Michael J. Sullivan: Riyria

In approaching the Riyria cycle, I found that Sullivan’s approach — combining a consecutive series with an overarching story arc on the one hand and a series of prequels recounting one individual adventure each on the other hand — was very helpful, as it allowed me to make an in-depth acquaintance with Riyria and their friends, associates, and adventures, while still leaving a substantial number of books to get back to later on.  I decided to start my acquaintance with Royce and Hadrian with the book that introduces the two of them to each other — The Crown Tower, book 1 of the Riyria Chronicles –, then move on to the short story The Viscount and the Witch (available for free on Smashwords), which later became an early chapter in the second Riyria Chronicles book, The Rose and the Thorn, and which introduces one additional key character beyond those already introduced in The Crown Tower, and finally move on to the full glory of the Riyria Revelations, while leaving the remaining installments of the Chronicles for a later time.  (Though I confess that I was sorely tempted to also read the complete second Chronicles book, The Rose and the Thorn, which continues one particular narrative strand from The Crown Tower; but in light of the way this particular strand is continued yet further in the Riyria Revelations, I am glad that I didn’t, but rather, resisted the temptation and left that book, too, to come back to later on.)

Format-wise, like in the case of the Legends cycle, I went with a combination of the excellent unabridged audio narration by Tim Gerard Reynolds and the likewise very well-done full cast audio dramatizations produced by Graphic Audio.

[Note: The below review does of course not spoil the big reveal and overall outcome of the Riyria Revelations cycle, but it contains minor spoilers regarding certain individual plot details; so be aware that you’re proceeding at your own risk.]

So, who are Riyria?

“Riyria” is an Elven term meaning “two” and reflecting that they are a partnership of two men:

• Royce Melborn, a master thief and assassin said to have been raised by wolves, who from earliest childhood on has gone through the proverbial school of hard knocks on the mean streets of Ratibor, the capital of the kingdom of Rhenydd. Slender and not overly tall, he usually wears a black tunic and a black cloak whose hood (which is almost always up) shades much of his face, including and in particular his eyes, and which frequenty also provides concealment for his hands. Being a “Mir” (of mixed elven and human blood), Royce is also unusually nimble and athletic and has a highly-developed sense of sight and hearing.  At a young age he joined Ratibor’s (and indeed all of the realm of Avryn’s) premier gang of professional thieves and assassins, the Black Diamond, and quickly became one of “the Diamond’s” (or “the BD’s”) most trusted members and most skillful assassins, until an altercation with his — until then — closest friend and fellow assassin Merrick Marius over the death of a joint close friend of theirs, a female “Diamond” assassin and Marius’s lover, led to his exclusion from the gang and his banishment from “the Diamond’s” territory in Ratibor.  Since then, Royce has been working on his own, a modus operandi much better suited to his fiercely solitary, cynical and mistrustful nature anyway.  At long last, he found himself incarcerated in the infamous Manzant Salt Mines prison in western Maranon, from which few (if any) are said to emerge alive, and where, as a gift from a fellow prisoner, he obtained his trademark weapon, a probably not-human-made, unfailingly lethal dagger named Alverstone, whose most outstanding feature is its shining silver-white blade.
• Royce is eventually freed from Manzant prison by Professor Arcadius Latimer, Master of Lore at the prestigious University of Sheridan in the kingdom of Melengar, with the express purpose of being paired up with:
• Hadrian Blackwater, from childhood on a protégé of the professor’s.  The son of the blacksmith of the village of Hintendar (also in Rhenydd), Hadrian has been trained in sword fighting by his father — a master of that form of combat himself — from his earliest years onwards.  As a result, he has acquired an unmatched skill, superior even to that of the premier noble dynasty renowned for their sword fighting ability, the Counts Pickering of Drondil Fields (the closest friends and allies of the royal family of the kingdom of Melengar), whose training — alone in all of Avryn — comprises a discipline passed down the generations in their family from the legendary Teshlor Knights of the defunct Novronian Empire (which fell roughly a millennium earlier), in turn believed to have been the greatest warriors that ever lived. — Hadrian is congenial, kind-hearted and incurably optimistic to the point of naiveté.  Seeking adventure and feeling cramped in the narrow confines of his native village, he left Hintendar when he had barely reached his manhood and spent the following years, over a decade, as a mercenary in various armies; initially those of other Avryn kingdoms, like that of Warric, but ultimately in the remote, exotic and incalculably dangerous southeastern realm of Calis.  Of tall and muscular build, Hadrian carries two, sometimes three different swords: a short blade similar to a dagger, a “bastard sword” (common longsword), and a massive, two-handed Spadone sword longer than his own back.  The first two of these blades he forged himself; the third one (the Spadone) is a family heirloom handed down through unknown numbers of generations, along with the training how to use it.
• Weary of war and of killing for money, Hadrian ultimately returns from Calis at the beginning of The Crown Tower, following a call from Professor Latimer to join him at Sheridan University and be given an assignment vaguely promising to provide his life with a new purpose.
• (NB: Except for two details that don’t affect the things only revealed at the end of the Riyria Revelations, virtually all of the above is backstory, not a series of spoilers.)

