Dimitri is a young academy-trained mage of Los Condenados (“the Condemned”) who copied the four-language obelisk of the Barrowmaze, the key to reading the Black Tongue.
| Type | Character |
| Chronicle | NOV |
| Also called | Dimitri Vaz, Dimitri Vance |
| Spanish entry | Dimitri, el copista del obelisco |
History
Dimitri was sixteen when he first went down into the ravine. Trained in the Tower of Knowledge, he was a fellow student of Luminița, the fair-haired daughter of the lady of the valley (Mirela Valka). In the first rooms he deciphered the draconic runes of a seal: “we sealed here a fallen priest, so that his blasphemy may not stain the memory of…“.
In room 43 of the Barrowmaze stood a four-sided obelisk carrying one text in four columns and four languages: Elvish, Dwarvish, Old Common and the Black Tongue. Dimitri stayed camped beside it while the others went deeper, and spent hours taking charcoal rubbings of the runes. He left the copy to the company as “fundamental to advance”. From it came the history of the barrows: Nergal, god of death, stabbed by his two sons, Set and Orcus, who split his house and still fight beneath the stone over the Tablets of Chaos their father hid.
From the same camp, on a rare sunny morning in the fog-bound valley, he saw a castle of bones being raised in the distance, and a patrol of armed skeletons crossing the tomb field behind a strange knight, a kind of lord of death. He stayed to watch instead of fleeing. The castle growing to the north was the shadow of Caladan, and Dimitri was the first of the company to see it.
Underground, Dimitri and Silas, the group’s other mage, were gradually corrupted: a sweetish smell, ever darker writings, a mark growing on his face. A small pact-demon with a stinger hovered around the spellcasters. In the final stretch of the arc Dimitri no longer descended; he withdrew to the village.
Open questions
- To which mage the pact-demon became bound as familiar is not settled.