Perennus Albion

Perennus Albion is a businessman, restaurateur, stone elementalist, and Academy professor of languages, history, metamagic, and morality. Earth elementals recognize him as one of their lords, and that is where his immortality comes from: stone does not age, and neither does he any more. He was born outside the great families and has spent his life trying to create one. Two meters tall and graceful in a distinctly feline way, he fills his restaurants and homes with portraits and statues of himself in marble, bronze, and now gold. His daughter Sophie, born to the late Geneviève Leblanc, was raised by her grandmother; she entered the Academy and left after her first year. Perennus sends gifts but is rarely present.

Before joining the Academy, Perennus was an obscure wizard obsessed with foreign languages. On Brazzant, Commode Telus offered him forbidden magic in exchange for spying on Cerberus. Perennus kept interrupting the proposal to record unfamiliar expressions, then explained that he had come only to research barbarian idioms. Commode ordered his death. Perennus petrified him, slaughtered the warriors who attacked, and left with the village's surviving children. One of them would become Frolix's father.

A later linguistic journey took Perennus to the Kal'dach mine in Askenon. An Aboleth controlled his hosts for six months before drugging him and hanging him naked by the ankles in Valerium shackles. Perennus resisted its mind, reached the creature, and told it to turn to stone. He brought it to Cerberus, where Marcin Sobiesansky implanted its cerebriles into the children from Brazzant. Most subjects died. Six became the first Cerberan Psychics.

Sobiesansky's recommendation later secured Perennus a place at the Academy, though the other professors did not know what kind of magic he practiced. His first students learned when he claimed them without allowing a choice. Gyllyn, Frolix, Glandir, Vidock, Jean and Jeanne Morin, Igor and Ivana Varanov, and finally Aldor all entered his class. Ivana objected; Perennus restrained the vampire with stone tentacles until she accepted.

He taught languages and history before magic because alliances, discounts, and foreign opportunities mattered more to him than an examination. Technical lessons went to assistants, visiting specialists, or anyone available. Perennus preferred fieldwork: audit Alfred Varanov's taxes, investigate cultists, recruit dwarven engineers, or build the professor's new manor. He allowed Aldor to eat during class because the alternative was watching him sleep.

His more personal methods carried greater risks. He introduced Aldor to the elemental cavern and threw Frolix from the mages' tower to awaken his latent power. He later ordered Frolix across the safety line around the captive Aboleth. The creature seized the student's mind and made him destroy his own eyes. Perennus treated the result as progress. His mostly common-born class nevertheless defeated the Academy's noble elite in the first-year examination.

The class finally broke with him over his plan to pour intelligence tea into the giants' fountain. Asked what smarter enemies would do to Cerberus, Perennus replied that he did not know—which was why he wanted to try. Aldor burned the tea. Perennus disowned him and entered him in a deadly third-year tournament; the others entered beside him. Perennus took Gyllyn aside meaning to get even with the rest of them: he saw real potential and no confidence, and sent him to wait tables unpaid in his restaurant for months to build the second. It worked, in the sense that Gyllyn came back more charming and no more powerful, on the eve of a tournament that could kill him. Gyllyn found Armure in one of the professor's locked chests.

Perennus later sold the white dragon Brisé to the Varanovs for more than two million gold, then reminded his students not to think about money. He spent much of it on an immense tower. When the war for the Ark began, he remained in Cerberus because no one could persuade him to pause construction. He still reached Askenon in time to sell thousands of copies of Certification in Cerberan Magic: The Complete Guide, by Perennus Albion to the dwarven army.

Dwarven officers now use that certification to correct actual Cerberan mages and will not be moved on the matter. They also bought Perennus's account of his amorous conquests and adventures. Their favorite chapter has him travel to Brazzant, capture a dragon, and commandeer a dwarven ship because no ordinary vessel could carry it. His former students have tried to explain what happened. The dwarves believe Perennus.

He did fight when Cauchemar attacked Cerberus. Perennus drove Ferothar away while the capital burned and received Gérard Alois's vacant seat on the Council of Mages instead of the promised contest. He has since stopped teaching to finish his tower and attend to the Council. In the Free Era, his former student Aldor is king, his old class is credited with killing Archon, and the two men maintain a permanent tax dispute. Perennus remains immensely proud of what he considers his achievement.