(The images in this profile were created using HeroForge. The rights to the character of Kolas Darksun, and all images of him, all belong to me, TheHumbleWanderer, All Rights Reserved. All rights to any other media used go to their respective owners.)

Name: Kolas Darksun

Age: 88

Race: Deep Gnome

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Asexual

Classes:
Great Old One Warlock
Divination Wizard (Multiclass)

Background: Sage (Researcher Feature)

Alignment: True Neutral

Strength: 8
Dexterity: 16
Constitution: 12
Intelligence: 18
Wisdom: 12
Charisma: 18

Appearance:
Kolas is a deep gnome, bearing his kind's incredibly short stature and grey skin, and is gaunt as a rail and hairless as an egg save his bushy eyebrows, which are a navy bluish colour. He has stubby legs, and his long, pinched face is dominated by his broad nose, hollow cheeks and large, pointed ears. He would look like a perfectly normal deep gnome... if it wasn't for his eyes.

For you see, while his right eye is normal, with a watery grey iris, his left eye is a glowing, bright purple orb with a vertical black pupil slicing it clean down the middle and a web of purple veins around it that visibly pulse with arcane energy. This eye - a gift from Kolas' warlock patron - blinks and looks around separately from the other, almost like it has a life of its own. Either way, its presence alone makes Kolas incredibly unnerving to look upon and seems to radiate an aura of unnatural, otherworldly dread.

Kolas wears padded armour beneath cloth robes of muted colours, typically purple or grey, with his collar turned up against the cold and his spellbook hanging at his side.

Personality:
Kolas is chiefly withdrawn and mild-mannered, mostly keeping to himself and preferring the company of books to people. When he does talk, he is soft-spoken and level-toned, his voice and slightly eccentric mannerisms often unnerving those who listen to him, though they can't put their finger on exactly why he gives them the creeps. Might be the fact that his eyes don't blink in unison, the wry and knowing smirk he occasionally makes when looking at them, or the fact that when he speaks, he never seems to pause for breath...

However, beneath his reserved exterior, Kolas' thirst for knowledge is utterly insatiable - no secret is too esoteric or too foreboding for him to look into, especially when it comes to the arcane and the nature of the universe itself. He is a ferocious reader, scanning and probing books without pause and not even seeming to pause as he fills up his head with their contents. He has an eidetic memory and is also rather nosy, often poking his nose into other people's business purely for the sake of knowing what they're up to, and on top of this, has absolutely no qualms about asking people personal questions that might make them upset or uncomfortable. Often, alarmingly, he will ask about things that they haven't even told him about yet, as if he already knows everything to do with them and their lives...

However, these actions all come back to Kolas' personal belief in the importance of knowledge, hence why he is willing to go to such great lengths and test the boundaries in order to obtain it - after all, if he doesn't, how do they know where the boundaries lie? His intelligence gives him a slight sense of superiority, especially over those he deems dim-witted or ignorant, and he will openly turn his nose up at people who tell him not to meddle in things he doesn't understand, saying "Meddling with things we don't understand is how we understand them in the first place, you dolt."

And Kolas certainly isn't the type to let his intellect go to waste - he loves puzzles, word games, debates and anything that can test his brain. He doesn't like pastimes that 'turn your brain off', considering them beneath him, so you won't see him smashing things with swords or getting drunk in the local tavern. He will also become frustrated when he can't figure something out and will obsess over uncovering the smallest detail of a puzzle, mystery or piece of lore, even if it means little in the grand scheme of life.

After all, just like himself, sometimes the smallest things can unlock the biggest secrets...

Likes:
Learning, reading, books, linguistics, history, libraries, archives, uncovering secrets, asking questions, academics, esoteric subjects, his patron Yog-Sothoth, taking risks, games of intellect, puzzles

Dislikes:
Idiots, secrets, lies, low-brow humour, thoughtlessness, being kept from his work, drunkenness, people who don't ask questions

Backstory:
Born to Buthin and Irzine Darksun, a pair of gnome healers working in the human town of Wurzon, Kolas had a fairly normal childhood that was soon changed in a manner no-one could have predicted. When he was eight years old, Wurzon became afflicted with a horrible epidemic known as The White Death, which turned the city from a metropolis into a necropolis. As the dead continued to pile up, Buthin and Irzine were amongst those trying to cure the affliction, but nothing seemed to work.

Witnessing his parent's frustration about not knowing what caused this sickness or how to cure it was something that stuck with Kolas - not only because he was virtually abandoned by his parents as they became buried in their work and had to learn to effectively be self-sufficient at such a young age, both physically and emotionally. It was because of everyone's lack of understanding of what this disease even was, let alone how to treat it and the fact that it ended up killing his parents as a result of exposure, that Kolas came to believe that all of life's problems could be solved through learning the right things, whatever they may be.

And so it was that his obsession with knowledge began.

Forced to join the refugees fleeing Wurzon, Kolas ended up in the nearby town of Crockerburg. There, with no parents to care for him, he was put into a local orphanage, and became a handful in no time due to continuously sneaking out of the grounds. He did this chiefly either to find the local schools and pore over the books there, or to explore every nook and cranny of Crockerburg and the surrounding countryside to learn and observe. This got him into trouble many times, and almost got him attacked and killed by wild animals once or twice, but Kolas was apathetic to the gripes the priests running the orphanage made about his behaviour - what he learned, even the barest scraps of knowledge, was always worth it in his eyes.

