Ghyll:Llysver the Doomed
Best known as the brother of Harover, one of the most famous artists of the Dreamy period, Llysver the Doomed (b. circa -1690 EC d. circa -1620 EC) was appointed a magistrate of the Alpha peninsula (the peninsula north of the Primus Dagger Sea) in -1666 EC. Though magistrates at that time were only intended to serve as a referee in settling disputes, Llysver was effectively the ruling monarch of Alpha and the adjacent shorelands. Llysver was never particularly interested in exercising power over the region under his control. Rather, he spent much of his time immersed in his studies of forestry and history.
As a forester, Llysver's influence remains visible to this day. Much of the apprish and reguescober which is grown in the Alpha region dates to the establishment of these woods by Llysver. When a penalty was warranted in a case that had been brought before him, Llysver would penalize his prisoners to a number of trees (instead of a number of sentences, as is the usual contemporary practice).
But most interestingly, Llysver was a historian of the Avazian epoch. Although only scraps of his writings remain (many of his manuscripts were mulched and used to bed seedlings after his death), much of what we know of the Avazian goddess Busco comes from Llysver's version of the Busco legend which was incorporated into Kebonston Lefkrane's Life in the Courts of Royalty.
Lefkrane was visiting Alpha in -1633 EC when he called on Llysver's court. Harover had recently unveiled his latest portrait (Busco Whompin' Dem Bad Guys), which sat in Llysver's mandible chamber. Upon seeing the portrait, Lefkrane beligerently declared his infamous line, "Those mandibles are way too big!"
In response to this artcrime, Llysver ordered Lefkrane to write out 100 copies of his Legend of Busco. (Legal scholars might be interested in noting that this is one of the first known instances of a sentence penalty, rather than manual labor penalty.) Once his punishment was completed, Llysver allowed Lefkrane to keep the pages. After Lefkrane's disappearance, his publisher found these pages, and figuring he could charge more if the book was a few pages thicker, he incorporated them into Life in the Courts of Royalty.
Citations: Busco, Dagger Seas, Dreamy period.
--Brother Arfrus 13:43, 12 Aug 2005 (EDT)
