Jonathan River

Jonathan River is the young human mage whose journeys form the campaign Zincirsiz ("Unchained"). A foundling raised by elves and schooled at the Archon, he is curious, bookish and fond of his freedom, and he leaves the Archon as an independent mage rather than enter the Empire's service. He is tall, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and dresses in blue.¹²

Origins

Jonathan was found as a baby beside a river, wrapped in a blue cloth, with a music box at his side; he never knew his parents. The elf warrior Eleniel raised him until he was seven and then brought him to the Archon. River is not a family name but the name of the place where he was found, and his liking for blue goes back to that cloth. The music box, a gnomish piece said to be the only thing his family left him, plays only when turned by hand; he learned to use tools in order to mend it himself, and though his first attempt failed, he found that it can be repaired.³⁴⁵

He can move objects with his mind, a gift he hid at the Archon from everyone but his friend Dunk. He does not know where it comes from, and wonders whether being found near the sacred waters of the Calinor-dal River, or growing up among elves, shaped his powers. He was fifteen and then sixteen in his student years and eighteen on the road, though he once told an elf commander he was nineteen.⁶⁷⁸⁹

Character and beliefs

Jonathan loves theory, history, religion and the Zahiriye, the Archon's discipline of tools and crafted things, but is an ordinary hand at practical spellcraft and socially awkward. He thinks the Empire useful but says he would not obey an unjust law, and he regards the gods kindly while distrusting religious institutions. Against the court mage Kasius, who urged palace service, he argued for the independent mage who chooses good works by his own conscience; privately he thought the palace would put an arms shipment before a village's lives. He dislikes being forced into violent magic, and later called himself a practical mage who learns by travelling and trying things.^1011121314

His deeds do not always match his words about being a good person. He stole, lied and once tripped a child on purpose to take its blood for a ritual; on the road he cheated at dice and deceived soldiers. Yet he repeatedly refuses to leave others to die, and declines offers of power.¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷

At the Archon

When Dunk proposed that they win fame by rescuing a child said to be trapped in another plane, Jonathan put a guard named Daniel to sleep, slipped into a great master's room and copied a small passage from a book there. The ritual exploded and no child appeared, but that night a small, pink, jelly-like flying creature crept out from behind him and fell asleep in his hand. He named it Blink; a great master judged it no fiend and let him keep it. Besides Blink, his companion is the owl Bold, his familiar. He trained in the scribes' way of wizardry, which gave him a spellbook with a mind of its own.^18192021

When tools entrusted to the senior student Michael vanished, Jonathan, disguised as the suspected student Duran, searched Duran's room and recovered the bag from another student's room, stealing coin, wine and clothes and fouling the rooms as he went; he later beat an older student who had struck his friend. In a festival week he heard the lectures of the Sunlight siblings, felt closer to the traveller Elenor than to the archaeologist Haldir, and won a copy of Elenor's journal by answering her three riddles. For Dunk's competition potion he took a little soil by night from the grave of the great master Haimdal Bartons, putting the watchman to sleep and leaving a gold coin in his hand.^22232425

After Dunk was taken into palace service, the two kept writing through paired notebooks. Jonathan sold his late place in the examination order, passed with an adequate mark, said goodbye to Michael and left. To fund the road he sold his finest clothes, the book and signed letter of Master Valeri, an orphan who had lived as an independent mage, and his spare ink, but kept his journal, the music box and his Zahiriye gear.²⁶²⁷²⁸

The orcs and the mountain of Azbo

A month into his travels, earning his way by repairs and as a caravan guard, Jonathan was struck by a poisoned arrow from bandits in soldiers' uniforms and then fell, with them, into the hands of orcs. Bound beside the northern sellsword Olaf, he would not escape alone and leave the others to die. The orc chief and the shaman Gromak kept his mage's licence as a pledge and sent the pair to recover a relic taken from an ancestor's tomb.²⁹¹⁶³⁰

They found the relic, a rod that can lift illusions, with a camp of city guards working for a noble collector. Jonathan won their trust by offering repairs and a free inspection for curses, carved a fake rod, and by night Bold and Blink swapped it for the real one. Back at the orc camp they found the orcs fighting among themselves and a note foretelling the turmoil. In the mountains the rod gave him a vision of a crowd running to war through an orc's eyes, and he urged the chief and the shaman to find the tomb's legacy before their enemy.^3132333435

