“Patchwork” Vaelor – High Elf Aberrant-Mind Sorcerer

Name: “Patchwork” Vaelor
Race: High Elf
Role/Class: Sorcerer Level 9 (Aberrant Mind)
Appearance: Vaelor is all sharp angles and haunted grace. Tall and slender even for a high elf, he moves with the careful precision of someone constantly bracing for unseen impact. His skin is a pale, almost silvery gold, marred by fine, branching scars that trace from his temples down his neck and along his arms—like lightning frozen beneath the skin. Embedded at his temples and along the back of his skull are slender plates of dull metal and crystal, half-healed into bone; faint lines of arcane circuitry pulse dimly beneath them when his powers stir.

His hair, once a glossy raven black, is now shot through with streaks of white where the implants burned through. It’s worn loose to his shoulders, often falling forward to half-hide the hardware and the faint glow of his eyes. Those eyes were once a clear elven green; now their irises swirl with motes of violet and electric blue, like storm-light caught in glass. When his emotions spike, subtle distortions ripple around him—air shimmering, nearby trinkets rattling, the occasional spark crawling over metal.

Vaelor dresses in practical layers adapted from outpost gear and elven robes: a dark, high-collared coat reinforced with stitched-in plates and fiber, worn over a simple tunic and fitted trousers. Sigils and small stabilizing devices are sewn into the inner lining, each humming softly. A harness of straps and buckles across his torso anchors a handful of palm-sized “grounding nodes”—discs of metal and crystal he can slam onto surfaces during flare-ups. At his hip, a slim dagger hangs more as a habit than a serious weapon; the real danger is in his bare hands and the invisible static that follows him.

Backstory

Vaelor once embodied the proud, measured promise of high elven scholarship. Raised in a quiet enclave of lorekeepers and arcanists, he studied mind magic and the subtler currents of the Weave, more interested in thoughts and feelings than in fireballs. He excelled at delicate telepathic exercises, gently bridging minds to ease negotiations or calm panic. His future was clear: a mediator, a psychic ward-mage, a quiet influence holding frayed alliances together.

Then word came from the forest outposts: engineers and casters there were developing neural-interface implants—devices that could let a single mind coordinate multiple defenses, communicate silently across ramparts, or sync with constructs in perfect harmony. To many, the idea was terrifying. To Vaelor, it sounded like the logical extension of his studies: not replacing minds, but knitting them together more efficiently.

He volunteered.

The first implant—small, experimental, anchored at his temple—worked… briefly. He felt the hum of an arcane turret as if it were an extra limb, could taste the “flavor” of its charge and nudge its aim with a thought. Then came static, pain, and darkness. The device was removed, mostly, and declared “a setback.” Vaelor insisted on continuing. Each new attempt promised to fix the previous flaws: more stable housing, better dampening, refined spell matrices.

Each one left another scar.

By the third procedure, it was clear the system wasn’t simply failing—it was changing him. The implants stopped responding as planned and instead began acting as conduits for something else: raw, aberrant psionic force that bent both magic and machinery around him. He awoke from the last surgery with voices like distant radio signals whispering beneath his thoughts, with devices around him sparking and twitching when he lost focus.

The outpost declared the project “terminated” and wrote Vaelor off as an unfortunate but valuable data set. They tried to stabilize him with dampening collars, grounding rigs, and supervised shifts, treating him as both patient and hazard. It was Vaelor who walked away—literally, in the middle of a storm of glitching constructs—when he realized they no longer saw him as a person, only as a problem to record.

Now he drifts between the fringes of the forest outposts and the deeper woods, a living nexus where psionics, magic, and machinery intersect. Sometimes he’s hired as a specialist: brought in to shut down a rogue construct, communicate with a damaged defense array, or track psychic interference. Sometimes he’s hunted: by factions who want to replicate (or weaponize) what he’s become, and by those who blame him for malfunctions he never meant to cause.

Vaelor hates what the implants did to him—but he refuses to believe he’s only a victim. If he can learn to steer the storm in his skull, he might yet turn that damage into something that actually protects people, instead of listing them under “acceptable losses.”