Being polar opposites in virtually everything from character and disposition to physical features and personal background — with a superior skill in the use of blades, albeit different ones, the only thing they seem to have in common —  Royce and Hadrian take an instant massive dislike to each other; something that cannot but prove fatal in the assignment that Professor Latimer hands down to them once they have made it to Sheridan University: to retrieve the notebook of a vanished former Sheridan professor named Edmund Hall from the treasury at the top of the sixty-stories high, alabaster-faced and absolutely unscalable Crown Tower, the seat of the Patriarch of the Nyphron Church, one of the premier religious cults in all of Avryn and rulers of Ghent, one of the territories emerging from the aftermath of the collapse of the erstwhile Novronian Empire roughly a millennium earlier.  Then, only a night later, they’re supposed to climb the Crown Tower once again and put the notebook right back where they found it … And it certainly also doesn’t help that the professor doesn’t even tell them why he is so interested in that darned notebook in the first place and what he’s hoping to find there.

Besides dealing with Royce and Hadrian’s first meeting — which actually occurs even before they have reached Sheridan and in itself bodes extremely ill already — and, subsequently, the good professor’s assignment to them, and their gradual and extremely grudging building of mutual respect in the face of constant mortal danger, The Crown Tower also introduces several of the Riyria cycle’s other key characters; most notably Professor Latimer, as well as a Medford prostitute of Calian origin named Gwen DeLancy.  Moreover, the book introduces the Nyphron Church (imagine late medieval Catholicism in full witch hunt mode), its inquisitors (the so-called Sentinels), its military arm (the Seret Knights [Seret is stressed on the second syllable]), and its creed, which is based on the veneration not only of Maribor (commonly believed to be the creator god of humanity and revered by all humans, regardless what church they belong to), but also — and primarily — of Novron, a demigod held to be Maribor’s son and the founder of the fallen Novronian Empire.  The church’s stated aim, pursued primarily by the Sentinels and the Seret Knights, is to find the lost Heir of Novron, the descendant of the son of the Novronian Empire’s last ruler, who vanished without a trace in the turmoil of that empire’s sudden and violent collapse.  As more than a minor side note, the Seret Knights and the Sentinels are also charged with rooting out heresy wherever they come across it (or believe they have done so).

The short story The Viscount and the Witch — which eventually became chapter 2 of the second Riyria Chronicle, The Rose and the Thorn — is set shortly after the events in The Crown Tower and shows Royce and Hadrian during a very early outing in their as-yet budding collaboration.  Besides providing some additional background on Royce in particular, it also introduces another key character, namely, the eponymous Viscount; a penniless nobleman who, like Gewn DeLancy, will become one of Riyria’s closest confidants and their go-between for communications with blue-blooeded clients.  It’s not as good an introduction to Royce and Hadrian as are the two other Riyria short stories, The Jester and Professional Integrity, so it shouldn’t be made a priority, but it’s an entertaining and useful bit of additional background information if you’ve decided to explore the Riyria cycle (Revelations and Chronicles) at all, and a neat minimalist short cut in case you’re not planning to immediately read The Rose and the Thorn — which, as I said above, I was sorely tempted to do, as it continues the narrative strand involving Gwen DeLancy, who is one of my favorite characters in the entire Riyria cycle.

