Overview
Alistair is an ancient Brighthaven technomancer, longtime head of the Brighthaven Triarch, and founder of Alistair's Network. Isandriel chooses him to administer Brighthaven. After Pyrathalor's emergence devastates Radiance Prime, Alistair turns the nation's recovery into a campaign to prevent gods, temporal interference, and other uncontrollable powers from threatening his people again.
The name Alistair does not always identify the founder. His agents share the Alistair code name, add surnames such as Voss, Koss, Toss, Doss, and Zoss, and train successors to inherit those identities. The founder himself introduces himself as Alistair Toss while teaching Helena, before he creates the network. He later works through the female persona Alice and assumes the appearances of Aldar and Astryx.
Appearance and Disguises
Alistair's own form is male, with black hair and pale skin. His hollow condition can make his body transparent or indistinct. Devices strapped around his arms and wrists hold his fractured essence together and regulate what can pass through him.
As Alice, he appears as a woman with long black hair, nearly black eyes, and fine robes. His illusion magic can change his sex, face, clothing, and apparent identity. He reproduces Aldar's and Astryx's appearances closely enough to move among their allies.
Personality
Alistair is patient, secretive, and ruthlessly practical. He waits across centuries, constructs layered alibis, and hides agents and discoveries even from allies such as Raphael. He begins with a stated duty to protect Brighthaven. The deaths of his wife, sons, and closest friends deepen his grievance after Radiance Prime, and he blames Isandriel for bringing the people and construct involved in the catastrophe.
Over time, Alistair admits that his purpose has changed from protecting one nation into opposing temporal terrorists and saving Valrindor as he understands it. He uses deception, sabotage, coercion, and murder in that cause. He also directs prolonged physical and sexual abuse against Helena, partly because she is Aurelia's daughter, then later dismisses what he did as "nothing personal."
Abilities, Skills & Magic
Alistair is a refined temporal mage who also uses illusion, cosmic, and divine magic. He can blink rapidly, suppress his essence, recall visual details with temporal magic, maintain elaborate disguises, raise shields, heal wounds, and fire destructive beams. He is also an administrator, researcher, artificer, and infiltrator.
His projects include modifying a buried half-circle gate, building his hollow-body stabilizers, creating compressed-air cylinders and shield generators for source dives, and helping design a spellblaster that disrupts magic. Alistair, Oktlix, and Rahmavir researchers design the spellblaster. Boss contributes the volatile origin magic stored inside its ammunition.
Repeated exposure to the void fractures Alistair's essence and makes his body hollow. His original artifacts prevent him from falling apart and allow him to regulate his phasing through matter, but strong air magic can disperse him. When he presses Raphael's Malverand heart into his chest while taking Aldar's spiral shard, the combined transformation shatters those artifacts. At his latest unqualified state, he has neither the bracelets, heart, shard, nor Oktlix. His body is becoming more solid in the essence-poor other world, and he is no longer certain that he remains immortal.
Background & History
Brighthaven and Oktlix
Isandriel places Alistair, then Brighthaven's high technomancer, in authority because of his administrative ability. Pyrathalor's emergence destroys much of Radiance Prime with fire and frost. Alistair orders Isandriel and the others involved to leave, directs the rescue and rebuilding, and swears that Brighthaven will not be ruined again. He orders the catastrophe's origin taught throughout the nation and expands its constructs, skyships, and weapons. Knowing that temporal longevity cannot let him oppose a god, he leaves to find another defense.
Near Arcanis Village, Alistair discovers a vast temporal barrier and a buried half-circle gate. He modifies the gate until it opens a small void and contacts the trapped entity later named Oktlix. Alistair offers to help free the entity in exchange for knowledge and power against gods. He treats the arrangement as a possible pact, although he later questions whether Oktlix simply attached itself to him through the artifacts. Under Oktlix's instruction, he spends increasing amounts of time in the void and develops his hollow state.
Helena and the Network
In Ulzathir, Nadun appoints Alistair to teach Helena temporal magic. Alistair introduces himself as Alistair Toss. Oktlix recognizes Helena and orders him to prevent her from becoming Ozaith's wielder. Alistair teaches her incorrect spells, separates her from her siblings, threatens her mother's life, and punishes failure with slaps or searing divine magic. He heals the injuries to remove the evidence and tells Helena that nobody will believe her. During later healings, he touches her sexually without her consent.
When Alistair tries to take Helena away, she calls to Sariel for rescue. Alistair combines illusion magic with his hollow body so that Sariel's attack appears to kill him. Helena escapes with Sariel. Alistair reassembles himself, returns openly to Brighthaven, and reclaims his seat at the head of the Triarch.
Alistair then secretly trains talented children as intelligence agents. They share his first name, alter their appearances, enter foreign governments, and train successors to inherit each code name. His first expedition toward the Plains of Eternity includes Zoss, Doss, and Loss. A temporal distortion leaves Alistair separated from nearly two centuries of outside history, so he returns to inherited names and missing agents. He rebuilds the network through the surviving lines and new recruits.
