Royer

Biography

Red Sea Trees and institutional loyalty

Royer meets Saul as Alfonso's exuberant best friend and the Third Rank leader responsible for Nephret's Red Sea Trees. He treats the trees as children he has cultivated for decades because they absorb the pollution threatening the coast. That responsibility makes him friendly toward any researcher who can improve them, but dismissive of mermaids except as organisms needed to clean their roots. He draws Saul into bloodline-fusion work and alternative experiments, hoping to preserve the defensive system before the next black tide even when individual subjects are consumed by failure. (Chapters 814–842)

Repeated failures reveal tension between Royer's personal sympathy and his institutional choices. He mourns wasted work and cares deeply for Alfonso, yet continues proposing noble children as bloodline subjects and accepts the Tribunal's treatment of mermaids as expendable. During the black tide, Saul's new Black Sea Tree host, Mido, offers a less destructive future for the Red Sea network. Royer cooperates because the project can save the trees he values, even though Mido's independent will and Saul's influence move control away from the methods he understands. His loyalty remains with Frim and the Tribunal rather than with reform. (Chapters 842–859)

Death, restoration, and the fall of Frim

During the mermaid escape, Royer attacks the fugitives because allowing them to leave threatens Tribunal control of the Red Sea system. Floco restrains him with water, disrupts his spiritual body, and destroys his physical form. Royer's soul escapes through a prepared contingency, allowing Frim and the Maze Corridor to rebuild him. He returns alive but pale, weak, and visibly uncomfortable, capable of defeating lower-rank opponents yet far from his previous condition. Restoration preserves both his service and his uncertainty about the institution that now owns the means of his continued life. (Chapters 856–869, 875–882)

Royer's doubts deepen when Frim imprisons Saul despite Saul's work for Nephret. He quietly helps requests move through the Tribunal and feels guilt about the healer's treatment, but he still stands between Saul and the Maze Corridor when the coalition comes to remove Frim. Royer openly admits that he does not understand Frim's unexplained killings or fixation on Gorsa; loyalty nevertheless compels him to fight. Saul overwhelms the assembled Tribunal wizards and leaves Royer unconscious. Their later conversation about Mido replaces open hostility with practical cooperation, demonstrating that Royer can accept the new balance even when he cannot defend the old chief. (Chapters 875–914)

Mido and the final black tide

After Frim's removal, Royer continues cultivating Mido with Alexandra and the Tribunal. He is protective when her connection to the Red Sea Trees changes and works with Saul's methods even though they make the new network dependent on Mido's consciousness. In the final black tide he and the resurrected Stuart defend her at the coast. Royer's fire becomes shark-like creatures that attack monsters in the sea, and he tells Stuart that their own lives matter less than keeping Mido alive long enough to contact Saul and preserve Nephret's defenses. (Chapters 943, 1000, 1020)

Royer's final action extends that loyalty beyond the Tribunal's former hierarchy. When Saul disappears beneath the sea after defeating Douglas, Gorsa calls for the Symphony of Fate, and Royer carries the order back to Mido and the Red Sea defenders. The dispersed participants contribute their destiny power to reach Saul. Royer therefore ends the war as a messenger and guardian within a coalition built around the person he once opposed for threatening Frim, preserving the continental mission while accepting that its leadership and methods have changed. (Chapter 1034)

Appearance and personality

Royer is a red-haired man whose strong fire-element fluctuations are as conspicuous as his personality. His arrival is loud enough to shake laboratory walls, and he habitually wears a broad smile, moves quickly, and speaks with easy familiarity. After resurrection he is pale and physically uncomfortable, an obvious contrast with his earlier vitality. In combat, burning armor forms across his body, while Saul's later star-eye effect temporarily leaves a seven-colored pupil hidden in his forehead. (Chapters 814–815, 869, 875, 909–914)

