• Dusty Tomes

Dusty Tomes was an archmage of the royal court and the eighth baron Vanhoover. He was a yellow unicorn stallion with gray (formerly coffee-brown) mane and brown eyes, a long goatee, and a wizardly monocle.

Dusty was born in the Royal Age to unicorn nobles in Canterlot. He received an excellent education, including several years as an advanced student at the Arcane Helix. Always playing things by the book, Dusty advanced through the ranks of the established hierarchy of magi mainly through quiet competence, careful not to step on too many hooves. Eventually, after his predecessor retired due to magical senility, Dusty Tomes became Archmage of the Royal Court. He married late in life to Mercy, a talented healer 149 years his junior, in 692. (She noted that he was a major stallion, as confirmed in the biographical information above.) Dusty personally lead several of the RRC’s finest paramilitary agents on a mission to arrest Eldritch Lore, a former student of Dusty’s. Dusty was mortally wounded in his epic final battle with Eldritch Lore (stricken with a rapidly fatal magical pestilence, The Itching Death, specifically; he protected his comrades with an area-of-effect shielding spell, but was outside its area of effect himself) and died soon after driving her from the Helix. Believing (correctly) that his soul would be trapped in the Dread Dimensions by Eldritch’s parting curse which bound him to her throne room (cast to prevent him pursuing her when she fled), he asked them to come back for him, but they never did.

The magical pestilence killed Dusty within days of his friends’ departure. His soul, bound to the tower by Eldritch’s curse, could not depart for the little pony afterlife. Unfortunately, over the decades, Dusty Tomes became angry and embittered, renouncing the power of friendship and his life of apparent selfless goodness, as his trust in his friends had now apparently condemned him to a bleak, lonely eternity. He used his magic to animate his own skeletal remains and inhabit them, becoming a fearsome undead mage, although his influence in the Dread Dimensions was limited by the fact that he could not leave Eldritch’s throne room at the top of the Arcane Helix. Still, through his minions, he became known as a local power, and all inhabitants of the Helix regarded him with awe and dread, as “the Deathless One.” The dragon Lürax feared him especially, mistakenly believing him to be Starswirl the Bearded.