Gérard Alois

Gérard Alois built Cerberus by thinking in decades. The Partage killed his family, so he rebelled against Archon, left the Ark, and led his people to the island that became Cerberus.

He then spent years at Vlad Varanov's court. The Valerium pendant he gave the vampire slowly poisoned him and drove his thirst for blood. When Valin finally shot Vlad through the head, Gérard looked at the corpse and said, another ten years and it would have worked. He reclaimed the pendant with a Time Stop no one in the room saw happen.

In exchange for the stone, Gérard promised the dwarves an era of trade and friendship. He then founded the Council of Mages on Christophe Leblanc's pactstone and became first consul, whose voice outweighs the other two. The State, the dwarven alliance, and the authority of the great families all grew from that settlement.

Gérard is one of the few immortals who know Regeneration, a secret he shares with Cosimo Leblanc. His family commands Time Stop and Time Sphere, which seals a mage away to study. Gérard calls it his Sphere of Solitude and says it is no longer useful to him.

He understood that Cerberus's great houses were crippling their own country by hoarding advanced spells. Marcin Sobiesansky broke that deadlock with the verchoix and Familiar, but Gérard answered the alchemist's Psychic Project with the Witcher Project: an orphan remade through alchemy to survive decoctions that would kill a human. Their rivalry became a cold war fought through living experiments.

Gérard also designed the war against the Ark. He moved when Archon sealed himself inside his meditation chamber, sending five agents who could function with little mana and whose faces carried no famous family name. His enchanted earrings hid both their appearance and magical aura. Their mission was to turn the censors against one another before Cerberus landed an army.

When Merenin refused that army, Gérard brought him Christophe Leblanc's vision of Askenar's murder. He apologized for a crime committed by neither himself nor Cerberus and secured one hundred thousand dwarves.

He knew. He had met Archon, and the man in the vision was not Archon. He did not know who it was — nobody did — and he let a dwarven king believe the only answer that would raise an army. Sobiesansky had gone first and been refused, in good faith; born on Cerberus, he had no way of knowing what Gérard knew.

The hammer in the chest was the same operation. Christophe's saved divinations were the only record of where Askenar had gone into the ocean, and Gérard and Sobiesansky went and got it themselves. A dead man's archive bought the alliance twice over: once with a lie about who swung, once with the relic that made Merenin a king worth following.

During the invasion, Gérard crossed the Underdark just ahead of four former Academy students. He left them a Time Sphere, an explanatory letter, and grimoires from himself, Cosimo Leblanc, Daviau Morin, and Lucius Stoneheart. Their twenty days inside produced Aldor's Battlefield, Frolix's Coherent Story, and Charlie Stoneheart's mastery of Shroud. It was the act of magical sharing Gérard had spent centuries asking Cerberus's great houses to attempt.

Gérard fought on the Telus front beside the Varanovs, Cosimo Leblanc, and Brisé. They brought down Markus Telus and it cost Gérard and Alfred Varanov their lives. Word travelled slowly enough that his council seat simply stood empty for a while, until Perennus Albion took it after driving Ferothar from the burning capital.