Gaiseric

Almost nothing of how Gaiseric looked has come down through the ages beyond the skull-shaped helm he took into battle, the source of his best-known title, the Skull King. Other, grander names cling to his memory as well, among them the Supreme King, the Demon King, and the King of Galloping Death.

The legends paint Gaiseric as a tyrant once his wars were won, indulging in luxury while crushing his people beneath ever-steeper taxes and remaking his capital into a playground of feasting and excess. He is remembered for locking away a sage and torturing him without end for refusing to stop condemning the king's crimes, a cruelty that, in the stories, at last drew down the fury of heaven.

Roughly a thousand years back, in the country that would one day be Midland, feuding tribes and city-states clawed at one another through what later generations called the age of warlords. Gaiseric, whose life before then is lost to record, appeared with an army that seemed to spring from nowhere and beat these factions into obedience, raising the first empire humankind had ever seen. Ruling as the Skull King, he drove laborers gathered from every corner of his realm to raise a grand capital he called Midland, a name framing it as the land set at the center of all nations. The Skull King's own fairy tale tells how an offended god sends angels down onto the imperial city, unleashing disasters that wipe it out in one night. Its ruins sank far underground and were later sealed under the Tower of Rebirth to bury the kingdom's shameful roots, and among that rubble lie countless bodies marked with the Brand of Sacrifice.

His conquests survive in that fairy tale and in the records of the Holy See, one of which recounts the sage he tortured until an angel descended. A thousand years after his empire crumbled, the city of Falconia arises, and the archmage Gedfring discloses that it is none other than Gaiseric's ruined capital brought back to life. Griffith, a conqueror of like stature, holds up Gaiseric's empire as the template for the second empire he intends to raise. Because the Midland royal house is believed to be the last line still bearing the blood of the Skull King, Princess Charlotte stands as his sole surviving descendant.