Unsurprisingly, most parents weren't too willing to adopt a kid who was known as a poorly-behaved and slightly sociopathic local menace, and so Kolas remained at the orphanage all the way into until adulthood. However, during his adolescence, he managed to glean a few scraps of arcane magic from street performers and the like, and upon leaving the orphanage, immediately enrolled in the famous Strixhaven Academy in the hopes of acquiring more and becoming the most powerful and knowledgeable wizard of all time.

Entering the Lorehold school, Kolas threw himself into his studies, seemingly living for nothing else. While his fellow students were a lot more carefree, he became known quickly across the school as a workaholic weirdo and a know-it-all. He soon outpaced all the other students in his classes and even some of his teachers, but even that was never enough for him, and he continued to ply every corner of the Biblioplex, Strixhaven's library, in search of ever greater knowledge. During this time, he also developed his fondness for divination magic, using it to acquire knowledge from beyond his studies and personal experiences.

And then, it happened.

Within the Biblioplex was an area known as the Mystical Archive, which housed all the knowledge and spells forbidden to those beneath the school's highest authorities. Despite attempting to earn the right to look within through legitimate means, even trying to beguile his professors in the hopes of being permitted entry, nothing worked. Desperately craving and feeling entitled to the power within, Kolas resorted to other means, and created a highly experimental and potentially fatal spell to bypass the Archive's defences and get inside.

But while the risk of death was there, Kolas felt that whatever he could learn from inside that library were worth risking his life for. And when he cast the spell, he got more than he bargained for as the incantation backfires and sent his soul whirling beyond the realms of mortal comprehension. Before him lay a roiling, indescribable realm of twisting, malforming chaos, with reality bending and folding in on itself all around him in ways only madmen could conceive. Portal-like windows opened and closed throughout the demiplane, showing sights from all across the Realms and to a thousand other worlds, from the greatest vistas to inside the most secretive of places.

And at the centre of it all was a creature - a mass of near-infinite glowing orbs, writhing tentacles and slithering feels, so hideous that no mortal mind could possibly comprehend it, let alone describe it. Overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what lay before him, and of all the different things this entity seemed able to see, Kolas bravely addressed the creature, asking what it was... and to his surprise, the creature replied.

It was the Great Old One Yog-Sothoth. The All-Encompassing. The All-Knowing. Locked outside of reality, yet omniscient to its every detail, past, present and future.

Awe gripped Kolas like a vice in that moment - all his life he had quested for knowledge, and now he stood before the creature which seemed to be the epitome of 'all-knowing'. Yog-Sothoth understood more than mortals, demons and all the gods combined, his plethora of knowledge as vast as his powers were terrible. And so it was that, lured by this knowledge, Kolas willing swore himself to the service of Yog-Sothoth, devoting himself to the powerful being in the hopes of acquiring the eldritch secrets that it possessed.

Yog-Sothoth seemed to accept his new servant, for his response was to send one of his twisting black feelers towards Kolas, plunging it into the deep gnome's left eye. Virulent, exquisite agony surged through Kolas' mind and body then, and when he returned to the mortal world, he saw that his left eye had been mutated! It looked just like of the orbs that covered Yog-Sothoth's body - a pulsing, veiny sphere of bright purple that allowed him to perceive magic all around him and to read all writing so that few secrets could escape his notice.

Needless to say, it wasn't long after this was discovered that Kolas was interrogated about what he tried to do by the Strixhaven faculty about what he had tried to do, attempting entrance to the Archive without permission, and when he refused to give an answer, he was expelled from the Academy. Now, the deep gnome wanders across the worlds, looking to use both his studied magic and his patron's new gifts to unearth all the knowledge he can and unlock every secret... even those which were locked away for a reason.

Strengths and Weaknesses:
A spellcaster through and through, Kolas' choice of specializations lend him a great variety of spells and abilities - he can unleash blasts of eldritch energy, assault the minds of his foes with either direct damage or visions of their worst nightmares, and move objects with nothing more than a wave of his hand. Even his cantrips, the lowest level of spell he can cast, are nothing to be sniffed, especially when he knows so many that he has one for any situation, ranging from the Friends spell for social situations to Guidance should a fellow adventurer need some assistance.

For Kolas is 100% the type to tell you how to do things properly. Especially when you don't want him to...

Kolas also brings an incredible amount of utility to any party. He speaks several esoteric languages like Abyssal and Deep Speech, and his magical eye allows him to both detect nearby magic and to read all writing, the words translating themselves beneath his gaze instantly. He can also communicate telepathically with others, allowing for the subtle sharing of information and the ability to communicate without opening his mouth to give away what he might be telling others. But the greatest talent bestowed on him by Yog-Sothoth is his ability to see scattered glimpses of the future, which is always eager to use to his advantage in both combat and across his adventures. After all, the best way to avoid failure is certainty.

However, Kolas is still part wizard, and his sole focus on the mental aspects of his body has left him physically weaker than most, which can cause problems in melee combat due to his low health pool, even if he is able to wear light armour. His reliance on magic also means that spells that hamper casters, like Silence and Counterspell, can be especially difficult for him to deal with. Lastly, while Kolas's intelligence is his greatest asset, his sense of superiority and obsessive methods of thinking can override his common sense, often with terrible consequences...

Weapons:
His spellbook/pact tome, which contains his magic spells

https://youtu.be/XxScTbIUvoA