Malagorn
Malagorn was born an ordinary kid. An ordinary poor as dirt peasant farm boy. So how did he become the wonderous Mad Malagorn? Well, that's quite a tale. As a young lad he was once lucky enough to see a hedgemage? in action. His town was besiged by a rather vicious group of moles, and this mage was asked to help the villagers be rid of them because they were ruining the potato harvest. Malagorn was amazed at the powers of the hedgemage?, and dreamed from that day on of becoming a mage just like him. Or maybe even better.
Over the years, his dreaming bore many results. Often his father would cuff him on the side of the head and tell him to stop daydreaming and get back to work. Not the results the boy had hoped for, but I suppose that beggars can't be choosers. Eventually, many years of dreaming later, and many many cuffs to the head later, Malagorn had his chance to achieve his dream. A wizard came to town in the midst of the worst storm the village had ever seen. This mage was studying lightning, and often chased after storms. As luck would have it, he was looking for an apprentice, but being a bit off his rocker, not many young mages were willing to work for him. But Malagorn wasn't just any young mage, he was a dirt poor one. So Malagorn, contrary to his parents' wishes signed on with the old coot (Not so secretly, his parents were quite glad that he was out of the house and they wouldn't have to feed him any more. They did, after all, have big plans for his loft now that he had finally moved out.). And so Malagorn took his first step into the wide world of wizardry.
It turns out that the crazy old coot of a mage wasn't looking for an apprentice so much as for a guinea pig. Oh, Malagorn did get lessons in the ways of magic, and in fact, he showed quite the aptitude for magic. Part of this was because of the otherworldly forces aiding him, but we'll get to that later. Now to pay for that he was often the subject of his master's lightning experimentations. Something about the way the mind worked when exposed to brief electrical currents running through it. Over time, this had quite the lasting effect on our young mage.
Over time, Malagorn developed quite the symptoms. Sure, there was the general insanity and looniness, but more than that was the splintering of his personality. Apparently having lightning bolts cast through your brain isn't a healthy thing after all. Malagorn developed numerous alternate personalities that would every once in a while come to the forefront of his consciousness, pushing him aside. Malagorn never knows what his personalities do, and in fact don't even know they exist. He just has blank moments he attributes to sleepwalking.
Oh, and as was mentioned, Malagorn seemed to attract the eye of another planar being who Malagorn perceives as a large plate of pancakes. Malagorn doesn't know why the Great Pancake contacts him, but it's usually in the morning when he's hungry.
Malagorn wandered into the Dragonslayer's company by ending up at Kylia's keep one day out of the blue. He didn't even remember how he got there. His addled mind latched onto her as his commanding officer for some reason and he followed her on her quests for a time. Pepe the skunk, Malagorn's familiar, helped keep him mostly on track through his personality changes on the quests.
On his last quest as a Dragonslayer, Malagorn met a green dragon. He did not slay the dragon.
Oh, the dragon didn't slay him either if that's what you were thinking. The dragon, a practitioner of magic itself, used quite the interesting lightning trap spell that Malagorn became instantly infatuated with. He somehow convinced the dragon to keep him on as an apprentice until he could learn some of the great dragon magic himself.
No one knows what happened to Malagorn after that. Perhaps he is flying on dragonback, sewing innocent chaos wherever he travels. Perhaps he has developed a new personality and thinks himself a dragon and is living happily in that cave to this day. Perhaps he got eaten. We may never know. But I do hope Pepe made out okay. It wasn't his fault he got turned into Malagorn's familiar.
