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Twenty-one years ago, in the city of Jacona almost a thousand miles to the east, the renowned Archmage-General Altarrin, recognized widely as one of the most powerful men in the sprawling Eastern Empire, died at the age of 112. Not, strictly speaking, of old age - a mage with the best life-extending magics available to the Empire could easily live to 150, 200 if they were particularly lucky - but his age had certainly been one of the things catching up to him, and intrigue was the other. It was going to happen sooner or later. Fifty years in a stable position of power and influence was more than he had hoped for - and, by the end, moving on is a relief.
A few months later, in the sleepy town of Twin Rivers in the loosely affiliated city-states of Har, the town cobbler is proud - and slightly unnerved - when his fourteen-year-old son, who had been showing signs of a developing Mind-Gift for a couple of years by then, also manifests a startlingly powerful new mage-gift, and an even more unexpected desire to leave home for the city and a proper education. But no one is really inclined to argue. Of course a mage needs a real education.
Even the main trade city in Har isn't really that big of a city, or equipped with a real mage-academy. There's not much of that to be found outside the Empire, which the ambitious young man from Twin Rivers intends to give a wide berth. But the young man finds enough.
He visits home once more, at eighteen. His parents barely recognize him, but you'd expect that, and no one who's been to the city ever really settles back in Twin Rivers. They're confusedly proud, and don't really expect to cross paths again, especially not when the young man tells them that he intends to travel further. There are mage-schools in the south, it's said.
Once he's left the region behind, he chooses himself a new name. Matteir. It sounds like a Har name, but the sound of it feels right in his mouth, more natural to answer to than the name the boy's parents chose. Once, a long time ago, he was Ma'ar.
He travels, presenting himself as a wandering mage-scholar with itchy feet, disinclined to settle anywhere for long. He passes through border towns of the Empire's provinces, sometimes, once he's confident that he can avoid both unwanted attention and unsolicited compulsions. Going back is - the default path - but it's a path he can only follow in one direction, and it's not an emergency. The Empire is stable.
By the time he's spent ten years in his new body - enough to relearn all of his Gate-locations and spend a month or two at every records cache on the continent - he's more or less made the decision. He won't be going back. Not in this lifetime, and - maybe not at all. The Empire isn't exactly a failure, but it's not what he wanted to build, and it no longer feels like a point of leverage.
Matteir travels. He tours the mage-schools of nearly every country on the continent, though he doesn't venture as far as the Haighlei empire. He researches and invents new magical techniques. He publishes anonymous treatises. He 'steals' secrets from the Empire and teaches distant kingdoms how to do better shielding and wards and book-preservation. (Permanent Gates aren't worth the overhead, for places with weaker infrastructure and mage-education, and trying is likely to get him murdered by the gods.) The gods try to murder him anyway, of course, however much he's trying to keep his head down. But he's a powerful, brilliant Adept mage, with the secrets of a hundred reclusive mage-schools and the protective artifacts stashed in records caches over centuries. He's very hard to kill.
He doesn't really have a plan. "Wander the world" doesn't count, but - he needs a lever and a place to stand, and the Empire he built isn't that. It's time to explore other options. He spent nearly a century in Altarrin's body; he can afford a few decades just to look for something else.
(And to invent and build and leave anonymous manuscripts at random academies in dozens of kingdoms. Matteir thinks he needs that, right now. It hadn't really been something he could think about when he was Altarrin, under loyalty compulsions, but - he was unhappy, and trapped, and now some part of him is very very tired. It gives him an itchy restless feeling, that he's not looking to the future - not working on anything that would really matter, that has any chance of changing things in a systematic way - but the future can wait. Better to wander the world doing small things that might only help a few people in a specific city for a few years, but at least aren't going to be making anyone's lives worse.)
The other continent is too far to attempt a Gate, and the current state of the art in shipbuilding techniques leaves a lot to be desired. But it seems like the sort of thing that might be solvable if he can make a breakthrough in Gate-routing. Matteir parks himself at a particularly safe and well-hidden cache, and embarks on a Gate-research project.