When a burning rain fell, he sheltered Olaf under his enlarged Zahiriye apron and worked out that a layer of magic in the air was souring the water. He found the tomb's hidden chamber, gathered its maps, journal and books, and, using the rod to unmake illusions and draw doors and stairs into being, led the way to the tomb of the great orc Azbo. Azbo showed them a thorned jewel of heavy malice which, he said, had been made from the organs of innocent elves as a gift to a god, and asked them to carry it to the chain-bearers to be destroyed.^3637383940

His sister Kirka broke in to claim the jewel. Jonathan stalled her, dangling it over the chasm with his mind, then vanished from sight and pulled it back; Azbo seized them all and flung them out of the mountain. Sick from the passage, Jonathan told a traveller that his own teleportation had gone wrong.⁴¹⁴²⁴³

Sınır Sapı

The jewel was now on his wrist in the look of a plain bracelet. Arrested by the quarantine forces around Sınır Sapı, he chose to explain himself rather than flee and bring the Empire after him. Released into the town, he wanted to help end its sickness but feared the witch hunters would blame him. He sorted books for Ektelyon, mended armour for the craftsman Fundin, and staged a glittering, fragrant display in the square that looked like a protective ward but was not, to win goodwill and draw the hunters' eye.^44454647

He accepted the elf commander's charge to find the missing Lady Teresa, then woke with Olaf in a dark cellar, unable to remember anything after setting out. With his consent Ektelyon searched his memory, a painful work that found a barrier placed from outside and brought back only fragments. In the likeness of Captain Markus he entered the captain's house and took a letter and a hidden box; opened from afar in the forest, the envelope turned into a bomb. He tested the town's orphans for a gift for magic, and lied that a child who had been watching the captain's house carried dangerous magic, so that he would be kept safe indoors.^4849505152

A hooded man linked to a note marked V showed him a drawing of creatures that shook him: from his lessons he knew them only as a thinking race beneath the earth with powers of the mind. He put Captain Markus to sleep by ambush and, wearing the captain's face, frightened him by hurling things about with his mind and threatening torture he never carried out.^53545556

Spoiler: A bargainGösterAçık ettiği: Zincirsiz #12; Zincirsiz #13 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

Then, with bowed head and reddened eyes, Markus spoke in another will. Jonathan hid his fear behind his borrowed face, gave the being his own name so as to speak as an equal, and asked for a truce of about a week in which no one would vanish or go mad. Afterwards he told his allies that he had confirmed their foe as a mind flayer.^57585960

Fearing that Olaf's mind might be read, he told him little of his plans. To act with official authority he proposed becoming a temporary consultant mage to the governor's house, drew up the document himself and saw it sealed, then worked the house's V crest onto his robe and his companions' gear. He borrowed from the elf commander a ring that shields the mind, offering Elenor's journal as a pledge, which the commander returned; he promised to tell everything if no solution were near in a week, and asked that if he died his own journal be sent to Eleniel.^6162636465

After another span of lost time he found Teresa, judged her the true Teresa from her bond with animals, and agreed to her plan to win the forest's fey to their side. A giant black water snake carried them to the spirit Aqua, who asked him for a gift; thinking of his loneliness and of the elf woman who had found him, he wept and gave his tears in a small vial. He accepted the spirit's heart under the nail of his little toe, on the terms that he kill the foe with its power and then give control to Teresa; if he failed, the heart would kill him. With it his senses deepened, animals guided him, and he could feel distant hunters through the ground.^6667686970

Spoiler: The battle in the caveGösterAçık ettiği: Zincirsiz #18 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

In the cave battle he badly wounded the mind flayer with a ball of fire, refused outright when the voice from the bracelet offered to even the odds, and, holding back a second fireball that would have burned his friends, killed it with five bolts of force. He spared a captured drow who told them where the bodies of the taken lay, gave the heart to Teresa by laying his hand in hers, and brought the dead back to Sınır Sapı. The innkeeper renamed the inn Jonathan's Place.^7172737475

His service was counted against that year's tax for independent mages, and he asked for a sealed letter in place of his lost licence. Ektelyon gave him an old letter of the chain-bearers signed by one Alcarin Nova.⁷⁶⁷⁷⁷⁸

