Bzulakar is the most powerful person on Alaria. The power of his ice magic is enough to freeze everything in a thousand-mile radius. His control over air is the namesake for the surrounding seas, which are quiet as whispers due to the still air. The spire is his own work, raised with his attunement to the air. Although some assume he is weak to fire, Bzulakar is also an extremely talented fire mage. He simply never uses it.
He is a total master of most of Kethic elementalism, and of a great deal of Deoric besides. He has lived for over nine thousand years. His power rivals that of major gods.
Holds a closely guarded secret about Deoric's life-cost: rather than drawing from his own body or making a single sacrificial death, Bzulakar leeches the life-price from the teeming small life around him — insects, vermin, soil-creatures, the diffuse warmth of countless living organisms in the ground. What reads as "ambient warmth" to those who have partially glimpsed his method is the slow drain of life-force from thousands of tiny bodies at once. People who spend time near Bzulakar find themselves subtly diminished; the small creatures of the frozen waste around his spire die in thin, invisible tithes. Deoric's cost is still paid in full — it always is — but he spreads it across so many lives that no single death is visible, and his own body remains untouched.
What the tithes pay for
The thinness of the method is a discipline he keeps, not a limit on what he can do, and it is recent by the measure of his life. There was an age when Bzulakar did not spread the cost at all.
Nine thousand years is long enough to want something past all sense and long enough to lose it. What he wanted was a woman named Velzunna, and what he wanted was to keep her on the near side of death after death had already been promised her. The working meant to hold her there was the largest piece of Deoric he ever attempted, and Deoric is paid in life. He did not pay it in insects then. The inner shores below his spire were peopled in that age, fishing holds strung along the ice where now there is nothing, and he rendered them down to fuel the working the way a chandler renders fat. He did not spread the cost. He did not hide it. As far as anyone can reconstruct, it did not occur to him that it was a thing that needed hiding. The holds were the nearest life to hand and the working wanted a great deal of life. By the time it failed there was no one left along that coast to bury the dead.
It failed because the one price Deoric cannot waive is the price it exists to collect. He could bind his own death, and did, and walks now nine thousand years past the grave that was owed him. Hers he could not bind. Velzunna passed the way the dead pass, along strands he could freeze the whole sea against and still not call back, and the coast he had spent bought her a season and then nothing at all. He has not called fire since. The last warmth he ever raised was the warmth meant to keep her, and a man who has mastered every Kethic discipline and will touch only the cold ones is not weak in the warm. He simply will not use again the thing that failed her.
The inner shores below the spire, where the fishing holds once stood. No pilings now, no hearthstones. Nothing was thrown down or burned. The ice took the timber and the snow took the ice, and the only mark left of the people who lived here is the silence of the bay, the particular silence of water with no one on it. The Whispering Sea is loudest along this coast, which is to say it makes no sound at all.
I have heard it called a tragedy. It was not. A tragedy is the thing you could not have prevented, and I could have stopped at any one of them and chose the next one instead, and at the end of it I had spent a coast and she died on the day she was always going to die. Keep your sympathy. I know to the life what I bought and what it cost, and that I would buy it again for a cleaner result. — attributed to Bzulakar
Why he stays
The mainland fears that Bzulakar will one day decide to come south, and it has the shape of the fear right and the cause wrong. Nothing holds him in the Northern Isles. No compact binds him, and the cold is no cage to the man who made the sea go quiet. He stays because there is nowhere he would rather be, which is a different thing from peace. People march for something. Bzulakar wanted one thing in nine thousand years, and it is gone, and in all the time since he has not found a second thing worth the crossing. His stillness is not mercy. It is not even restraint. It is the stillness of someone who has already lost the only argument that could have moved him.
That same fact is the condition under which the fear comes true. He does not need to be provoked or cornered. He needs only to want something again. What that would take, he is certain no longer exists, and he has had a very long time to make certain of it. If he is wrong, the isles will not hold what comes down off the spire, and neither will the coast south of them.
Bzulakar's Keep
Atop a tower that stretches 2 miles into the sky stands Bzulakar's Keep, an enormous fortress of permanently frozen ice. And within the tower lives the ancient lich Bzulakar. Ascending the spire is treacherous, due to high winds, extreme temperatures, and sheer cliff. At the base of the spire lives Strolzaq, Bzulakar's pet dragon.