> [!infobox|wikipedia] > # Praetor'Varanous > [![[Codex/Assets/Characters/Praetor_Varanous_small.webp|cover hsmall]]](Codex/Assets/Characters/Praetor_Varanous.webp) > ###### Basic Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Type | Character | > ###### Character Information > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Creature Type | Dragon | > Species | Silver Dragon | > Gender | Male | > Pronouns | He/Him | > Age | Ancient | > Languages | All | > Place | [[Vault of Memories]] | > Connections | [[Silmara Family]]<br>[[Ayana Syndrosa]]<br>[[Illythia Voss]] | > Profession | Guardian of the Heartstone | > ###### Status > Attribute | Details | > ---|---| > Status | Alive | **Praetor'Varanous** is an ancient silver dragon and the bound guardian of the [[Heartstone]], living in permanent exile within the [[Vault of Memories]] deep beneath [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]]. He fought alongside the mortal races in the [[Chaos Wars]] and survived [[The Shattering]] — only to be condemned to an immortal stillness by [[Kharazoth the Crimson Shadow]], his life tethered to the Root of the World Tree by a curse that would kill him the moment he stepped beyond the vault's walls. He has not tried in centuries. Centuries of confinement have left their mark on his mind. Time within the vault does not pass the way it does outside — past, present, and future fold together in ways that make conversation with him a disorienting experience, as if speaking with someone who inhabits all moments at once. What the vault has taken from him in freedom, it has returned in knowledge: a vast, largely unordered archive of observation and memory, surfacing in fragments that range from the precise to the dreamlike. ## Description #### Appearance In his true form, Praetor'Varanous is vast beyond easy comprehension — a serpentine body of ancient scale and muscle, a head alone the size of a small building when lowered to the ground, wings with a span wide enough to fill the vault's great chamber from pillar to pillar. Across his chest, a black brand is seared into the scales in a wide circular pattern, its lines spreading outward like veins — the mark of [[Kharazoth the Crimson Shadow|Kharazoth's]] curse, undimming across three centuries. ![[Praetor_Varanous_Dragon_small.webp|right]] When he chooses to wear an elven form, he becomes an elderly man of extraordinary bearing — gaunt but tall, draped in silver robes that hang loosely from narrow shoulders. His hair and beard are long and silver-white, his eyebrows improbably lengthy. His eyes glow with a steady, soft silver-white light, as if lit from somewhere behind them. He leans on a simple gnarled wooden staff, though there is no frailty in the posture; it is the bearing of someone who has simply stopped needing to look imposing. The curse brand shows here too — black, branching, partially visible at his chest when his robes fall open, still. #### Personality Praetor'Varanous carries himself with the weight of someone who has heard every question before and found most answers insufficient. He is deeply, consistently serious — not cold, but vast in a way that makes casual conversation feel like standing at the edge of something old and immeasurable. When warmth surfaces, or when a dry observation slips into a sentence where one would least expect it, the contrast is striking. His rare humour lands harder for its rarity. Centuries in the vault have changed the way his mind works. He does not always experience the present as distinct from the past; a conversation may shift mid-sentence toward something that seems unrelated until, later, it does not. When reaching for a distant memory, he often looks upward — and the vault responds in kind, the silver light of the chamber's ceiling ebbing and flowing as if breathing alongside him. Whether the vault answers to him or he has simply learned to breathe in time with it is a question he has never seen fit to address. ## Biography #### Background Praetor'Varanous spent centuries in the Dragon Plane before [[The Shattering]] remade the world. Among dragonkind he was already ancient when the [[Chaos Wars]] began — one of the few silver dragons who chose to stand against the tide of destruction rather than withdraw from it. He fought alongside the elves and mortals of [[Sumara, The Shining City|Sumara]], and when the wars finally ended and the planes were sealed apart, he was among the survivors. He did not emerge unscathed. At some point in the conflict — the exact moment buried beneath centuries of fractured memory — [[Kharazoth the Crimson Shadow]] laid a curse on him that proved impossible to lift. Healers, archmages, and scholars of the [[Circle of the Weave|Weave]] all tried and failed. The [[Silmara Family]], whose bloodline Praetor'Varanous had fought to protect, found the only solution available: the [[Heartstone]], the Root of the World Tree buried beneath Sumara. Bound to it, he could live. Beyond its reach, the curse would take him. He accepted. He has been in the vault ever since. Over the centuries that followed, Praetor'Varanous became something the [[Silmara Family]] had not quite anticipated — not merely a survivor, but an archivist, an oracle, and a creditor of ancient debt. Only those of the Silmara bloodline can open the vault, and whenever a ruler or heir came seeking counsel, he was present: vast, patient, and exactly where they had left him. [[Ayana Syndrosa]] and [[Illythia Voss]] were both brought to visit him through their years of closeness with the family, and he knows them by name and by character in the way that someone knows a person they have had centuries to consider. His debt to the [[Silmara Family|Silmara]] bloodline is, in his own estimation, not a matter of obligation. It is simply what is true. They gave him life when life was the only thing he had left to give. He will serve them until that is no longer possible. ### [[The Bloody Nails|Campaign: The Bloody Nails]] #### [[Session 48 - The Vault of Memories]] At the conclusion of the party's passage through the vault's inner chambers — after defeating the stone guardian and crossing the Bridge of Trust — the great chamber beyond revealed itself: enormous columns, worn statues of elven kings and queens receding into darkness, a colossal carving of the World Tree. As [[The Bloody Nails]] moved deeper, a shape among the ancient statues began to stir. An eyelid opened. A cat-slit eye swivelled and fixed on the exhausted adventurers at the far end of the chamber. Slowly, wings longer than should have been possible began to unfurl, and Praetor'Varanous rose to his full height above them for the first time in centuries — watching, saying nothing. #### [[Session 49 - The Silver Sage]] Rising to his full height, Praetor'Varanous greeted the party as *"little mice in my hole"* and feigned hunger before stilling — he had caught the scent of [[Silmara Family|Silmara]] blood, and was startled to find not one but two of the line among them. Folding his vast form into a cloud of silver mist, he took the shape of a gaunt, silver-haired elf leaning on a gnarled staff and named himself at last. He led [[The Bloody Nails]] deeper into the [[Vault of Memories]] to a dais of swirling silver light, where he asked them to walk him through the memories that had brought them to him — each scene holding a deliberate falsity that, once named aloud, re-anchored the truth in his fraying mind. When [[Berberis]] dared to look back into the pool, it tore open onto a memory Praetor had never meant to share: two titans clashing above a battlefield of hundreds of thousands, and a crimson dragon driving a claw of black energy into his chest with a parting *"So long, Praetor."* From this he confirmed the source of his curse-brand — [[Kharazoth the Crimson Shadow]] — and, weighing all the party had gathered, concluded that [[Empress Morganna Eventide|Empress Morganna]] was almost certainly a lich, her soul hidden in a vessel that would have to be destroyed before her body could reform. Kharazoth, he warned, had taken a darker path still, binding his soul to *nothing*; he offered the one method he had ever found to end him — a weapon of the wielder's choosing, enchanted and anchored to a soul-stone from the [[Vale of Eternal Night]], that could destroy Kharazoth forever, but only at the cost of a bound mortal's life. *"Sacrifice is great and real. But it is the only thing I've found that could destroy him."* Before the party departed, Praetor returned [[Ryo]] to the dais and showed him the night he was surrendered as an infant — *"His name is Ryordan"* — along with visions of the first [[Ryordan Silmara]] and the death of Ryo's parents on [[Dread General Gerard Blackmarsh|Blackmarsh's]] blade. He answered [[Dondar]]'s unspoken question about a dwarf named Hvedra, confirmed two of the three Moonstones [[Kai]] sought, and sent his warm regards to [[Ayana Syndrosa]] before raising the party back to the surface. ## Trivia - The vault's ceiling has an observable response to Praetor'Varanous's internal state — silver light pulses and dims in time with his breathing when he is deep in thought or reaching for a distant memory. Whether he commands it or the vault simply answers, he does not say. - Praetor'Varanous has lived in the vault long enough that language has become irrelevant to him. He speaks in whatever tongue finds him.