JustCyr

Alaric Clockwell — Backstory

Alaric Clockwell was born in a small, impoverished town on the edge of the Imperial Crownlands as the only son of a blacksmith father and a laundress mother. The town was an ordinary place—one that survived by swallowing the dust of imperial roads, neither growing nor dying, where the same tired faces looked out with the same exhaustion year after year. Edric Clockwell was a good blacksmith, but being a good man never brought wealth; the family lived off what others discarded. Even as a child, Alaric realized something: in this world, the strong thrive while the weak rot—and he had no intention of rotting.

At fourteen, he had effectively taken over his father’s workshop; Edric’s hands had begun to tremble, while customers noticed that Alaric completed work faster and cheaper. At sixteen, he redesigned the town’s watermill, sold the design to the settlement, and kept all the profit for himself—he gave his father a single coin, not out of spite, but because the idea had been his. At eighteen, he was producing defensive mechanisms for small traders around the Crownlands, selling them to anyone in need at his own price. Empathy did not exist in Alaric’s vocabulary; he saw human suffering, calculated opportunity, and acted. Emotional sentiment, in his view, was a luxury for the weak.

Growing up in the town had taught him this: throughout history, humanity has always united under a single banner when at its strongest—and those who carried that banner were never ordinary men. Alaric instinctively viewed people hierarchically: the intelligent and strong at the top, the masses below. He placed himself unquestionably at the top. He believed the weak were not meant to be protected, but used; not deserving of mercy, but of efficiency. He did not like justice—he saw it as a story written by the strong, and he wanted to be on the side that wrote it.

He hated elves; and dark elves in particular, with a cold, deep-rooted disgust that had settled into his bones. This was not abstract prejudice—when he was young, the plans for his first major invention, which he was transporting along the Crownlands roads, were stolen by a Mali’ker who introduced himself as a partner and later sold them in another city under a different name. Knowing that dark elves operated through closed cultural and familial bonds among their own, Alaric concluded that this cohesion was being used as a weapon against human societies. Elves lived long, looked down on humans, and organized among themselves—this, to Alaric, was an unforgivable threat. He would not sit at a negotiation table with a dark elf face-to-face; no deals, no offers. Only turning his back.

By the age of twenty, the town had become too small for him—not small, but suffocating. The people around him were trapped in the same cycle: birth, work, death. Alaric decided not to break that cycle, but to become its master. He did not say goodbye to his family—he packed his belongings, took his savings, and stepped onto the main road of the Crownlands. He did not look back. There was nothing worth looking at.

Alaric Clockwell entered the world: harsh, resentful, frugal, and guided by a moral code entirely his own. He wanted wealth—but not for money alone. Money meant power, and power meant never bowing to anyone. And Alaric Clockwell had only ever truly feared one thing in his life: being forced to kneel before someone.