Kiber Asulak Litavis
Appearance
Beautiful. Pouty. Smouldering.
The most gorgeous curls in all the realm.
A fashion icon. Dressed in elegant gilded fashion. Scarves are in. Smells like a dream.
Personality
If written by himself, this would read, "A charming and mysterious young man. Fashionable and streetwise. Aesthetically pleasing and charismatic. What people wouldn’t give to be Kiber Asulak Litavis."
As it is not written by him, it instead reads as a pompous, abrasive scoundrel more concerned with pleasure than anything actually meaningful. That pursuit of pleasure is a reckless one with little thought of the circumstances for others. He is rude and entitled, and he believes himself above his peers, strangers, and authorities, but in that terribly pitying way where he treats others as if they don’t know any better.
At the heart of it, however, is a deeply insecure young man who longs for nothing more than to prove everybody wrong in their assumptions about him, assumptions that he has placed there himself. Kiber fears his own unremarkableness and irrelevancy, finding the thought of being less than something that keeps him awake at night.
What if he was to be exposed for the fraud of a mage that he is?
That is why he is so pompous, abrasive, and rude. Expecting to be rejected for his own perceived failings, he moves to reject first and is cool and callous in the face of any emotional investment.
Although, since it’s at the heart of the matter, it’s never seen, and thus, he has designated himself a complete and utter tosser.
Who definitely cheats at cards.
Skills and Abilities
While mediocre or poor in most aspects of magic, Kiber’s core strength comes from enchantment, item enchantment specifically. Since it was the only thing he was naturally good at as a child and before attending Pomelts, he wasn’t entirely dissuaded from practising that magical talent.
Aided by the one professor not entirely willing to give up on him to foster this talent and realising that he can use this school of magic to make money, it is his bread and butter. Otherwise, he is an altogether haphazard mage with little patience for any other school of magic. He should be kept away from forbidden knowledge and powerful artefacts for the good of the universe.
A side effect of his talent for item enchantment is that he is also a decent craftsman, from woodwork to sewing, pottery and even light metalwork. He can actually make things when he can be bothered.
Great in bed.
Fantastic liar.
The Story So Far...
Growing up in an idyllic, isolated cottage in Lyedath Grove surrounded by the apparent serenity of nature may be the nightly dream of mushroom-scoffing, unkempt men with beards or daydreaming hopeless cat women. Still, it was no good for a growing boy who required socialisation with his peers to have any hope of becoming socially well-adjusted.
That boy was Kiber Asulak Litavis.
His parents' company, although warm and full of arcane wonder, was a bubble. It is difficult to summon pity at the thought of a boy, well-loved and surrounded by what could only be described as a scene slapped onto the front of a postcard and sent by your aunt, who trusts crystals to make adult decisions for her. However, life can be full of love, great climbing trees, cherubic chirping birds and mesmerising toadstools and still be lonely.
Worse still, he was unaware that he was alone, only coming to the fore when his parents decided that there was no time to teach him the ways of magic meaningfully and that if progress was to be made, it had to be in an academic setting.
Pomelts, Academy of the Arcane.
A thoroughly dreadful place full to the brim with competition, arrogance and nepotism. It was not the ideal setting to throw a twelve-year-old boy who had never spent a day away from his parents and with all the social skills of an excitable golden retriever.
It went poorly.
To say that Kiber was a friendless soul and target of merciless bullying at Pomelts would have been entirely accurate.
The dormitory existence was hellish, full of sharp tongues, snide laughter and escalating pranks, all at his expense. Naturally, his first recourse was to quit, sending a barrage of letters home to beg his parents to pull him out of the Academy. They were firm in their refusal, championing perseverance and academic success above all. His mother, a well-respected alumni of the school, was more insistent than his father, a soft-hearted Elbion type.
So, there was no choice but to stay and find his own way to adapt.
In the passing years, he had hardened his heart. When they came with sharp tongues, his was sharper. Their mocking laughter was derided with withering stares that settled on their imperfections: an unsightly pimple, a prominent nose, a weak jaw. When it came to their japes, he hit back harder and more creatively, culminating in the now infamous enchanted toilet incident that had almost resulted in his expulsion.
At the very least, it had resulted in a truce and, for one girl, a permanent fear of the lavatory.
However, the truce didn’t result in a sudden smooth sailing into academic greatness as he soon realised that he was not, in fact, the unique child of limitless potential that his parents had led him to believe. This was no longer a peerless coddling bubble but a competitive environment full of those driven to succeed. It was one thing to be distracted by tormentors but another thing entirely to find out that you were average.
In truth, it hurt.
