Dunk

Dunk is the closest friend and bunkmate of Jonathan River at the Archon in the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"). The two are thought clever but idle students and are often punished together; they share a hidden corner behind the dormitories, and Dunk knows of Jonathan's gift for moving things with his mind. His own passion is mixtures and potions.¹²

Appearance and craft

Dunk's pointed ears and violet eyes are the result of potions he has tried on himself; he is not an elf. Rather than memorise formulas, he tries to understand what each ingredient does on its own, an improvisation that sometimes leaves bodily side effects. He won a spoon that stirs by itself, for potions that need an hour of stirring, in a class competition.³⁴⁵

When he tried to summon a familiar, boasting that he would call up something mighty, even a dragon, he ended up with a crow, which has since grown on him.⁶⁷

He finds the village he comes from dull and has no wish to go back. He supports Jonathan's wish for an independent life as a friend, though not for Jonathan's political reasons; his own dream is to roam the mountains and fine landscapes gathering ingredients and to sell what he makes to adventurers in the cities, and he is warier of journeys to other planes. The two once imagined that one of them would keep a potion shop while the other went exploring.⁸⁹¹⁰

The child in the Ethereal Plane

Dunk had heard of an eight-year-old child said to have been trapped in the Ethereal Plane by an experiment years before, which the Archon presents as an accident, and he proposed that he and Jonathan rescue the child and win fame. He dug up the child's grave and found no body there, and, starting from a summoning account in a history lesson about the God Slayers, set out to combine rituals.¹¹¹²¹³

On the night of the attempt Dunk brewed the mixture while Jonathan drew the circle. As Dunk struck a borrowed suppressing rod on the ground, the mixture exploded in on itself: smoke and a foul smell rose, but no child appeared. The two concluded that perhaps the child had never existed at all.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

Life at the Archon

An early result of Dunk's research into seeing in the dark was a mixture that did not let the drinker see in darkness but sharpened the senses and quickened the speech for about a minute, with no lasting after-effect. On another night, while Jonathan went about a secret errand, a fight broke out between Dunk and another student in a corridor, and Dunk was put in the Archon's holding room, where students are kept to calm down after minor fights while their punishment is decided; Jonathan joined him there after beating the other student. At a later reception, held at a great master's order to thank them for their help, Dunk was given a book offering an unusual way of looking at potions.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

The potion competition

At a feast for visiting elf and dwarf scholars, the imperial bureaucrat Derek Mimaran announced a potion competition, showing a sample that revived a wilting flower with a single drop. Eight years earlier its prize had been a free licence as an independent mage, in return for regular teaching, and Dunk wanted badly to win. Doubting that he could beat the masters with ordinary ingredients, he tried a mixture he said came from the teachers; Jonathan found him by following paw prints, his trousers torn and his feet back to normal.²⁰²¹²²

Dunk believed that the soil of a great mage's grave might hold its power. Jonathan, thinking this hearsay, judged that the grave of a sorcerer, born with magic, would serve better; he chose one named Haimdal Bartons and took a little soil from it by night, without touching the coffin, and gave it to Dunk. The damage to the grave was condemned the next day, but the missing soil went unnoticed, and Dunk spent the remaining days on his potion.²³²⁴²⁵

At the judging Jonathan cast a spell to steady his nervous friend. Dunk's potion split its pot and soil and raised a flower the size of a middling tree, and Michael pointed out two teachers grinning at the pair. Derek named Dunk the winner and gave him a purse of gold, but this time the boon was not a licence: it was the right to go to White City the next day, finish his examinations there, and serve the emperor, and later the prince, for life at the Marble Palace. It was not an offer that could be refused, and Dunk was crushed.²⁶²⁷²⁸

After a bittersweet farewell drink with Jonathan and Michael, Dunk was gone by morning. He left Jonathan a notebook and a note: with his prize money and the help of the great master Yotun he had bought items through which the two could speak at a distance, and he meant to keep following his friend's adventures. Jonathan wrote his reply in the notebook.²⁹³⁰

Letters from the palace

The notebook trembles when a message arrives. Dunk's letters complain of the court: protocol dinners bore him and he asks Jonathan for tales of adventure. When Jonathan asked him to search the genealogies for a noble house near Bozyurt, he agreed to look once the dinner was over, and later reported that he could find no one named Marvel in the records.³¹³²³³

Asked about the sickness at Sınır Sapı, Dunk promised to inquire. He later wrote that the name appears in texts a century old, that the region has known civilisation for nearly a thousand years, and that there were events within and beneath the forest. In old notes of the chain-bearers he found that underground forces had once fought the forest spirits and their guardians there, and that the chain-bearers had helped the surface side and driven the underground back; he guessed this was a thousand to fifteen hundred years ago, and suggested the underground side may have been drow.³⁴³⁵³⁶

Meanwhile the court tried to marry him to a bureaucrat's daughter, and he made potions for the emperor, his guests and his soldiers without being allowed to leave the palace. He applied for posts outside White City, with the elves and for the Archon, but none was granted: kept near the Marble Palace for his talent, he wrote that the work he loved most had made him a prisoner, and his once cheerful letters grew narrower. He lacks nothing, he says, and sits at tables where even the emperor may be present, but he wants to see the mountains and hates this life.³⁷³⁸³⁹

Jonathan suggested a potion that would leave him briefly unfit for work so that he could leave and travel with him; Dunk answered that older potion masters would quickly cure him, but said he would think about it. Later he wrote that he was advancing towards becoming the chief potion-maker and could reach the private collections, though the emperor had refused his request for two years of study among the elves. When Jonathan sent him a copy of an unknown script that runs from right to left, Dunk had never seen its alphabet; he could not find it in the ordinary collection and undertook to search the private ones. Jonathan keeps promising that he will soon spirit him away.⁴⁰⁴¹⁴²