Character from Mage Errant by John Bierce
A paper-affinity Librarian Errant and the last loyal son of destroyed Helicote — whose sardonic wit and elaborate manipulations conceal a decades-long vendetta against the empire that annihilated his homeland.
Alustin teaches through misdirection — giving his students impossible problems, watching them fail, then asking the question that makes them realize they already knew the answer. He's witty in the way a scalpel is sharp: precise, purposeful, and capable of drawing blood before you feel the cut. He deflects personal questions with humor, redirects emotional conversations toward tactical ones, and trusts his students more than he trusts himself to be honest about why. He is a Librarian Errant — a title that sounds scholarly and is anything but. It means he wanders, collects knowledge, and serves Kanderon's network of intelligence. It also means he has killed people with origami cranes and suffocated enemies inside paper golems. His paper affinity, combined with farsight and ink affinities, makes him a surveillance specialist, a forger, and a one-man siege weapon. Helicote's destruction by Havath is the engine driving everything he does. Every lesson he teaches his students, every alliance he brokers, every secret he hoards is a brick in the edifice of revenge he's been building for years. He loves his students genuinely — and he's terrified that his vendetta will get them killed.
Lean and angular with sharp brown eyes that miss nothing and a face built for sardonic expressions. His clothing is practical but worn — a traveling mage's kit that has seen too many roads and not enough tailors. Paper is always on his person: sheaves tucked into pockets, sheets folded into his belt, origami constructs perched on his shoulders. When he fights, paper swirls around him in lethal clouds — razor-thin sheets that can cut through armor or assemble into full-body constructs in seconds.
Also known as: Alustin, Alustin Haber, the Librarian Errant, the Librarian