For some, it could have been a moment of revelation to take that hurt and use it as motivation to work harder. After all, for those not born gifted, it was the labour of learning and practice that built skills and nurtured talents.
But he couldn’t get over the fact that he wasn’t innately gifted and that the power of the arcane would not fall into his lap simply because he existed, so his academic results slipped further. His only passing grade came in studying item enchantment at the behest of one particularly insistent professor.
No amount of encouragement or mentoring could halt the rate at which he declined as a student of Pomelts. When faced with vocal defiance and refusal to partake in studies, the school had little choice but to escalate disciplinary measures: detentions, cleaning duty, corporal punishment, and suspensions. Naturally, none of it worked, only to foster greater defiance and place him in the company of other students of ill repute.
Not that he particularly enjoyed their company, finding his relegation to the dregs of the student body to be a further slight upon him, but there was some joy to be had in the relentless mockery of the high achievers.
However, when the Rector brandished the ultimatum of expulsion, Kiber jumped instead of being pushed, refusing to give them satisfaction.
A final act of defiance, he didn’t need an academy to determine his ability and self-worth and so chose to delude himself into believing that the school had only shackled him and never truly acknowledging that his failure had been his own doing. However, there was an inch of self-awareness and shame as he neglected to inform his parents of his expulsion.
The sudden freedom this offered him was perhaps too much. He made his way to the closest city, Allira, to carve out his own path and show the world what he was worth. Immediately, he was drawn to the area restricted by the academy.
He took to drink like a lush, dice like a gambler and to other people’s beds like a cut-price courtesan.
It wasn’t a sustainable lifestyle, nor was it one that went about proving anybody wrong, in fact, rather the opposite, but most of all it grew dull rather swiftly. The common man might have been content to waste away on vices whose pedestrian nature had become apparent, but Kiber did not consider himself the common man. However, to get anywhere, he first had to get somewhere, which required coin.
Pomelts hadn’t been entirely useless, and with his skills in enchantment, he created trick dice, not rigged by mechanics but by magic. A more intelligent person might have used this sparingly and not with the reckless abandon that Kiber did, making swift enemies out of local low-rent criminal enterprises.
Low rent or not, he still had no desire to see if they would make good on their promise to have him shitting dice for the next decade, so he lied, spun a good yarn about getting the dice from another crew a few streets down under the condition that he would only rinse the punters in this neighbourhood.
Which worked in the short term.
Until the two groups opened up a dialogue and quickly deduced that it was nonsense peddled by the now illusive ‘dice boy’.
The failed enterprise inspired him to create and peddle a wide variety of enchanted wares (albeit in a different part of the city). As it turned out, most people who visited him just wanted to cheat at gambling, so he pumped out mostly ‘lucky’ dice, coins, and cards for a decent price…
…and thus ruined the gambling economy in another part of the city.
Once more on the move and listless, he happened across a travelling cart belonging to a wizened old turnip of a lady that seemed to be selling… well, a lot of eclectic old tat, or so he thought. As she had introduced herself, Granny Morag claimed to have exactly what he needed. It was a pretty mediocre sales pitch as it stood, but all she wanted in return were his gloves.
Sentimental, ill-fitting gloves that he had crafted before going to Pomelts. He called them the everwarm gloves. His first genuinely successful enchantment. While they were too small for grown hands and worn from use, there was something inherently tragic about trading them away.
A feeling soon forgotten upon receiving ‘exactly what he needed’.
It was a silver hourglass engraved with deep grooves that, upon first inspection, seemed mundane and, to put his thoughts to words, a total fucking scam. The first use proved otherwise. She turned it for him, the veins carved into the silver filling up with an iridescent purple shimmer, illuminating the grains inside like stars. It piqued his interest aesthetically, but everything changed when she told him to turn it.
The universe stretched out before him, its v a s t n e s s stupifying, wonderous, and terrifying. He was plunged into a paradoxical sensation of being the supermassive centre of all things, and yet something so small, so insignificant that to exist was to be consumed. He was a man in one place at one time, and yet he was everything in every possible place and at every possible time. There were colours he had never known, alongside impossible shapes and sounds that men would chase until the end of the earth.
It was pleasurable in how incomprehensible it all was.
An hour later, he woke up in an alleyway clutching the hourglass, the travelling cart and Granny Morag, nowhere to be found.
After finding his senses and pouring over the hourglass in a tavern alongside a strong drink, Kiber eventually fathomed that he had experienced the very essence of time for no purpose other than pleasure. He had gotten high on time magic. It posed two questions: the first was how, and that question he felt like he could answer given time and study.
The second question was, could you do it with other forms of magic?