Moving on (at last) to the Riyria Revelations, the series begins a little over a decade after Royce and Hadrian have first met.  As I said elsewhere, if you read the first part (The Crown Conspiracy, part 1 of Theft of Swords) on its own terms, which is possible almost as well as with The Crown Tower, you’ll find it to be chiefly an example of those high fantasy books that are a blend of fantasy and swashbuckling tales, elaborating on the Riyria cycle’s world building and laying the groundwork for the entire series’s overall story arc, but also providing a conclusion to the book’s own individual story arc, and chiefly concerned with a really nasty conspiracy (as you might have guessed from the title) and Royce and Hadrian’s adventures while trying to extricate themselves from said conspiracy and, in the process, save the future of a kingdom.  That all being the case, the book is only a rudimentary foreshadowing of what is to come later in the series, particularly in its spectacular conclusion (both parts of Heir of Novron, Wintertide and Percepliquis), which takes the series to a completely different and much higher level that you can’t even begin to guess at from the contents of The Crown Conspiracy, nor from the combined contents of that installment and The Crown Tower, enjoyable though both of these books are on their own terms.

Avempartha (originally book 2 of the series, now part 2 of Theft of Swords) — again, as the title indicates — for the first time brings us in close contact with the world of the Legends cycle set 3000 years earlier.  For one thing, a large part of this installment’s plot is actually set in the small village of Dahlgren on the banks of the Nidwalden River, near the (now-abandoned) erstwhile magical Elven tower of Avempartha.  (Note: the Nidwalden is now the border between Erivan, the Elven Lands — 3000 years earlier the heartland of the realm of the Fhrey, and the location of their capital Estramnadon — and Avryn, the realm of the humans, which now however includes large swaths of what once also used to be Fhrey territory, which back then extended all the way to the northern and eastern banks of the Bern [now: Bernum] and Gula Rivers; see the maps at the bottom of p. 2 of my post on the Legends cycle).  As importantly, we also encounter one of the terrifying dragon-like beasts of war that the Fhrey first learned to create three millennia earlier, a gilarabrywn (pronounced gilLAHrabren); and it’s still perfectly capable of wreaking as much havoc as its peers were seen to do back in the mists of time.

By the end of this installment, most of the core threads of the series’s overall narrative arc are in place, and while Avempartha, too, “technically” brings the core of its own individual story arc to a conclusion, at this point so many balls are up in the air and merrily being juggled that you’re likely not going to find the ending wholly satisfactory if you decide to stop here.  I wouldn’t exactly call the book’s ending a complete cliffhanger, but enough remains unresolved that it’s probably a wise idea to determine whether you want to commit to the entire series before you even begin to read this installment; which is a bit unfortunate because, as I said above, the preceding part, The Crown Conspiracy, in itself doesn’t even begin to give you an indication of what is yet to come; and while Avempartha in itself does … well, for one thing, you’ll only know that after you’ve read it to its very end, and all told, even Avempartha, nerve-racking that it (and particularly its conclusion) actually is, is still comparatively minor fry when compared to what’s to come at the very end.

The second double bill repackaging (Rise of Empire, which contains books 3 and 4 of the series as originally published, Nyphron Rising and The Emerald Storm) is a bit of a mixed bag, which on the next page of this post you’ll see reflected to some extent in my rating.  Part 1 (Nyphron Rising) takes us to the beginning of the war fought over the creation of the new Nyphron Empire, a de-facto theocracy with a figurehead puppet empress but championed by — you guessed it — the Nyphron Church, the true power behind the imperial throne, which also furnishes one of the empire’s two regents who govern instead of the puppet empress; the other regent being the former king of Warric, who has happily contributed his capital of Aquesta as the new empire’s capital, and his kingdom as one of the empire’s major fiefdoms.

Up to and including Nyphron Rising, the structure of the Riyria Revelations is similar to that of the Legends cycle: with book 1 — (The Crown Conspiracy / Age of Myth, respectively) laying the ground work in terms of character introduction and world building; book 2 (Avempartha / Age of Swords) — taking the series’s overall story arc beyond the point of no return, with a (first) lengthy excursion to a location outside the area where most of the series’s core action is set, but which nevertheless is absolutely crucial to the overall story arc; and book 3 (Nyphron Rising / Age of War) — sees open warfare breaking out, with one or several pivotal (and very ugly) battles, while the overall plot is, however, also being advanced in several other ways.

