NAME: Zachary, Who Bears the Light
PRONOUNS: He/Him
MAGE CLASS: None (Knight) — Mundane, yet empowered through augmented traits and unknown resonance
LINEAGE: The People → Human
SUBTYPE: Warriors → Knight
ERA PLACEMENT: Post-2150 AD — The Ascendant Age
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In the long twilight that followed the Rift Wars, when the threads of Aether still trembled in the scars of the earth, there rose a knight without a banner — no noble house to claim him, no mage’s lineage to empower him. Yet he walked among those with spells in their veins and monsters in their blood, and they did not stand taller than he.

His name was Zachary. Not a chosen name. A given one — plain, honest, enduring. But the world would come to know him by another: Who Bears the Light.

He was born in the Iridic lowlands, far from the spires and sanctums of the Arc-Mage dominions. His hair was the color of cinnamon bark, eyes pale green like morning frost on old glass — always watching, always wondering. Even as a child, he moved with a grace that belied his strength. He solved problems the elders couldn't. He lifted stones others struggled to budge. He was fast — faster than reason. And he knew your thoughts before you could hide them.

But no rune pulsed beneath his skin. No relic called to him. He bore no Mage Mark.

His powers — telepathy, super strength, super speed — should have been impossible outside the Ætherborn. Some whispered he was a sleeper Relic-bond, a Vessel waiting to awaken. Others believed the Rift left something in his bloodline that even his ancestors never knew. Zachary never answered the speculation. He was too busy helping — pulling villagers from collapsed sanctuaries, running letters through dead zones, lifting the wounded when no one else could.

But Zachary's strength was never what defined him. It was his conviction. He believed people were worth saving even when they weren’t brave, or beautiful, or right. He believed in laughter as a weapon against despair. In kindness not as weakness, but as rebellion. And yet, he was not without shadow.

His mind was a storm of second-guessing. For every life he saved, he dwelled on those he couldn’t. Obsession grew in the cracks of his compassion — an ache to understand why he had power at all, and why no purpose came with it. He longed to matter — not out of ego, but out of desperation to make sense of the strength that sometimes terrified him.

His telepathy brought him too close to people. He knew their doubts. He absorbed their anger. He began to carry more than his body was built for. And in the rare moments when his fury surfaced, it was not aimed at enemies — it was self-directed, a blast furnace of guilt and unspoken fear.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he kept going.

Zachary never joined an Order. He answered no horn. But those who saw him on the fields of Caer Virel, during the storming of the Glass Reaches, during the plagues of whispering dust, remembered the man with no sigil, lifting fallen comrades, running through shrapnel faster than the eye, standing alone where even mages faltered.

He bore no banner, because he was the standard. A living reminder of what Light meant — not safety, not certainty, but courage without proof.

And so the name was given, etched first into the whispers of refugees, then the logs of field scribes, and finally, the Canticles of the Wandering Orders:

Zachary, Who Bears the Light.

No one records where he died.
Some believe he didn’t.
Only that where the world begins to crack again,
a man with cinnamon hair and pale green eyes
still walks toward the falling.

Still bearing it.