Alastair Stone

## Biography

Alastair Stone began life as the only child of Orion and Peregrine Stone, and the newest of an unusually long line of talented mages, in Surrey, England. Alastair never knew his mother; he was told she’d abandoned the family and disappeared shortly after he was born. He attended Barrow, an exclusive all-boys private school, until his father withdrew him early to begin his magical apprenticeship. Alastair was precocious in that he’d begun to practice magic rituals clandestinely on his own, prior to completing secondary school. When he was caught, Orion brought him home, set him up with a tutor, and arranged for him to apprentice to William Desmond, one of the top mages in the world. Details of Alastair’s apprenticeship can be found in Path of Stone.

During his later apprenticeship and university years, Alastair spent most of his off time with Imogen Desmond, William’s daughter. After graduation, everyone – including Alastair – assumed they would marry. Imogen, however, didn’t want to compete with magic for Alastair’s attention as she and her mother had, with her father. She ended the relationship kindly, but firmly. Feeling unrooted, Alastair took an offer to teach at Stanford University he’d initially discounted, and moved to California.

Soon after beginning his professorship at Stanford, Alastair is drawn into a murder mystery. This kicks off his inadvertent side-gig as an investigator of strange occurrences the police can’t explain, much less solve, while trying to keep the world of magic under wraps. He also becomes acquainted with powerful, if mysterious and even eccentric, practitioners such as Madame Huan and Stefan Kolinsky.

Stone eventually takes an apprentice, Ethan Penrose. Unfortunately, naïve Ethan is quickly subverted by a group of young dark mages, headed by Trin Blackburn. Events Trin precipitates leads to disaster for an elderly woman Alastair is trying to help, as well as the deaths of both Ethan, and Stone’s old friend, Tommy Langley. Trin escapes, though her two partners are also killed. She becomes obsessed with Alastair, and becomes a kind of nemesis.

### Pause here a moment WARNING, Possible Spoilers Ahead

Stone’s penchant for unraveling impossible puzzles puts him in the paths of Jason and Verity Thayer, who ultimately become his best friends while they investigate the extra-dimensional entities known as the Evil. Their attempts to find the source of the Evil’s entry into our dimension leads them to Las Vegas, where Alastair becomes acquainted with wealthy and purposefully enigmatic mage, Trevor Harrison. His magic is like nothing Alastair has seen, and he seems as ruthless as he is powerful.
Harrison is mortally wounded in the effort to get to the dimensional portal the Evil use to enter our world, and sacrifices himself by going through the portal and blowing it up from the other side. Stone later learns that Harrison somehow survived, and sent Alastair his notes on how his magic works, though they’re difficult to decipher and require long study

Meanwhile, Evil on our side still exist, however, and Alastair, Jason and Verity find themselves in the Nevada desert at the Burning Man festival, where the Evil plan to use the power of the deaths of the tens of thousands of attendees to reopen the portal to their dimension.

Alastair runs afoul of Trin Blackburn again, now looking different due to surgery and going by the name Tanya, and possessed by one of the Evil. He survives her attempts to murder him, and he ends up battling her head-on while also trying to close the burgeoning portal, using the magic he’s managed to access from his study of Harrison’s notes. He prevails, but not only has Trin disappeared – presumed dead – but Alastair has burned out his mage powers with the unrestrained use of Harrison’s magic, rendering himself temporarily mundane. His powers do eventually regenerate, fortunately, and gains a third color in his aura, a slim band of silver.

When Stone’s Master and mentor, William Desmond, goes missing, Stone returns to England to investigate and finds him dead, magically murdered. He and Verity attend the funeral, and come into contact with a group of female practitioners who invite them to visit their remote commune. Verity has been wrestling with what her magical direction should be, and Stone has been guiltily noticing Verity’s maturity. The visit prompts Verity to consider joining the community to study their magic for a time, and  Alastair and Verity become lovers under somewhat odd circumstances, discovering that they’re exceptionally good together. But the master/apprentice relationship complicates things, so Verity takes a vacation to consider things.

Meanwhile, Desmond’s Will is probated, and Alastair discovers he’s been left his mentor’s entire personal magical holdings, his London home, his Caventhorne estate – in conservatorship as a magical study retreat – and an extraordinary amount of money. Stone is now very, very wealthy.

Desmond’s estate also includes a letter from Desmond, and his journal, which details how a distraught Orion Stone – Alastair’s father – came to Desmond with a mysterious object that he said was ‘killing him’, and incoherent ramblings about infant Alastair having been taken, and Orion getting him back. Orion dies, after having made Desmond promise to keep this secret, and make his death look accidental.

Alastair’s new knowledge of events unlocks the magical binding on his old friend and family caretaker, Aubrey, who relates that Orion’s marriage to Peregrin was oddly sudden, and that they didn’t appear to be in love, but that Orion was thrilled when she became pregnant with a son soon after. However, just before her due-date Peregrine and her ‘attendant’ fled, covering their tracks. Orion eventually tracks them down and reappears back in Surrey with infant Alastair, and looking as if he’d been through a war. Worse, Orion had killed his wife by ashing her, becoming a black mage.

The hits keep on coming, when the women of the magical commune lure Stone back to them using Verity as the bait. He finally gets the story of his his mother – Acantha Lennox, Peregrine was a pseudonym – had set out to marry Orion Stone for the express purpose of producing a child for sacrifice in a ritual designed to bring a supposedly beneficial entity to the earthly plane. More, Alastair had been magically ‘enhanced’ in utero to make him the optimal sacrifice, by his grandmother and head of the community, Nessa Lennox.

Their efforts worked better than they realized, and Acantha bore twins – Alastair, and a sister, also named Acantha. Nessa and Acantha and their group attempt to force Stone and Verity to have ritual sex in order to produce a magically powerful male child for eventual sacrifice. Given no other choice, Alastair uses his black mage powers and drains Acantha, ashing her. Alastair, like his father, has become a black mage.

Stone learns from Stefan Kolinsky that there are people who voluntarily feed power to black mages, but on his first attempt, he nearly loses control and is revolted by a process that could kill the donor with a single misuse. He also gets a tattoo from a contact of Kolinsky’s, that can help store magical power. He can also draw power from Jason, who can uniquely serve as a never-draining battery, but that option is less than attractive, given Alastair’s self-contempt at having gone black and, later, Jason’s ire at finding out that Stone and Verity have become intimate. In addition, Alastair realizes that he craves the rush of draining someone else’s power, and it terrifies him.

Alastair eventually takes a dangerous gamble, and builds a portal to Harrison’s home dimension, Calanar, to learn how to harness that power. His search for Harrison is arduous, and he is very nearly killed several times. Eventually, he apprentices himself to Harrison, who proceeds to leave him to a physical training regimen led by Kira and Karol. After a month of frustration, Alastair - drunk - confronts Harrison and, in the process, produces a powerful magical blast. After this, Harrison gives him the knowledge he needs to control Calanar's magical energy. Stone is about to return home when problems arise that he volunteers to assist Harrison with. Unfortunately, things go very wrong, and Harrison is kidnapped by the Talented - the magic-using ruling class of Calanar - as a rebel and to experiment on, since his magic is as unique on Calanar as on Earth. Stone and others rescue Harrison, but during their escape through the Wastes, Stone is mortally injured - impaled through the chest on a crystal shard during a magical storm called a manastorm. But he is miraculously healed by Harrison's techno-magical devices and a magical healer, Tanissa, who tells him he really should have died from the injury.