Malrec Ashvale

Professor Ashvale, putting the fire exactly where he wants it, and nowhere else

Malrec is a lean, upright man of forty-eight, squarely in the prime of his life as D-grade folk measure it, with a severe, clean-shaven face, dark hair combed straight back, and a pair of thin wire-rimmed spectacles that he looks over far more often than he looks through. Nearly everyone who meets him takes him for human. He dresses with the formality of a man who spent twenty years at the head of a lecture hall: a long dark robe patterned in charcoal and deep red, a high crimson collar, a heavy mantle of gold filigree across the shoulders fastened with a blue-stoned clasp, and a sweeping cape lined in dark wine. A broad belt hung with buckled pouches of chalk, reagents, and notebooks sits at his waist, because he does not trust any calculation he has not written down.

Malrec is an Ifrit, but his elemental ancestry is subtle enough that he passes easily for human. His tells are mostly supernatural rather than physical: his skin is always unusually warm to the touch, his eyes reflect a faint orange-red in the dark, and his body temperature climbs noticeably whenever he channels magic, enough that people standing beside him during a long casting sometimes step back without knowing why. He hates being asked whether his elemental blood is why he is good at fire magic. He was also born under the Phoenixborn Ifrit, which he maintains is a coincidence and which everyone else considers a punchline. His fire behaves with unnatural precision. He can send flame through a doorway without touching the frame, burn a weapon out of someone's hand without scorching their skin, or raise a wall of fire exactly six inches in front of an advancing formation. There is no wasted magic, and that, more than any explosion, is what makes watching him fight so unsettling.