The Sorcerer-Kings were a group of originally twelve of the greatest practitioners of High Magic and Sorcery in Eryndor.
Sorcerer-King Virulan
For most of the Age of Magic, the Endless Night was a distant threat. It appears in texts as a warning, a boundary, an abstraction. That changes with the Sorcerer-King Virulan.
According to surviving sources, Virulan begins as a loyal servant of Mythrael. At some point near the end of his reign he hears a voice at the edge of his workings. Not in dreams, but in the moments between spells, in the stillness when the Wellspring pauses before it answers. This sweet voice shows him that all magic he knows bends around an empty centre, a silence that none of the sung Gods can fill. It tells him that silence can be his.
What happened that day between the Endless Night and Virulan is a secret he kept to his final death with the shattering of the Shardspire, but with his acceptance, he became the first of the Darksworn, the first to take the Dark Oaths.
Sorcerer-King Walkyrion
The first Sorcerer-King to rise to prominence during the Age of Magic, and the first to hold the title of High Luminarch. Most later chronicles treat Walkyrion as the architect of the early the Luminarchate, the one who managed to turn a loose fellowship of city-states devoted to Mythrael into something like a continent-spanning order. How much of that is his own work and how much is later mythmaking is unclear, but even his enemies record him as a gifted organiser and a relentless diplomat.
Walkyrion’s surviving edicts, preserved only in quotation in later legal codes, focus less on grand spells and more on rules: who may study High Sorcery, how far a ritual may extend without council approval, what duties a ruler owes to the Wellspring and to their subjects. He is credited with establishing the first councils that would later elect the High Luminarch, though in his lifetime the title seems to have been his by acclamation more than by formal vote. Some Dwarven sources describe him as “the Lawgiver of Magic”, not always kindly, accusing him of trying to bind powers that did not wish to be bound.
He dies before the end of the Age, and long before the fall of Lavellor. Later Luminarchate factions invoke his name freely, each claiming to be his true heirs. What is certain is that by the time of Virulan, Walkyrion’s careful limits on sorcery are mostly honoured in the breach, if at all.
Sorcerer-King Aurozan
Aurozan is usually placed two or three generations after Walkyrion and is remembered, when remembered at all, as the “builder-king” of Lavellor’s high days. Fragmentary accounts credit him with overseeing the expansion of Lavellor around the Shardspire, the laying out of the great processional avenues, and the founding or consolidation of the so-called Halls of Magic as formal institutions of advanced study.
In magical history, Aurozan is tied to the first true “world-works” of the Age of Magic: broad, stable enchantments anchored in geography rather than individuals. Later texts mention his name in connection with early climate-wards, river stabilisation rites, and the great warding nets that once wrapped the heart of Rhaedwyn. Whether he personally devised these workings or simply sponsored the magi who did is impossible to say.
Sorcerer-King Aktal Xylir
Aktal Xylir is the only Dwarf counted among the Twelve Sorcerer-Kings of the Luminarchate, and the one about whom the most contradictory stories are told. Some human sources call him “the Sorcerer of the Swamps” and reduce him to a footnote. Dwarven records and later clan-lore tell a different story: of a mage-king from the Wetlands who rose to sit in Lavellor’s councils and who specialised in containment, wards and the crafting of Aethercraft.
Legends say Aktal Xylir survived the destruction of the Shardspire and the fall of Lavellor when most of his peers died. In Dwarven tradition he sees the end coming before the Last Battle and quietly prepares for it. When the Last Battle tears Lavellor apart, he and a small retinue of mages and apprentices vanish into the swamps. There they carve out the region now called Mistmourn and lay the foundations of the later Xylir clan.