Alkar the Black

Alkar is a wizard from the Merge Dimension, thought by some to be one of the most powerful sorcerers alive today.

Biological

Full Name: Alkar

Born: 5 WR/2288 AD

Birthplace: Tule, Merge I

Sex: Male

Race: Human

Hair: Albino Blonde

Eyes: Yellow

Height: 5'8"

Personal

Religion: Xaos (not openly)

Title: Grand Master of Black Magic, Chairman of the Council of Sorcery and Leader of the Merge People's League of Free Cities

Nicknames: None

Hobbies: Scheming, Plotting, Cackling

Known Skills: Alkar is skilled in the Merge Dimension's native school of Black Magic, and has studied the closely related Black Magic schools of Mysidia and Thamasa.

History

Magic-Users have, since the defeat of ExDeath, been prevalent in Merge. Nearly every kingdom in the dimension has a bevvy of court magicians, and even sorcerors in the private sector, taking up magic as one might take up a musical instrument. The warning sent to the IJF, to guard carefully the magic users of Merge, went ignored by Shane Lile... and when this was passed around and inflated by the angry, emotional young Queen of Bal, Kururu, people started to get mad.

One man, in particular, took Kururu's lead and, banding together with high-ranking mages from other villages on both of Merge's populated worlds, declared themselves one sovereign entity.

Alkar, a powerful Black Wizard, was this man. He is a slight man, not especially tall and possessing a very frail, fragile-looking build. He is an albino; his flesh appears pale and pasty all over, blue and red veins clearly visible beneath it. His hair is stringy and long, a dirty pale blond color and completely without shine or bounce. His eyes, those haunting, glowing yellow eyes, are among the most intensely glowing that one will ever see in a Black Mage. Due to his distaste for bright light, Alkar almost always wears a hood over his head and face; he has long since discarded the straw hat that seems to typify Black Wizards.

Alkar was born in Tule and studied magic in Worus, earning the highest honor ever given to a student of magic in the water kingdom. When the dimension was opened to the web, he traveled to Mysidia for continuation study, and he dazzled the mages there with his mastery of the Arcane Arts. Alkar has always been quite the intellectual, and as he moved from dimension to dimension studying and displaying magic, he learned of the great communist revolutionaries in Ticondera and Scande. He grew to admire men like [[Travin Rumanski|Travin] and Cadin -- although Alkar hardly had a taste for the end to Cadin's great story. Still, communism appealed to him.

Remembering his study of Communist literature, Alkar used the Scandian League as his nominal model when he established what he called the Merge People's League of Free Cities -- or just the Merge League, for short.

Alkar rallied together the magic-using, intellectual elites of Tule, Port Torna (along with its sister city, Torna Bay, on the eastern mouth of the Torna Canal), Jacole, Crescent, Istory, Lix, and the town of Muah on Merge World II, and formed a pact. They broke from the control of the larger Merge Kingdoms and established their own rule, independent of the IJF (which had refused to protect the magic-users) and other external forces. Keeping in step with his communist beliefs, however, Alkar ordered the socialization of all public services and took the lower classes under his wing, vowing to establish a powerful magocracy that would serve and protect the agricultural foundations of the new political entity. The role of the mage, as per this doctrine, is soldier, protector, administrator and teacher. The farming man works, and in return for this work, he is well cared for. "No man in the League starves while the Mages watch over him," Alkar was fond of saying at rallies among his followers.

Not long after the League's establishment, power changed hands. Though it is still unclear what, exactly, went on back then, Stantalias the Red, former school-fellow of Alkar and Grand Master of the Red Mage Fellowship, discovered improprieties in Alkar's administration and confronted him on this. The result of this confrontation was an impromptu coup d'etat which ended in Alkar's death and a conspiracy among the other Grand Masters to install Stantalias, a political moderate, in Alkar's place as Chair of the Council of Sorcery.

Followers loyal to Alkar stole away his body and, through means unknown, resurrected him (the only such magic that can bring back the dead in Merge is sealed away in the White Tower, under the watch of the vigilant and honorable Lord Kellsig). Alkar then went into exile, along with his Crystal Golem Gash and a companion he picked up along the way, an uncannily gifted fencer named Ruiz.

Alkar then almost entirely disappeared, except for one brief appearance at the Battle of Albrook, where he pitted his magic against the leashed slaves of the OmniSent. Following the Leviathan War, he returned to the Merge League to single-handedly save it from the ravages of the Dwarven Skull Empire -- or so it appeared that way. In reality he was siezing on an opportunity to reclaim his nation and expel those who had betrayed him: Stantalias the Red, and his former pupil Rygax the Black.

Since the close of the Leviathan War, Alkar has ruled the League much as he once did -- though now there are fears that he is trying to covertly topple the governments of his neighbors in an attempt to expand the influence of his Merge League. He has secretly taken up worship of the Dark God Chaos, and has already fomented an insurrection that cost the Kingdom of Bal more than half its territory on Merge II. Because of Alkar's posturing in Merge, Guardia and Scande are standing at the brink of war.