Marcin Sobiesansky

Marcin Sobiesansky was Cerberus's greatest alchemist: an imposing man over two meters tall, usually announced by the smell of chemicals and a cape pitted with acid. He insisted on the title Grand Alchemist of Cerberus and corrected anyone who called him a mere mage. His work solved the country's deepest problem. The great families hoarded their strongest spells; Marcin found ways to manufacture power without them.

His first answer was the power worm. He selected prisoners and boys taken from Brazzant, forced full-grown worms down their throats, and watched all but two of the first group die when the creatures opened them from within. His assistants considered the trial worthwhile because raising the worms had been expensive. The next version entered small and grew inside its host. Presented to the Council as the verchoix, it revealed a latent supernatural affinity and was approved for every first-year mage.

Marcin kept its final property secret. A mature verchoix replaces the organs it consumes, resists divination and dispelling, and cannot be removed without killing its host. Words known only to Marcin can order the worm to devour the mage from within. His second approved invention, the Familiar, transformed an animal into a magical beast that consumed its mage's mana and returned a growing supernatural gift. Together, the two inventions ended the Academy's dependence on inherited family magic.

The Psychic Project went further. After Perennus Albion brought Jerax to Cerberus, Marcin implanted the Aboleth's living cerebriles into children taken from Brazzant. Six survived as Cerberan Psychics. He tried to accelerate their growth by forcing their minds against the captive creature; his strongest subject went mad, and Marcin abandoned the method only after confronting Jerax himself. Every Psychic still received a vial of poison near the brain that Marcin could open at will.

He regarded those Psychics as property. When Skarde massacred 128 residents of Eden, Marcin thanked the students who brought him back alive and questioned the morality of killing a good Psychic for the villagers. Control also shaped his politics. He secretly asked Aldor to destroy Perennus's intelligence tea, then denied the arrangement while standing beside the furious professor.

Marcin's power did not end at the laboratory. He used powders, poisons, mutagens, transformation, and Psychic servants rather than fight fairly. During the war for the Ark, he and Gérard Alois brought King Merenin a vision of Askenar's murder and the broken hammer seen within it. The evidence secured an army of one hundred thousand dwarves for Cerberus.

At the Crassus landing, Marcin infiltrated the dwarven force in another dwarf's shape, revealed himself after Flavius Marcus fell, and ordered the Cerberan mages to find Marcus Crassus. He already knew where the censor was. In the Underdark he offered Crassus a secret alliance that would finance his research and place both men above the empire replacing the Ark. His former students overheard him and refused his authority.

Marcin fought them with a transformed body, poison, telekinesis, and three living Psychic heads grafted into his torso: Sven, Skarde, and Baltix. When he began to lose, he restored Jerax from petrification and ordered her to kill them. Aldor destroyed the Aboleth. Marcin survived the Fireball as green vapor, then used his final command over the verchoix inside Aldor, Frolix, and Gyllyn. The grafted Psychics turned against him long enough for Gyllyn to stop his teleportation. Gyllyn beat him to death, killing all four minds in the shared body. Dwarven special forces later recovered pieces of his remains and research from the cavern.