Unfortunately, the structural parallels also continue, at least in one significant respect, in book 4 of the original Riyria Revelations series (part 2 of Rise of Empire), The Emerald Storm: Just as Sullivan threw me in the final part of the Legends cycle’s fourth book, Age of Legend, by introducing a quest narrative into a series that, in its main outline, is essentially the story of a cataclysmic culture clash between two races that couldn’t be any more different (and by then continuing said quest narrative all through book 5 and through a large part of book 6); so, too, here he threw me by introducing similarly foreign matter: in this instance, a seafaring adventure straight out of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey & Maturin and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series, complete with sea battles, pirates, (almost-) shipwrecks, plenty more swashbuckling, and the exploration of dangerous foreign lands inhabited by primitive natives (namely, the jungles of Calis all the way to Dur Guron at its extreme southeastern end).

And while I could at least see the rationale why Sullivan should have decided to suddenly ram a substantially different narrative structure down his readers’ throat in the Legends cycle (and the writing of the quest narrative as such is up to that series’s overall high standard), here I simply didn’t see the point from a storytelling point of view; or at least not the point of a book-length excursion of that nature.  Sure, we learn a bit about both Royce and Hadrian along the way, and we do so in a more colorful setting than we might have if Hadrian had told a few campfire tales of his mercenary adventures in Calis or if Royce had made Gwen (who is of Calian origin, after all, and like many of that realm’s women a seer) reveal more of his future path than she had heretofore admitted to having divined.  And, yes, there are a few folks on board who have an agenda of their own that we’ll only see being revealed much later (and there’s plenty of kindling between them and Royce im particular).  But come on, Mr. Sullivan, a whole book’s worth — all the while things back at the ranch in Avryn are essentially stalled, or (again, similar to the way the quest narrative in the Legends cycle is handled) only moved forward to the barest minimal extent necessary for things to come together in a rousing conclusion once our heroes are finally back from their massive detour and we’re all able to pick up things mostly, even if not quite from the same point, where we were before the seafaring adventure started in the first place?!  (And, yesyesyes, there’s also a goblin invasion at the end of The Emerald Storm, but that, too, could have been included without first sidetracking us for the length of an entire book.)

Moreover, the description of the natives we meet in the jungles of Calis and in Dur Guron has “primitive savages” in the worst tradition of racist and clichéd 19th and early 20th century adventure writing literally plastered on its forehead, which was an additional factor that made me increasingly resent this detour into Calis, and a disappointment coming from an author with an — until then — proven track record of deliberately going against stereotype, no matter on what grounds.  (Indeed, an exposure and condemnation of racist prejudice is literally built into the Riyria cycle’s whole underlying fabric, and it’s one of the main reasons that made me take to the books as quickly as I did in the first place.)

So, long story short, if there is one part of the series that I think you can easily skip in its entirety if you’re in a hurry to get to the conclusion, it’s The Emerald Storm; particularly as the events that really matter in that installment are summed up in the subsequent narrative anyway.

That all being said, if the sea voyage in and of itself really had been part of a series along the lines of Aubrey & Maturin and Horatio Hornblower, or anything similar for that matter, such as The Sea-Hawk and Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, I’d probably have enjoyed it very much, as, taken in isolation, the writing of that part is easily as enjoyable as in most of the rest of the series.  Ah, well.

Fortunately, the detour at least didn’t last almost one entire book plus the better part of two others, as in the case of the Legends cycle’s quest narrative, and most importantly, by far the best part was yet to come.  The conclusion of the Riyria Revelations — Heir of Novron, which includes the original books nos. 5 and 6 of the series, Wintertide and Percepliquis — is unquestionably the entire series’s crowning achievement, and based on what I’ve seen so far, quite possibly also that of the complete Riyria cycle (Riyria Revelations and Chronicles taken together).  Suspense and suffering are ratcheted up far beyond endurance point, for the characters as well as for the humble reader, who is forced to witness cruelty and peril of sheer unimaginable dimensions without being able to actively stand by our heroes, and who can only hope and pray that everything will turn out OK.  This isn’t quite on the scale of George R.R. Martin, but the Legends cycle had already taught me never to take the survival of favorite or even just well-liked characters for granted, as did, once more, the earlier installments of the Riyria Revelations; and during large parts of the series’s epic conclusion I came closer to (metaphorically, albeit) repeatedly and extendedly sweating blood for the sake of our heroes and heroines than I’ve done in a long time; in a fantasy series quite possibly not since I first read the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings decades ago.  Never mind that everything was still on track for the one element of the solution that I’d essentially been expecting going in already (and which did eventually come to pass in fact).  And never mind that the reveal of the “big lie” at the heart of the story wasn’t much of a reveal to me, because I’d chosen to read the Legends cycle first and had, instead, enjoyed the care and attention to detail which Sullivan put into crafting that “big lie” and weaving it into almost every fibre of his world building, which far exceeded the level that I had been expecting …

