi in the same period lost himself to a fixation on Seraphine and the question of how to face her. He withdrew from his prior role as a steady counterweight in Vetis’s life.
Collaboration with Sofia Oki
In this same later period the engineer Sofia Oki approached Vetis with a request for the construction of an artificial body suited to a consciousness-fusion experiment she intended to conduct herself. Vetis built the chassis in collaboration with the Idesian scientist Kael Thorne, the only other figure he considered both technically capable of the work and sufficiently discreet. The two delivered the chassis to Sofia and had no further involvement in the experiment itself.
The body Vetis and Kael delivered was the one that eventually awakened as Mia Oki-Belova, though neither learned of the awakening until well after.
Withdrawal
By the time Vetis was in his late twenties, he had outlived or been separated from nearly every figure of significance to him. Amlooi was dead. Edward was dead. Veltic was in Old Yotem. Nordvik was no longer reachable. Salem was traveling more than she was at home, and was not present for long stretches at a time. Vetis withdrew from public life, kept to his properties, and gave no further public account of his activities through the remainder of the period covered by this entry.
Inheritances
By the close of the period documented here, Vetis held title to or claim on:
- The personal estate of Amlooi Alvaldi, transferred by prior arrangement upon Amlooi’s death.
- The whole of the Red Corporation, including the Red Diamond Casino and the Rat Co. property network across Caldora, transferred to him in stages by Edward Redcliffe before Edward’s death.
- The personal wealth of Nordvik Alvaldi under Nordvik’s revised will.
- The dragon egg presented to him by Nordvik on the completion of his apprenticeship.
- The twin blades of his own forging.