Marellius Geyser Tohan

The wizard who cooks

Identity

Marellius is a Fire Genasi and a wizard. He uses he/him. He is also a cook, and the two are not in tension for him — he is good at both, and does not treat the kitchen as the lesser craft.

An Orphan

Marellius is an orphan. He does not know who his parents were, and there is no blood family behind him — no name to trace, no household of his own people, nobody who could tell him where he began. He was raised, and raised well, by the family who took him in; what he lacks is not a childhood but an origin.

He is a Fire Genasi and he knows it. That part he simply accepts: it is what he is, and he has never needed it explained. The blank is not what he is. The blank is who he came from.

And there is a second blank under the first: he has no memories of his own childhood before Deepwater Hold. What he can recall of his life begins where he was found. Before that there is nothing to recall — not a house, not a face, not a name. He knows the gap is there, which is a different thing from having forgotten.

The Family That Took Him In

He was taken in at Deepwater Hold by Munro and Rasha Tohan, who ran a shipping business — middle-class people, owners of their own trade rather than hired hands. It happened somewhere between his fifth and his thirteenth year; the exact age is not recorded, and neither is what state he was in when they found him.

Munro ran the boats. Rasha fed people. The trade was his and the table was hers, and the two halves of that household are the two halves of the man Marellius became — a business he could have inherited, and a craft he actually did.

Tohan is their name, and he carries it. He was not born to it — it was given to him when they took him in, and it is the only surname he has. The man with no lineage to trace is walking around under the name of the people who decided he was theirs.

They fed the town. Food was how Rasha brought the community together, and Marellius grew up inside that habit — watching a household use a table to hold a place together, and then working it himself. That is where his cooking comes from, and it is why the kitchen has never been the lesser craft to him.

Deepwater Hold

He comes from a town called Deepwater Hold. Little else about the place is recorded — not where it sits, not what it is like, not why he left it — beyond what the family he was raised by implies: it is a town a shipping trade can be run out of, and one with a community worth gathering.

The Academy of Tenai Kata

He studied at the Academy of Tenai Kata in Toh’Zorah — the prestigious school of House Zorah, the House of Discovery, where magical study and open learning are the whole business of the place. That is where Marellius became a mage.

He did not finish there in peace. Somewhere in his studies he came across something — what it was is not recorded here — and it sent him looking for his own past. He left the Academy and went travelling to find out more.

The Kitchen in Onda

In Onda he works with Maselva, the town's cook. What began as shared work has become a friendship, and it runs in a particular direction: Marellius is the better cook of the two, and he has been teaching her. He gives her recipes, and she is getting better for it.

It is the one relationship recorded for him, and it is a generous one — which is worth holding beside the ambition below rather than in place of it.

An Ambitious Man

Marellius is ambitious. It is a settled trait, not an accusation: he wants, and he moves toward what he wants. What he is ambitious for is not written.

His Purposes in Onda

Onda is a stop, not the goal. Marellius is travelling in search of what he came from, and Onda is somewhere along that road rather than the end of it.

That narrows the question without closing it. Why Onda, what he expects to find here, and how long he means to stay are all still unstated — and none of it is explained by the fact that he is in a kitchen teaching Maselva better recipes. A man passing through does not usually settle far enough in to teach someone a craft.

Deliberately Unwritten

🔒 Canon · Dramatis Personae · a player character of the Onda campaign