As the title of the final installment, Percepliquis, indicates, Riyria and their friends embark on yet another quest at the very end of the series; however, unlike in the case of the voyage on board of the Emerald Storm — and even more so than the earlier excursion to Dahlgren and Avempartha (or, for that matter, a similar extended outing to a place outside of Rhulyn in book 2 of the Legends cycle, Age of Swords) — this quest is absolutely indispensable to the series’s overal solution and the revelation of the truth behind the all-pervading “big lie”; so I definitely don’t have any quarrels there: in fact, I’d have felt seriously short-changed without it … even if it involves some of the entire series’s most harrowing moments.

Given the excessively pervasive nature of the “big lie”, the monumental falsification at the heart of the Riyria cycle’s storyline, it’s difficult to comment on the Riyria books’ worldbuilding without giving away too much (in fact, merely mentioning certain names is revealing to some extent, though as the names pertain to intrinsic elements of the worldbuilding, they can’t entirely be avoided).  However, if you’ve read even a single installment of the Legends cycle, you can expect things to be very different now, and not merely due to the passage of time.  Most significantly, while the Fhrey were by far the most sophisticated and overall superior race in the “prehistory” described in the Legends cycle, nobody in Avryn even bothers to refer to their descendants by the collective name “Fhrey” anymore; now they are officially “Elves” (a term which the Fhrey had considered an insult), and instead of the superior, golden-haired warriors of yore they are a downtrodden pariah race denied the rights of citizenship in any part of Avryn — as incidentally are the Dwarves –, with their pointed ears easily marking them out as outcasts due to be subjected to the same kind of abuse and racial prejudice as the Jews were in Nazi Germany and the blacks in Jim Crow America.  In fact, it is generally held that the Elves used to be slaves in the Novronian Empire; and if the Nyphron Church had its way, that would still be the case now (though as it turns out, the church and its representatives also find other means of mass extermination, which incidentally is one of the most fiendish aspects of that church’s entire history and course of action, both in itself and as pertains to the “big lie”).  Then again, nobody has crossed the Nidwalden River — in either direction — in a millennium or more; so nobody in Avryn even knows if any ElvFhrey of the old tribes, or their descendants, have even survived in Erivan until the present day; and the existence and location of their erstwhile capital Estramnadon has passed out of common awareness, as has the knowledge of the Fhrey society and culture of old.  And if you think that’s a major blind spot to have on almost your entire realm’s eastern flank, you just might be right … particularly after the reappearance of one of the feared dragon-like gilarabrywn of old right on the banks of the Nidwalden River.  But then, we’re literally talking more than a millennium’s worth of neglect here …  (Or are we? 🙂 )

Elan — the world in which the Legends of the First Empire and Riyria cycles are set — in the year 2998, i.e., at the beginning of the events recounted in the Riyria Revelations: The main area to be concerned with in the Riyria cycle is Avryn, the realm of humans and former territory of the Novronian Empire; particularly the kingdoms and territories of Melengar, Warric and Rhenydd, with prolongued excursions into Ghent (the territory ruled by the Nyphron Church), Dunmore (the kingdom bordering on Erivan, the Elven Lands) and Calis (a land of exotic south-eastern human tribes and Ba Ran Ghazel (seafaring, man-eating goblins)).
(Printable map from Michael J. Sullivan’s blog)

The part of Avryn in which almost all of the action of the core Riyria books is set:

