Glolindir
Safe through Heroes of Ravenford Book 3
Main text: Book 1. Books 2–3: collapsed sections below.
Characters
Glolindir Arshatheriat Eodin — ‘Glo’ to his friends — is an elven wizard and one of the four companions whose meeting opens Ruins on Stone Hill. He is 120 years old, which for long-lived elves makes him the equivalent of an eighteen-year-old human: clever, well taught, and still discovering how much of the world his lessons left out. Six feet tall, flaxen-haired, and blue-eyed, he is tall even among his own people, and he travels with Raven, his black familiar, who shares an empathic link with him and can warn him when danger is near.
Glo is a Galinthral elf from the hidden city of Cairthrellon. His father, Amrod, heads the House of Eodin, one of the seven great houses of the Galinthral, and is among Cairthrellon’s foremost wizards. Father and son disagreed about almost everything — Amrod’s slow, steady approach to magic, and the Galinthrals’ insistence on hiding from the wider world. When the argument came to a head, Glo left. His mother gave him the staff with two crescents that serves as his light and casting focus, and he set out to learn what sequestered study could not teach him.
On the road he falls in with Seth and Aksel, and the three try the hero-for-hire business together. Glo begins quite sure of his intellect and spellcraft, then learns — in a life-threatening encounter, before Lloyd‘s arrival turns the fight — that knowledge and experience are not the same thing. In Ravenford and at Stone Hill his magic is genuinely useful, from light and detection to fire in a tower fight, but his perfectionism makes him overreact in the moment and berate himself afterwards.
That tension defines his Book 1 arc. He vows to learn proper magic to support his new friends, studies what the ruins and captured spellbooks can teach him, and keeps choosing the companions over the safer, hidden life he left. He is not yet the wizard he intends to become — and that, for Glo, is precisely the problem he means to fix.
See Aksel, Seth, and Lloyd for the companions who keep him alive while he learns.
After Book 1 — spoilers for Book 2, Serpent Cult
In Serpent Cult, Glo sails with the party to Cape Marlin. He is the one who presses the three sisters until Ves admits they are runaways looking for their missing father, and the companions agree to help. When Maltar vanishes, Baron Gryswold asks Glo to stand in for him as court wizard at Andrella’s gala.
When the Serpent Cult attacks, Glo climbs onto the head table to draw Voltark’s attention away from the guests, counters one spell, and takes the full blast of two fireballs. After the knight Sir Calric is killed, something snaps inside him and he calls down lightning. When Voltark sends one more fireball at him, he stands his ground rather than let it hit the guests behind him, and he collapses into the arms of Ves, who tends to him.
After Book 2 — spoilers for Book 3, Dark Monolith
In Dark Monolith, Glo is back on his feet. Ves gives him a Pearl of Friendship, an amulet that lets him contact the sisters anytime and anywhere, and promises their help. On the road he studies Telvar’s and Voltark’s spellbooks, and an ominous dream about his friends haunts him.
In the Darkwoods Monolith his learning finally matches his ambition. He works through its puzzles, fits together the pieces of a golden sphere, and turns fire on the cult’s black mages. The seeress Elistra becomes increasingly close to him over the course of the book.