Khalim (Khalim de Esperanza, “plus Kim el-Hassain”) is a thousand-year-old Algerian arcanist and sorcerer who now walks the world in a hobgoblin’s body, carrying objects from millennia and a talking mask.
Description
His half-elf side “comes from the north, from Scandinavia”; the other is Ifrit blood, “from the men of fire and sand”. He looks young, perhaps through the fire blood. His eyes shift between emerald green, “ecstasy blue” and honeyed red, and turn fiery when he works magic. He speaks Common, Infernal, Auran, Celestial, Sylvan and Ignan, and knows the Koran by heart.
By his father’s blood he “should go to the Efrins”; by his magical specialty, “to the void, to time”.
Life
He was a mounted Bedouin warrior, a caravan warrior, then an arcanist and sorcerer; now he is also a local doctor. He fights from the air with magic missiles, can knock down a golem and can go unseen. He owns a castle: the place where Suriel, the Exterminating Angel, fell. He is “an important sorcerer”.
Possessions
- On his camel: a sword of Hernán Cortés, bracelets perhaps of Achilles, and clothes kept for one or two thousand years.
- A bow whose empty quiver regrows arrows “like twigs”.
- A scimitar and a longsword.
- Ancient fireproof clothing, the Best of Clothes.
- A statuette that turns into the Haun, on which he teleports and flies across continents.
- A broken Staff of Fire, “from some age of glory, more powerful than his present magic”, now without magic.
- The mask: bronze, skull-shaped, intelligent and speaking; it is “Khalim when he was young, when he created that object”. He guards it under written instructions from Milan; it oversees his actions and awakens new abilities on its own.
Raising the dead
He brings back companions just after death, and a reconstruction artifact heals his whole body. When Neferu, the black bird with him for a thousand years, “opens its wings”, the dead “rise and come back to life”.
Judgment and prophecy
He is judged “a neutral of evil”, and divine judgment declares him beyond redemption; he crossed “from light to darkness”. Yet a prophecy says Khalim de Esperanza “is the one who will bring balance to the force in the end”. When he reaches Luca, he sits and meditates beside him. “Poor Algeria,” he says.
Conflicting accounts
- Neferu is “what remains of Neferu” and his first wife, yet the entity calls him “son Khalim, do your work”.
- He was head of the Youth, or he is a divine manifestation.
- He says “I don’t use weapons, weapons are for the weak”, yet carries a scimitar and a longsword.
- His age is a thousand years, or thousands; he also “slept two centuries”.
Open questions
- How he went from Arab to hobgoblin.
- Where the castle is and why Suriel fell there.
- What the Haun is; who gave the Milan instructions; what broke the Staff of Fire.
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