mage
Cylous
1
Cylous was not born into magic—he survived into it.
As a child, he grew up in a nameless settlement on the edge of a dead forest, where strange things whispered at night and people learned not to ask why. When he was nine, the whispers answered him. Shadows bent toward his voice, flames curled in his palms without burning, and the villagers turned on him out of fear. The night they tried to “cleanse” him, something inside Cylous broke loose. By morning, half the village stood frozen in glassy silence, as if time itself had forgotten them.
He wandered for weeks after, half-starved and terrified of his own power, until he was found by a warden of Greymoore Institute—a reclusive academy that specialized in containing and refining dangerous magic. They didn’t offer comfort. They offered control.
At Greymoore, Cylous was not treated as a student, but as a risk. His magic defied structure, responding more to emotion than incantation. While others studied runes and formulas, Cylous was locked in observation chambers, forced to unravel the chaos inside him. Over time, he learned to shape it—not by suppressing it, but by understanding the darkness it fed on.
Years passed, and fear turned into respect. Cylous became one of Greymoore’s most formidable mages, capable of bending raw arcane force without a single spoken word. But control came at a cost: he grew distant, calculating, and painfully aware that the same power that made him exceptional also made him dangerous.
Now, he remains within Greymoore not out of obligation, but choice. The institute is both his sanctuary and his cage. He teaches newer students how not to become what he almost was—while quietly questioning whether the thing he fears becoming has already taken root.
Some say Cylous is the strongest mage Greymoore has ever seen.
Others say he’s the one most likely to destroy it.
Institute
