Grand Maester Cyrus

Grand Maester Cyrus, born Cyrus Hightower, is the Grand Maester of the Iron Throne after his election in late 382 AC. Prior to his election, he served as the Archmaester for Medicine and was well-known in the Citadel for his tenacity and humorless personality. As a former Hightower, he is a distant cousin to the current Lord Androw Hightower and to many other important nobles, Queen Myrcella II Tyrell included.

## Appearance and Character

Cyrus is an aging man of middling height with a slim build, one built better for hours spent hunched over books than for hours in the training ring. He has a square jaw with a sometimes sallow look about his face, which is downturned in a perpetual frown, lines trailing downwards from his mouth and wrinkled across his forehead. His gray-blue eyes are sharp and unyielding. He keeps his graying blond hair and beard closely cropped and neat. His attire is always the same; a large, sweeping cloak the color of thunderclouds, with his long, colorful maester's chain wrapped about his neck.

The Grand Maester conducts himself with utmost dignity at all times. Above all, he is unrelentingly persistent in his studies and his pursuits and questions everything except his own hard-earned knowledge. He considers himself a foremost expert in many of the subjects of study at the Citadel, and is not afraid to seek credit where credit is due, sometimes absorbed by his own brilliance to the point of considering others as naturally lesser. He is stern to a fault, believing humor to be a weakness, and intense emotion the sign of a feeble mind. He is not, however, always grumpy, though his best moods tend to be observed as simply neutral. He believes strongly in pragmatism and realism, discounting anything that is not backed by hard, scientific evidence (such as religious faith or mythical tales). He considers people to be fundamentally base creatures, and learning to be the only way to rise above nature. He nurses a soft spot in his heart for animals and for his daughter, Alyssa.

## History

Cyrus was born in late 332 AC, in the middle of winter, to Humfrey Hightower, the fourth son of late Lord Leyton Hightower. Cyrus spent his youth in the lap of relative luxury, amidst a large family with plenty of heirs. Thus, from the start, he was considered non-essential and was raised with more freedom than was perhaps proper.

From the time he was old enough to hold a book, Cyrus was a voracious reader, but it was not until his young adulthood that he began to show the signs of a true scholar. In his childhood, he was stubborn and resistant to the maester's lessons, absorbing himself not in the subjects that were proper for a young lordling but the things he wanted most to learn. He flitted from subject to subject with little thought, started grand projects he never finished and was a terror about the keep, never able to sit still for long. As he grew, he took advantage of his family's status and forayed into the many luxuries the Hightower and the city of Oldtown could provide, whether it was drink, parties and company, gambling or street-racing.

Yet, while he was not hung-over, Cyrus had an increasingly insatiable thirst for knowledge, and at the time of his father's death in 349 AC, his family sent him to the Citadel with hopes of straightening him out.

Straighten he did. The young man thrived in the structure and cutthroat environment of the Citadel, gaining metal links in rapid succession. Once he forayed into medicine, he found his true calling, and became known for his radical methods of curing various ailments and his skills in diagnosis simply by observation. Cyrus studied not only the body, but forayed deeply into the study of the mind, a previously looked-over subject. He earned links in all the basic subjects, excelling particularly in languages, poisons and herbcraft, mathematics and astronomy.

Cyrus rose to the rank of Archmaester, fulfilling the role as premier healer at the Citadel. He was a sought-after teacher and colleague. During his many years at the Citadel, Cyrus fathered a bastard daughter with a mysterious woman with whom he conducted a secret affair. Instead of abandoning the child when the woman perished in childbirth, Cyrus sought to care for her, placing her in various homes with peasant families and plying them with coin to raise her in secret. There are none at the Citadel who know of the girls' existence, though a few who have suspected the man of some sort of illicit activity, having noticed his frequent absences and trips into the city.

## Recent History

Despite some of his colleagues' suspicions of him, when old Grand Maester Hendry breathed his last, Cyrus was elected to serve in his place as Grand Maester of the Iron Throne. Though it has been half a year since his election, Cyrus has only just arrived in the city a fortnight before the first moon of 383 AC to take up his place, with his daughter Alyssa hidden away in a small manse at the outskirts of the city. Though he will blame his delay on the many preparations that must be undertaken for a maester to move his laboratory and library across the continent, he was truly working painstakingly in secret to ensure a proper place for his daughter, coaching her on what she must do to remain hidden in plain sight.

## Family

Cyrus is the son of the late Humfrey Hightower, brother of the late Lord Baelor "Brightsmile" Hightower, from whom the current line of Hightowers descends. He is thus a first cousin twice removed to Lord Androw Hightower and his siblings and to Queen Myrcella II Tyrell and Princess Elinor Tyrell.

Cyrus has one daughter, Alyssa Flowers, though he maintains her existence as a secret.