He is enthusiastic, sociable, irreverent, and deeply loyal. Royer readily befriends researchers, boasts about Alfonso, and uses pleasure and humor to relieve pressure, but his warmth coexists with a utilitarian view of experimental lives. He recognizes Frim's moral failures without finding the will to abandon him, making duty both his strength and limitation. After defeat, he adapts more readily than his rhetoric suggests, returning to the work of protecting Mido and Nephret rather than pursuing revenge. (Chapters 814–842, 856–882, 907–914, 1020)

Abilities

• Third Rank fire magic: Royer commands fire on a scale suited to a senior Tribunal combatant. His World-Destroying Fire can absorb additional magical attacks as fuel, and he can form burning armor for defense. At the Red Sea he shapes persistent flames into shark-like creatures that continue fighting in water. Saul can seize control of the large fire construct, while Floco's water body suppresses Royer's flames and disrupts his spiritual form. (Chapters 814, 856–860, 909–910, 1020)

• Abyssal Throw: Royer can prepare a fifth-tier spell that opens a spatial rift and attempts to cast an enemy into a dangerous location. With the wizard world sealed, such rifts lead toward the Abyssal Eye and risk letting pollution or unknown beings cross back. The spell therefore requires speed and careful closure, and Saul's counterattack nearly breaks Royer's concentration before he can complete it. (Chapter 909)

• Red Sea Tree cultivation and bloodline research: He leads maintenance of the Red Sea Trees, understands their pollution-storage structures, and runs experiments intended to preserve or replace the mermaid-dependent system. His knowledge lets him cultivate Mido and extend the network, but his bloodline fusions repeatedly fail and kill subjects. Saul's soul and fate methods provide solutions Royer cannot derive alone. (Chapters 819–847, 869–894, 943, 1000)

• Death contingency and resurrection: Royer prepares a soul escape that activates when Floco destroys his body. Frim and the Maze Corridor use the surviving consciousness to rebuild him, but the restoration leaves him weakened for weeks. It is a survival mechanism supported by Tribunal infrastructure, not immunity to death or an increase in rank. (Chapters 860, 869, 875–882)

Power progression

Relationships

• Saul: Royer welcomes Saul as a fellow researcher, draws him into Red Sea projects, and benefits from his creation of Mido. Frim's treatment of Saul fills Royer with guilt, but loyalty makes him defend the chief anyway. Saul defeats without killing him and resumes technical collaboration afterward. By the final crisis, Royer carries the call that lets Mido and the Symphony participants support Saul. (Chapters 814–859, 875–914, 943–1034)

• Frim: Royer sees Frim as the chief whose authority and defensive systems preserve Nephret. Frim restores him after death, deepening both gratitude and dependence. Royer recognizes that Frim has killed innocents and mishandled Saul, but cannot watch his leader be threatened without resistance. Frim's removal ends Royer's political defense of him while leaving Royer committed to the Tribunal's continental mission. (Chapters 834–882, 907–914)

• Floco: Floco kills Royer to protect the escaping mermaids, overcoming his fire with a Fourth Rank water body and destroying the flesh completely. Royer's prepared soul escape prevents the death from becoming final. They later fight on the same side of the wider war, but the killing remains the decisive demonstration that Royer's institutional loyalty can make him an enemy of people defending lives the Tribunal treats as expendable. (Chapters 856–869, 1034)

• Mido: Mido begins as Saul's answer to the failing mermaid–Red Sea arrangement and becomes the living center of Royer's later work. Royer cultivates her, worries when her connections change, and finally treats her protection as more important than his own survival. Their bond shifts his role from maintaining replaceable organisms to defending an autonomous consciousness essential to the whole coast. (Chapters 869–894, 943, 1000, 1020, 1034)

• Alfonso: Royer openly calls Alfonso his best friend and repeatedly intrudes on his laboratory with cheerful familiarity. Their specialties overlap but their priorities conflict: Alfonso studies mermaids, while Royer values Red Sea Trees and views mermaids chiefly through their utility. Royer quietly warns Alfonso when Frim turns against him and later accepts the anger surrounding Alfonso's betrayal, showing that friendship survives disagreement even when institutional loyalty limits what he will do to help. (Chapters 814–847, 856–859, 908)