• Knowledge should be gathered, but not at the cost of the living
• History is to be understood, not revered; the dead are not innately sacrosanct
• If someone is working for you, you treat them well

Ever the loner, Mercator found unspoken companionship with the hereditary dream-spirit, Growing up following his parents between dig site and tomb excavation, he found ways to make himself useful, organising layouts and calculating locations of tombs, and re-assembing aged contraptions.

With no innate sorceries or magic himself, he made his living in artifice, utilising the natural magical properties of the materials around him to exact the same effects, focused and calibrated through the astrolabes, runespheres and sextants of his workshop.

Maintaining few personal connections, content in comparative isolation in his instinctive comradery; working towards a goal of a true Worlds-Atlas

After a recent trip to Baldurs gate, involving; a symposium on magical maps, a great deal of chaos, fire and grasping tendrils, he hound himself waking up in a wrecked cephalopod.

Following recovery, he's found those still-quiet whispers of his lifelong companion urging this as evidence that more active involvement in current affairs, and this situation and growing magical capacity and opportunity to get out of civilization proper and see something new.