Elio

"Refill that, boy. And don't spill it this time." Behind the counter of his family's dockside inn in Dawngrad, Elio learned early what it meant to be invisible. The sixth of eight children, he moved between tables like a ghost, noticed only when something needed filling. But the travelers who crowded the inn every night filled his head with something far more intoxicating: stories. Routes through uncharted mountains. Wonders no cartographer had ever mapped. Creatures and powers beyond imagination. Elio refilled their cups and memorized every word. By the time he was twelve, he had papered his room with maps; half collected, half drawn from memory, blank spaces filled with his own guesses. Most of them, he would later discover, were right.

"The ship awaits. Go to Belleron, and don't stop until you reach the Last Horizon, kiddo." Harvey Shackelhart, the greatest explorer alive, was hiding in room seven. Elio had read every account he had ever published. For weeks, he kept the explorer's secret, kept him supplied with bowls of broth, and talked about all the mysteries and discoveries that fed his imagination. Shackelhart, feverish and cornered, listened with growing attention. The passionate boy knew things he had no business knowing. So, he unveiled his story in pieces: he had uncovered a chain of anomalies in Belleron, pointing toward something he called "The Last Horizon"—the kind of discovery that comes once in a generation. The map was real... But so was the Dwarven faction who wanted it, and the mercenaries they had sent to collect it. The King was the rightful recipient, but Shackelhart pressed the map into Elio's hands. No one would suspect a Halfling table boy. And the boy, against all reasonable expectation, already knew the way. Elio told his family that evening. The conversation was short, affectionate, and entirely unconvincing on both sides. He boarded a Dwarven merchant vessel to Belleron the following dawn, the map tucked against his ribs.

The map was a puzzle in itself, but months among Dwarven merchants gave Elio time to study its logics. The first set of coordinates he deciphered led him to an abandoned Dwarven forge, carved into a mountain peak and exposed to everlasting winds. Past the frozen bodies that paved the entrance, Elio discovered a titanic laboratory seemingly used by runesmiths to capture the power of wind in runes. Nearby, a runic tablet slotted into an engraved structure on the floor. He inserted it. The structure rose and pulled the air into a roar. Elio climbed on. Then the walls shook. By the time the cold hit, he understood everything: the bodies, the silence, the abandonment. The Frost Dragon's breath launched him off the mountain. He braced for the fall. It never came. A press of his foot shifted the trajectory. Another corrected it. Right. So that was how it worked.

Elio modestly named the runic board "Galerider". Mounted upon it, he crossed mountain ranges no scout dared approach, returning each discovery and relic to the Crown as if such journeys were mere errands. The more impossible the expedition, the more certain he became that nothing truly fatal could happen to him. Rumors spread first among merchants, then soldiers, then the Court itself: a Halfling riding the winds faster than avalanches and dragons alike. The legend became impossible to dismiss after Elio rescued a royal delegation from the Frost Dragon, guiding them through the forgotten tunnels of Aurion's mountains while luring the beast away alone. In gratitude, the King restored Elio's broken firearm and named him Captain of the Royal Expeditions. Now burdened with duty, Elio felt the Last Horizon within his reach... until the sky itself tore open during the Night of Burning Stars.