Volos Gulagin Koranov

Volos Gotanov Kulagin

Magus of House Verditius

Essential Nature

As of 1222, Volos is 27 years old, of decent height but middling build, with black, wiry hair. A true product of House Verditius‘ traditions, he is a quintessential lab rat whose actual casting abilities are less than impressive. Having spent his apprenticeship defying his parens’ attempts to enforce a well-rounded education, he is enormously specialized in Herbam, adequate in Corpus and Vim, and performatively uninterested in the other Forms.

History

Volos was born on the outskirts of Prague. He has no memory of his birth family, having been collected at the age of 5 by Krause of Verditius as part of the Magus’s attempts to build a new system of apprenticeship for magi. Volos was the mage’s fifth apprentice, but only the third trained using his new processes.

Unfortunately for Krause’s ambitions, Volos proved a very different challenge than his previous apprentices. Willful, stubborn, and frequently fixated on idiosyncratic notions, Volos, while an insatiable absorber of magical theory, was overall a poor student and far worse teacher. Expected to help educate the apprentices that came after him, Volos instead spent his time ‘playing with flowers’, pursuing pet theories and dead-ends, and associating with radicals from other covenants who only encouraged his defiance of Krause’s detailed plan for ‘systemic inculcation of wisdom’. Unpopular with his fellow apprentices as well as his parents, Volos found companionship at Tribunals with the Raspberries, an unofficial ‘mock’ guild composed of young mages and apprentices committed to overturning the foundations of Hermetic magic with radical new theories and techniques. With their encouragement, Volos began to develop a fixation on the ‘natural Vis’ of living beings and the ways that it could be tapped to support magical workings.

In the end, driven to rage by Volos’s defiance and in fear for the integrity of his decades-long experiment in training multiple apprentices at once, Krause attempted to bring the boy to heel with the threat of failure in his Gauntlet if he did not work strictly according to Krause’s instructions. Volos responded with deception, producing a magic item that appeared to meet Krause’s demands and winning his gloating approval before revealing the living, enchanted tree hidden within. While the ploy allowed Volos to qualify as a full Mage, it also cemented Krause’s absolute enmity and began a Verditius Vendetta between them that continues to this day.

After his graduation from Krause’s lab, Volos found himself in an unexpected difficulty - any authority willing to ignore Krause’s insistence of his incompetence as a mage was dismissive of his parens’ teaching methods or politically opposed to Krause and everything he had built. Either way, no one was willing to accept him into a Covenant. He was left drifting from one Raspberry’s guest suite to another for over two years before Magus Wymund alerted him to the intended restoration of the Roznov covenant.

Lab

Rather than a smaller chamber inside the keep or new tower, Volos laid claim to the old covenant's stables and began rebuilding them to fit his own needs. As his studies focus on harnessing the living strength of plants to empower and sustain magical workings, his lab is filled with native and imported bushes, trees, ferns, ivys, and flowers in all stages of growth, many etched and inlaid with metals and gemstones or woven together to combine their properties. Volos's experiments with growing trees to bonsai sizes to 'concentrate their energy' are mounted in trays on the counters, while vines and bushes trained into runic shapes line the walls on wire frames. A massive multi-story wooden frame extends the stable building into the former paddocks, covered with enchanted vines that keep the interior warm year-round for growing full-size trees. Shelves running the length of the building hold powders, liquids, gravels, and samples, all of them now clamped in place with stiff locking frames to try to keep the ghosts of the former stablemen from moving or smashing them, and stone channels carry water from the covenant's spring to basins scattered throughout.