The relic on his wrist

Jonathan says he carries the relic not to use it but to guard it until he can hand it to the chain-bearers, a charge greater even than the fate of the town. When he tried to take it off, eyes and a grin in the dark answered him from the bracelet; his spells began to work more easily, which gladdened and then frightened him. Its invitations came in dreams more and more often, and he kept refusing them. Later he made a limited bargain with the will inside it, that until he decided it would cause no harm on its own, while saying he feared it and wished to be rid of it.^79808182

The journey south

Tim, the governor's son, joined Jonathan and Olaf of his own will, and the three drove south for about a month and a half towards Kızılkale, where the chain-bearers were to receive the relic. Along the road Jonathan mended gear, identified magic items and gave advice. Turning aside at the sight of smoke, he found a burned settlement, tended a wounded old man named Mark and paid a traveller to take him for healing.^83848586

Spoiler: The burned settlementGösterAçık ettiği: Zincirsiz #19; Zincirsiz #20 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

The devils who had burned the settlement had dreamed that their master was there. When Jonathan stepped into view, eight imps and two bearded devils knelt to him as their master, though he did not lose himself to the relic. Playing the master, he had two imps sent back to the Nine Hells, made the devils release their captives, and received from the priest Lukas an ancient Celestial manuscript that the devils sought; Lukas held that it told of a great devil lord imprisoned by the gods, while the relic's will claimed it showed where that lord's sword lay. He told the devils that he had killed the priest, a lie, and sent them south, away from people.^8788899091

He then took a wilder road away from towns.⁹²

Elm and the vanishing lake

In the farming village of Elm, where a Victory Day alliance banner hung, Jonathan joined the search for a missing girl alongside the guest Max. The trail ended at a lake heavy with a complex magic tied to time; at dawn he watched it vanish, and the village itself appeared a ruin for a few moments before it looked normal again. Invisible, he took a box from under the bed of the sheep farmer Lena; it held only simple folk rituals, which he kept, before he mended the box and gave it back through the stranger Zar. When the girl walked towards the water as if called, he held back the pull with his mind until his friends pulled her free.^9394959697

Beneath the lake he found a hall of collections with doors of past, present and future. He showed Max the relic in its true necklace form, the wounds on his wrist plain to see. Through the door of the past they met a lord named Kuzon, who said they had come in the twelfth year after Victory Day; Jonathan introduced himself as Jon River, a mage of the Archon, and said that his party came from some two and a half centuries later. He took an illustrated ritual book in an unknown script, and found a sleeping man who remembered nothing of himself and could read every script; Jonathan would not kill him, and left him able to breathe water and to wake.^{9899100101102}

When they escaped, Tim told him by Sending that three months had passed and that he was now at Turunç Kale. Jonathan chose to look at Elm first and then go on to the castle.¹⁰³¹⁰⁴

Companions

• Dunk. His bunkmate and closest friend. When Dunk felt himself a prisoner at the palace, Jonathan suggested a potion that would leave him briefly unfit for work so that the two could travel together.¹⁰⁵¹⁰⁶
• Olaf. The northern sellsword captured with him by the orcs, who chose to stay at his side when Jonathan offered him a share of the coin and his leave. Olaf told him of his werewolf nature.³⁴¹⁰⁷
• Tim. The governor's son, who invited him to dinner, where they talked of family, school, the orphans and Jonathan's dreams of exploration. Jonathan promised the forest's spirit to help him leave the town.¹⁰⁸¹⁰⁹
• Bold and Blink. His owl familiar, through whose eyes he scouts, and the pink shapeshifting creature from his student ritual, which he describes as born of an alchemical experiment and without a human soul.³¹¹⁰

Spoiler: A private talkGösterAçık ettiği: Zincirsiz #14; Zincirsiz #18 · Ne okuduğunuzu söyleyin

It was Tim who sealed Jonathan's consultancy. Speaking with him alone after the leaders' dinner, Jonathan saw that Tim, a shapeshifter, also bears the governor's face; asked whether he and his father were the same person, Tim answered by telling his past.⁶³¹¹¹

Open questions

Who his parents were and why he can move things with his mind are not known; he has only guesses about the elves and the river. The relic still travels with him, undelivered.⁷¹¹²