Sir Glastum is the castellan of the Azure Fortress, the imperial citadel atop the waterfall of the Ardis Vala valley, and the unofficial son of Lord Burdock. He sponsored the founding of Glastumville at the foot of the waterfall, and is half-brother and rival of Baron Argus of Ritornello.
| Type | Character (knight, castellan) |
| Office | Castellan (custos arcis) of the Azure Fortress, since c. 2985 AEP |
| Father | Iskander Basileon, Lord Burdock |
| Half-siblings | Lady Alexia, Baron Argus |
| Spanish entry | Sir Glastum |
Office
Custos arcis is the title’s form in the official language of the Archontean Empire. The office was conferred by delegation of the archon of the valley, his father. Glastumville grew as a supply base for adventurers descending into the Mega-Dungeon; it bears his name by local custom, not by imperial decree. The imperial chancery registered him as acting castellan in the valley papers of 2993 AEP.
Lineage
The civil register of House Basileon does not list him in its main column; he appears in the margin as “unofficial son”, the imperial euphemism for a son born outside the archon’s lawful marriage.
- Lady Alexia, eldest legitimate daughter, the Green Lady of Burdock.
- Lord Argus, legitimate son, Baron of Ritornello (a full imperial office).
- Sir Glastum, unofficial half-brother, knight-castellan: a knightly rank with a subordinate administrative post and no barony.
Valley gossip, preserved in a chancery copy of a Burdock Valley administrative paper, holds that his family sent him unofficially to compete with Argus for glory and riches in Ardis Vala.
Rule of Glastumville
He keeps no solid formal government over the town. Daily affairs fall to an informal council of notables: merchants with warehouse fees, mercenary captains, and resident scholars who have spent years in the dungeon. His orders rarely reach the streets; the garrison redistributes them from the fortress gates.
His one firm rule is known to every adventurer: protection within the Azure Fortress in exchange for the dungeon tithe, one tenth of each party’s loot on its return.
He has a tactical arrangement with the imperial thesmothete Eusebia Phokas: she keeps the books, he holds the seal, and neither questions the other’s flows.
He balances three factions:
- The Factorial Merchants, the guild of warehousers and lenders, who pay the castellany and receive patents.
- The Benevolent Brotherhood, a semi-secret smuggling society led by Wicktrimmer, which he tolerates; Argus persecutes it in Ritornello when he can.
- The adventurers’ community, the Company of the Golden Lance, source of the tithe.
His personal cavalry, smaller than his half-brother’s, holds the fortress garrison. Kaitor the Red, spokesman of the Council of Delvers, deals with him directly, bypassing the imperial chancery. Other associates include Theron Glesteon, factor of the Mint.
Rivalry with Argus
Burdock placed his two sons as two parallel points of the valley, not as a chain of command. Glastumville’s notables resent any attempt by Argus to impose authority on the town or tax its dungeon earnings; the castellan’s tithe stays in the fortress. Argus regards the town as lax ground and a hotbed of sedition: smugglers, mages not registered with the Order of Thoth, Sortian heretics, Wiskin refugees from the north, scholars banned by the Orthodoxy, and clandestine theosophist alchemists.
Faith
Publicly he professes the Decadian Orthodoxy: Mithra, the only one of the old Twelve taken into the Ten of the new order, is served in the fortress’s makeshift chapel. Some mages of his retinue keep a clandestine shrine to Thoth in a side chamber, with a small library of theosophist texts whose possession the Orthodoxy of Narsileon punishes with confiscation and exile. He neither enters nor forbids it. Glastumville is therefore an obligatory stop for clandestine theosophist mages traveling between the imperial south and the ruins of Ardisvala; some arrive without passing through Ritornello.
Conflicting accounts
The archive records four readings of him without choosing:
- A competent adventurer with an administrative post who aspires to nothing more.
- A renegade aristocrat who turned the “unofficial son” formula into operational independence (the imperial reading).
- An ambiguous knight of balance whose laxity lets the town breathe; without him Glastumville would be a punitive extension of Ritornello (the local reading).
- A piece of his father’s pincer: Arkos suspects Burdock knew exactly what rivalry he was creating, keeping the valley tight through its own friction.
Open questions
- Whether and how he survived the formation of Valakhan during the Fifteen-Year Hiatus is not recorded.