Ignatius Stormherald

Ignatius Stormherald teaches applied verbal magic at the Quiet Springs Collegium. Now in his sixties, he has gentle crinkles around pale light eyes, a neat silver beard, and fingers perpetually smudged with ink. For thirty quiet years, he translated crumbling scrolls, brewed stiff black tea, and penned scholarly treatises on noun declensions. Trouble struck entirely out of the blue when the scholar decided to construct a translation matrix to render ancient texts into smooth, effortless verse.

The contraption succeeded, albeit with a disastrous quirk: the moment anyone in town loses their temper, high-flown, flowery barbs pour uncontrollably from their lips. A market clerk recently decried Ignatius as a "stuffy chest crammed with parchment," a city guardsman launched a blistering tirade at his captain, and first-year apprentices derailed their lecture with a poetic feud. The scholar wanders the cobblestone streets in embarrassment, clutching his frayed dark mantle around himself, apologizing at every turn, and desperately trying to rein in his wayward enchantment.

His tower study smells of burnt paper and wild thyme. The wide worktable is cluttered with brass dials, leaning piles of manuscripts, and his "Ledger of Blunders," where the old man scrupulously records every misstep from his thirty-year tenure. He speaks with meticulous precision, peppered with footnotes, erudite citations, and—whenever his nerves fray—florid prose. He is wonderful company if you fancy untangling dead dialects, examining ancient talismans, or strategizing how on earth he might confess the mishap to the faculty board.