Everard Lyschtager

Everard Lyschtager was an Angelborn Human born into a family which was, by the time of his birth, among the wealthiest names in the region around Cliffsunder. The Lyschtager line had carried its Celestial blood for generations before him, faint in some heirs and unmistakable in others, and the golden-eyed Everard wore his bearing proudly above his servants in the Lyschtager Estate. He grew up assuming, correctly, that this bearing would open doors long before his own merits ever had the chance to. He was sent in his youth to the Whiteharbour Academy, where his name bought him proximity to people who mattered and his talent shone.

Academically gifted, he would eventually become a professor of law at the Academy, an expert at negotiating contracts at a time when Cliffsunder's marble trade was booming.One of his students was a young Margrea Fayan, eldest daughter of the Fayan trading dynasty, one of the richest houses in Commona. Margrea trusted almost no one outside her own blood, and she found in her professor someone her calculus could accept as safe: an heir with old money, better manners than ambition, and no throne of his own to covet. When her parents stepped back and she seized control of the Fayan Trading Company outright, Everard was brought in as a senior officer of the company, one of the vanishingly few outsiders whose counsel she was known to entertain twice.

Everard's talent for contracts learned from years at the lectern served him well as he took up a position in one of Commona's most strategically important cities, and after years of success, Margrea fully trusted him to make agreements sound safe. He was dispatched to Emblem to oversee the company's interests there, and stayed for decades, watching colleagues and rivals alike live out full lives and die while he barely aged. It was in the capital city that he built a fortune of his own, separate from the Lyschtager name for the first time.

Blessed with exceptionally long life due to his celestial blood, he returned to Cliffsunder decades later. He kept his seat with the company, and after his return he sired two sons, Everard Lyschtager II and Earnest Lyschtager. Their mother's name was stricken from every record the household kept, and the staff of the Lyschtager Estate were forbidden, on pain of dismissal, from speaking of her at all. Even his own sons grew up unsure whether they'd shared a mother; however, that silence didn't extend to how he treated the two boys. Everard II carried the family's Celestial blood as visibly as Everard did, and Earnest did not, and he treated his younger son as something of an afterthought.

Everard decided early which of them would inherit his place at the company, and spent the rest of their childhoods away from the estate confirming it.