• Melengar: independent kingdom established by the ancestor of the ruling Essendon family after the fall of the (old) Novronian Empire (which occurred roughly a millennium prior to the events of the Riyria cycle).  In the conflicts revolving around the foundation of the (new) Nyphron Empire, Melengar is the only kingdom to resist being swallowed up into the new empire — the only other significant holdout being Delgos, a republic in southwestern Elan –, which is extremely inconvenient to the Nyphron Empire not only in terms of its overall reach and exercise of power but also territorially, because Melengar is located squat in the middle between the Nyphron Empire’s two original pieces of heartland, the (former) kingdom of Warric — with the new empire’s capital, Aquesta — and Ghent, the territorial holdings of the Nyphron Church and seat of its highest official (think “pope”), known as the Patriarch.
  • Medford: the capital of Melengar, seat of the House of Essendon and main base of operations of Riyria
  • Drondil Fields: the original capital of Melengar; now the seat of the powerful Counts Pickering, a noble family closely allied with the Essendons
  • Winds Abbey: an abbey serving the god Maribor on the shores of Lake Windermere
  • Gutaria: a secret, timeless, enchanted prison in the mountains north of Lake Windermere, created with the sole purpose of holding captive the wizard Esrahaddon, the person charged with having been the chief architect of the destruction of the Novronian Empire
  • Sheridan: the seat of a prestigious university; Professor Arcadius Latimer — Master of Lore at Sheridan University — first brought Royce Melborn and Hadrian Blackwater together there and tasked them with retrieving from the Crown Tower (see Ervanon, further below) the journal of a former Sheridan professor named Edmund Hall, which is believed to reveal the location of the lost capital of the fallen Novronian Empire, Percepliquis
• Dunmore: the kingdom bordering on the now-inaccessible Elven Lands, Erivan; it rejects a Melengar bid for alliance and is shortly thereafter swallowed into the new Nyphron Empire without a fight, as its ruler fully supports the policy of the new empire
  • Dahlgren: a small village on the western (Avryn) border of the Nidwalden River near the Elven tower of Avempartha; nightly terrorized by a gilarabrywn (dragon-like Elven beast of war)
• Avempartha: a now-deserted  magic Elven tower created in the far distant past, prior to the establishment of the First Empire (see Legends of the First Empire)
• Warric: the kingdom from which the Nyphron Empire is launched; its ruler, King Lanis Ethelred, is one of the masterminds behind the new empire and one of its two regents, governing in lieu of the puppet empress
  • Aquesta: the capital of Warric and, later, of the Nyphron Empire
  • Colnora: an important merchant city
• Rhenydd: a kingdom fought over in the context of the creation of the Nyphron Empire; both Royce Melborn and Hadrian Blackwater are born in Rhenydd
  • Ratibor: the capital of Rhenydd and birthplace of Royce Melborn; also the location of a battle fought in the course of the foundation of the Nyphron Empire
  • Hintendar: the small village where Hadrian Blackwater was born
  • Amberton Lee: a place near Hintendar where Hadrian and his village boyhood friends used to play as children; at the end of the Riyria Revelations, the empire’s capital will be moved here
• Ghent: the territorial holdings of the Nyphron Church, the true power behind the throne of the newly-formed Nyphron Empire; a creed worshipping not only the god Maribor but also — and chiefly — his presumed demigod son, known as Novron and believed to have been the founder of the First (Novronian) Empire which collapsed almost a millennium prior to the events of the Riyria cycle
  • Ervanon: the capital of Ghent and location of the Crown Tower, the seat of the Patriarch (highest and all-powerful governing official) of the Nyphron Church
• Vernes: an important port city near the mouth of the Bernum River in an inlet of what is now known as the Ghazel Sea (and used to be known as Blue Sea 3000 years earlier, in the days of the First Empire, when in approximately the same location there used to be a “Rhune” settlement called Tirre).  It was in Vernes that Hadrian Blackwater first arrived back in Avryn after having spent over a decade of his life as a mercenary, ultimately for several years in Calis; a past that Hadrian is glad to have left behind.
• Manzant Salt Mines: an infamous prison from which nobody is believed to emerge alive, but from which Royce was freed by Professor Arcadius Latimer, Master of Lore at Sheridan University, with the aim of uniting him with Hadrian Blackwater
• Percepliquis: the erstwhile capital of the fallen Novronian Empire; a place of myth and legend whose location has been lost in the mists of time, and which is the subject of repeated expeditions, as it is believed to offer key documents and other evidence on the fate of the last known heir to the throne of Novron, who vanished in the chaos of the Novronian Empire’s destruction.  Professor Edmund Hall of Sheridan University was one person who set out on such a quest and is believed to have been the only one to ever be successful in locating Percepliquis, but he has never been seen again after his expedition, and his journal is kept under lock and key in the treasury of the Nyphron Church at the top of the sixty-stories high Crown Tower in Ervanon.