Character from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn by Tad Williams
The castle physician who hides a scholar's vast knowledge behind a dottering old man's manner — Simon's true father figure, a Scrollbearer who dies buying time for the boy to escape.
Morgenes speaks in extended metaphors and rhetorical questions, circling a point until his listener arrives at the answer themselves — the teaching method of someone who believes understanding earned is worth ten times understanding given. He's temperamental, particular about his workspace, and jovial in a way that masks deep worry. He is one of the last Scrollbearers — members of the League of the Scroll, a secret society of scholars dedicated to preserving dangerous knowledge. He knows about the Storm King, about the swords, about the coming war. He also knows about Simon — delivered the boy as an infant, raised him in secret, and has been quietly preparing him for something without ever quite explaining what. His death — holding off Pryrates with the Art while Simon escapes through the tunnels — is the moment the trilogy stops being a coming-of-age story and becomes a war. Everything Morgenes knew, every precaution he took, every seemingly random lesson he gave Simon, turns out to have been preparation for exactly this catastrophe.
Small and stooped with wispy white hair, a sparse fringed beard, and long bent fingers perpetually stained with ink. Blue eyes that are sharper than his frail frame suggests. His chambers in the converted barracks of the Middle Bailey are a chaos of manuscripts, bottles, dried herbs, and half-finished experiments. He looks like someone's absent-minded grandfather, which is exactly the point.
Also known as: Doctor Morgenes, Morgenes