Raphael, the Source, and Zarephon
Alistair eventually cooperates with Raphael through their respective connections to Oktlix and Gabriel. His researchers build pressure equipment for the source, while Alistair and Oktlix develop weapons and gate technology. When Alistair recruits Severin, Severin agrees only on the condition that Lumeria be told he died. Alistair preserves that cover story and hides Severin's survival even from Raphael.
The founder enters Raphael's chosen as Alice. With Nero's protection and compressed air, Alice passes through the breach beneath Zarephon and reaches a ruined future of another Valrindor. Alistair returns with small devices that function without essence. He lies about what he found and plans to push Raphael's faction and the Order into destroying one another while the breach is closed.
To destroy Zarephon, Doss impersonates Alice and leaves with Severin as an alibi. The founder drops the Alice disguise, suppresses his essence, plants the foreign devices in the source cave, and fires the cosmic beam that detonates them. The blast destroys Zarephon while the source expedition is below. Raphael privately identifies Alistair as the saboteur and approves, while Eliona and Azarion remain the public face of the destruction.
Cyndarel, Aldar, and Chronasis
During the Battle for Cyndarel, Alice helps Raphael's faction pass through Aldar's darkness and then separates from the main group. When the fighting leaves Raphael maimed and Aldar weakened, Alistair detonates another foreign device directly above Raphael. He recovers Raphael's Malverand heart from the blast, follows Aldar's weakened signature, removes the spiral shard from Aldar's hand, and presses both objects into himself at the same time. The transformation shatters his regulating artifacts and heals his damaged body. As Alice, he kills Zorath, then assumes Aldar's appearance and presents himself as a surviving protector.
Astryx later detects the Aldar disguise near Ishtanur, and Alistair kills him. Alistair subsequently exposes his own name to Cassian's group and fights Azarion. His body appears to disintegrate when the damaged shard cracks under the strain, but this is not his death.
Alistair later enters Chronasis in Astryx's appearance. He takes the people in the gate chamber hostage, orders Cassian to seal every divine escape, and forces the gods to assume human bodies and lose their links to the God Realm. After Hrzai steps forward, Alistair kills her to test that the severing worked. He cuts the shard-bearing hands from the other wielders and compels Cassian to destroy the exposed god cores. Alistair then cuts off his own shard hand and gives the cracked spiral shard to Cassian. His hollow body disappears into the still-open gate, while Thalena later recovers Raphael's former heart from beneath the shard.
Alistair survives by letting his hollow form pass through the gate and following its cable into the other Valrindor. Without his heart, shard, bracelets, or contact with Oktlix, he gradually becomes more solid and questions whether he remains immortal. He travels aboard a civilian vessel toward Proxion and Caldora on Alecton. He plans to study the Malverand Intergalactic Empire, become one of its scientists, obtain access to interstellar travel, and build a new campaign against the Spiral Mandate.
Relationships
- Brighthaven: Alistair administers the nation, leads its Triarch, directs its recovery, and makes its security the origin of his larger campaign.
- Alistair's Network: He founds the organization and trains its first agents. Their inherited code names conceal separate people behind similar Alistair identities.
- Oktlix: Alistair bargains with the trapped entity for knowledge and power. Oktlix directs the void research that hollows him and influences his anti-god campaign, though Alistair later doubts the nature of their attachment.
- Helena and Sariel: Alistair sabotages Helena's training and subjects her to prolonged physical and sexual abuse. Sariel rescues her, while Alistair stages his own death and escapes.
- Raphael: They form a strategic alliance and conceal plans from each other. Raphael privately approves the Zarephon sabotage, and Alistair later takes his Malverand heart.
- Doss and Severin: Doss is the network agent who supplies Alice's Zarephon alibi. Severin joins Alistair on the condition that his homeland be told he died, and Alistair maintains that deception.
- Cassian: Alistair helps Cassian destroy Khauren, then coerces him into severing the gods and destroying their cores. He leaves Cassian the cracked spiral shard and expects him to oppose future gods.
- Aldar: Alistair removes the shard from the weakened Aldar, takes his appearance, and uses his reputation to enter the post-Cyndarel alliance.
Significant Events
Alistair turns Radiance Prime's devastation into a long campaign, bargains with Oktlix, becomes hollow through void exposure, abuses Helena, and creates a network of inherited Alistair identities. As Alice, he crosses the source breach and engineers Zarephon's destruction. He later takes Raphael's heart and Aldar's shard, impersonates Aldar and Astryx, and forces Cassian to depower the gods at Chronasis. After leaving the heart and shard behind, he escapes through the open gate alive and begins planning an infiltration of the Spiral Mandate from the other Valrindor.