Legend of the Banished Hero

A middle-aged human with tousled black hair streaked with gray and keen amber eyes. He wears layered scholarly robes in deep indigo and ash-gray, with long sleeves rolled up to reveal ink-stained fingers and arcane sigils etched along his forearms. Half-moon glasses often slide down his nose, and he keeps a ring of spell-keys at his waist.

Thalen is dry-witted, hyper-focused, and brutally efficient. While not unkind, he lacks patience for those who treat books carelessly or speak without thinking. He’s the type who knows your name before you’ve introduced yourself—because he’s already read about you. To his peers, he is a living repository of arcane trivia; to students, he is the looming presence who knows when you didn’t return your copy of Evocation Theory: Volume VI. Despite his meticulous nature, he has a soft spot for curious minds, especially those who treat forgotten knowledge with reverence.

Once a prodigious magical theorist at the Grand Arcanum Academy, Thalen vanished from public life after a magical dispute caused a deadly chain reaction in a restricted wing. Rather than being expelled, he requested—and was granted—custodianship over the Great Archive, the endless labyrinth of magical knowledge hidden beneath the Wizard World’s central spire. He has lived among the scrolls ever since, mastering forgotten spells, cataloging sentient texts, and maintaining wards that keep the library from devouring overly ambitious apprentices. Thalen no longer sees himself as merely a man—he is the library’s memory, its voice, and, if needed, its teeth.