Christophe Leblanc

Christophe Leblanc was a diviner, popular novelist, grandson of Cosimo Leblanc, and one of the three young mages who prepared the fall of Vlad Varanov. He died at twenty-five, but two things he made outlived the kingdom that killed him: a book and a constitution.

His Adventures and Reflections of a Young Leblanc crossed the sea before Cerberus and Askenon had a formal alliance. Valin learned the human language from it, translated it into Askenar, and used it to compile his dictionary. A novel no dwarf wanted to buy helped create the interpreter who would later arrive with Portin, Merenin, and the means to kill Vlad.

Christophe plotted beside Lucius Stoneheart and Daviau Morin. They understood what Vlad had become but lacked a weapon that could stop him. For Lucius, orphaned by the vampire and raised in isolation, Christophe was the one person who saw the man behind the magic.

The dwarven mission gave their conspiracy its chance. Six attackers flew to Vlad's castle on two griffins. When the vampire unleashed his scream, Christophe stepped between Vlad and the others and died. Valin fired the Valerium shot that finished the fight.

Christophe also created the pactstone, an artifact built for powers with no reason to trust one another. Anyone who swears upon it willingly enters a magical contract. It enforces the separation of powers, transfers authority to new consuls, and gives those consuls command over the instruments of the State. The Council of Mages formed on the pactstone after Christophe's death. In practical terms, the young novelist wrote the constitution of Cerberus and never saw it govern.

He was a diviner before he was anything else, and three spells of the school are his: Future Victory, To the Past, and Between Two Truths. Gyllyn still casts them.

The last of the three is how he saw the death of Askenar. Between Two Truths reaches back one year per caster level and then stops, so he went in stages: two accounts that contradicted each other, then witnesses who had spoken nearer the event, then their accounts, and again, and again, for most of the years he had. He told no one what he found at the end of it, and he had a reason beyond modesty: he knew the man in the vision was not Archon. He did not know who it was. A vision that showed a god being murdered by someone nobody could name was worth nothing, and a vision that showed Archon doing it was worth an army, and he understood the difference. Forty-four years after his death, Gérard Alois carried the vision to Kaz'Nakaram and bought the dwarven alliance with it.

He also rode on the mercenary contract where Polymarch found Fleur de Bataille, before that man ever went to the Ark.