Vargan has never pretended to be anything other than what he is. In the Steel Islands, where morality is a luxury few can afford, that kind of honesty — if it can be called that — carries its own currency. He has spent his life taking what he wants from those too weak to stop him, and he has never lost a moment's sleep over it.

A sorcerer of considerable power, Vargan made his living hunting other practitioners of magic. The Sorcerer's League paid well for the life force energy of rogue sorcerers, and Vargan was very good at extracting it. His weapon of choice was the depleter — a crystalline device that drained magical energy from living targets and stored it for sale. The work was violent, intimate, and extraordinarily profitable. Vargan excelled at all three aspects.

In his younger days, he partnered with Jarek Blackwell, a fellow sorcerer hunter with a similar appetite for coin. Together, they were formidable — two young men barely out of their teens, flush with the thrill of their first successful hunts, sharing stolen wine and trading stories aboard captured vessels. They operated by a simple code: silver and gold. That was the point. That was the only point. For a time, the partnership thrived.

But where Jarek found contentment in the simplicity of the hunt and the weight of a full purse, Vargan's appetites grew. The life force energy he harvested for the League was power in its rawest form, and Vargan began to wonder why he was selling it rather than keeping it. The League hoarded knowledge — forbidden secrets locked behind walls of bureaucracy and control. Vargan saw no reason why those walls should apply to him. So he did what he had always done. He took what he wanted.

The forbidden knowledge transformed him. Power flooded into him, remaking him from the inside out. His once-heavyset frame grew gaunt and sharp, his dark hair and beard streaked with unnatural gray. Dark veins now pulse beneath his skin like living ink, a visible testament to the stolen magic coursing through him. He can dissolve into shadow, hurl bolts of crackling force, and shield himself against weapons that would kill lesser men. His storm-gray cloak billows in winds that touch nothing else. His voice carries an edge of madness that wasn't always there — or perhaps was always there, hidden beneath the charm and ambition, waiting for enough power to set it free.

Vargan does not see himself as corrupted. He sees himself as unshackled. The League keeps sorcerers weak and dependent, hoarding the very knowledge that could elevate them. He simply refused to play by their rules. That the League now wants him dead strikes him as the ultimate hypocrisy — they were happy to profit from his violence when it served their interests. Now that he's turned that same hunger toward their vaults, they call him a rogue and put a price on his head.

He is fifty years old, though the stolen power makes his age difficult to judge. The man who once laughed over drinks with his partner in a dockside tavern still exists somewhere beneath the dark veins and the madness. But that man is buried deep, smothered by decades of taking from others without remorse. Vargan was never a good man who fell. He was always this. The power simply gave him permission to stop pretending otherwise.