Grimalkin the Great

Grimalkin weaving a dream sphere.

### Aliases

The Night Panther, The Dreamweaver, The Sultan of Sleep, The Sorcerer of Somnolence, The Star-Eyed Shaman

### Occupation

Stage magician

**Grimalkin the Great** is a world-famous Leonian tabaxi sorcerer/warlock and stage magician. He is one of the top acts working for Harlequins Brigade and performs tricks based around the night sky, stars, sleep, and dreams. He claims to be able to cure any insomniac and help them sleep forever.

Grimalkin was trapped on Tor with his rakshasa strike force after the resealing of the planes at the end of the Affliction, and Agnes D'Eclatte forced the rakshasa into servitude with the fire giants. Grimalkin and his fellow rakshasa plotted to escape after 100 years and made it out into Acqua Vecchia. He came into contact with a group of vampires who had revived the defeated Dalk Dranzorg, the vampire who had started the Affliction. As the Arcanaissance was flourishing in Inferny, Dalk and his vampires took on new personas in the center of commerce and became the Dominici family. They formulated a plan alongside Grimalkin and the rakshasa to reclaim the Links of Power by setting up a guild of entertainers in the town of Acqua Vecchia, which was the town where druids gathered for Everlight each year.

Many of their initial attempts to secure the links from the archruids failed miserably, and in frustration Grimalkin began working on a theory that he could open a portal to the Nine Hells for his rakshasa by extracting ancient human blood from tieflings and using it to create a race of blood-human hybrid creatures that would have a planar linkage to the vanished humans who were swept off the Material Plane in ancient times.

Grimalkin studied how planar portals worked in ancient times and how rituals were used to open them. He studied the Astral Sea extensively along with the Nine Hells. He was obsessed with meeting his old master Lucina Occolor back in the Nine Hells, and he formed his Harlequins Guild around hellish entertainments and sadism.

In the Age of Artifice, Grimalkin became interested in the new form of high-powered magic and its potential to open a portal. When one of his extraction experiments escaped, he brooded that his blood portal would never work. So he traveled to Leonia and made a name for himself as a popular stage magician while learning about artificial magic in secret. Prior to the Elder War, he heard rumors that dwarven scientists were working on a machine that could create planar portals and break through the ancient seals.

He enlisted the Dominicis to spy on the dwarven scientists. They learned that a portal machine was nearly operational and that a rogue scientist had created his own smaller machine, but it was stolen by an archdruid of the Wardens, which the Dominicis were secretly funding and keeping an eye on. The Dominicis learned that the Wardens whisked the machine away to the Ravenwood Forest for study. Grimalkin traveled to the forest and killed the archdruid Crone o' the Wood, taking her persona. It was then he realized he had finally come into possession of one of the Links of Power he had spent so long trying to acquire. Finding that the gyrosphere wasn't powerful enough to creat a portal, he left it with the kenku in the town of Drvo, telling them it was a relic from their nature gods and a signal that they must stop what they used to do and start digging for coal, going as far down as they could. Though he had just said this to mess with them, he found that they actually listened to him and started digging, eventually using the gyrosphere to open a small planar seam.

Grimalkin now had two options to get what he wanted. He had one Link of Power but needed six others, and the other archdruids would see through his disguise as they had done before. He also had a true planar opening, though it was going into the Primordial Plane, not the NIne Hells as he would have wanted. He decided he would need to convince an unwitting group of people to enact his plan for him. With Everlight approaching, he could find non-druids to bring the Crone's Link of Power to the gathering. And he had recently learned that the girl who had escaped from extraction years ago had been found by a Dominici spy selling fake jewels.