T-Minus One Year: Steorra
Steorra was something of a prodigy as far as mages and the magical community goes, and within Aleteros he was something of a minor celebrity. This wasn't due just to his having magic, but for having successfully become a Time Wizard. Because Time magic was often considered to be one of the least understood and most difficulty to actualize types of magic, with more of it being in the realm of theory than practice for most mages. But for some reason, Steorra was different. He was not only able to use Time Magic, but he was genuinely a prodigy at it! Enough so where he was the only mage in the kingdom to be able to successfully claim Time as his dominant spell school. And even as a child, he as able to do things like haste and slow spells and as an adult he was doing all sorts of crazy esoteric things. Teleporting, regeneration, precognition, freezing time, and some even gossip that he was able to make someone age forward or even backwards if he desired it. One person even suggested that maybe he was some sort of Time-Lich that was several hundred years old, but used his magic to appear perpetually in his twenties in the prime of adult youth.
And if you were wondering, no...he is not a Time-Lich or otherwise several hundred years old. He's just a young prodigy is all that happens to be both respected and misunderstood in equal measure.
He was something of a free-spirit that wandered around the kingdom as he felt the need to. However, his heart was always with the capital though and the royal family, so he always wound up coming back to his home there. Because when he was a kid, he had witnessed a procession of the Emperor passing through one of the gates into the city as he was coming back from some sort of expedition or some such, and assassins from the remnants of a conquered smaller nation had planned an attack against him right after he entered the gates and went into the main road proper, where security would be momentarily reduced due to the transition from the wall into the city. However, Steorra - who wasn't a truly trained mage then as he was like 10 but had some innate lesser time magic he could call on, decided to risk himself to try and help protect the Emperor. Several Assassins slipped past the knights escorting the Emperor in the procession, and came at him brandishing poisoned blades as the knights were turning to intercept them, for they had disguised themselves among the citizenry of the procession as well as in some of the lesser soldiers. So Steorra had to reach quickly and he used a slow spell to make the onrushing assassins suddenly move unnaturally slower by several degrees, while the child Steorra ran up to the Emperor in a hasted blur of motion, and grabbed the man by the hand.
"Excuse me, your majesty. Or Emperorness. Or whatever I'm supposed to call you. But I can't keep them at bay while also hasting both of us. But if you hold my hand, I think I'll barely manage." the child said.
The surprised Emperor saw the assassins were coming toward him, since only the nearest ones were unnaturally slowed down, so he took the boy by the hand. And suddenly, to the amazement of everyone, the Emperor and child ran up the street a ways in a blur of unnaturally hasted speed, which got them both to safety while the knights, loyal soldiers, and other loyal onlookers rallied and steamrolled the surprised assassins. However, the display of what Steorra did was quite public at that point, and the child could no longer hide or lay low about his gifts.
Thankfully, the Emperor was both grateful and immensely intrigued by the whole thing, and as a reward for helping save him and in an effort to try and nurture the gifts of someone who could potentially be an asset to the nation, the King took the young Steorra under wing as a Patron, and sponsored his enrollment to the Capital's Academy of Magic with a full scholarship and stipend. This was the gateway he had into higher society and magical society at that. And due to his stellar performance and unusual affinity for a type of magic that most mages struggled with, he was admitted to the Tower of Magic (an organization of Elite mages, something like an elite mage guild based in the capital that also has close ties to nobility and royalty to the point that most people treated them as functionally nobles, since they only answered to the Crown) at the young age of 16! Now though, he's a young man in his early twenties.
One of the projects that the Tower of Magic was working on was a special project between the various "factions" of the Tower Mages. There was a big convention where various mages from the Tower came together, and decided that as part of an effort to form bonds between the various factions and groups within the Tower, and advance the shared knowledge of magic from a unified effort to do something grand, an idea was created. That a Spire, grand and marvelous, would be created as a joint-effort from all the departments, factions, and groups of mages in the Tower as well as some of its allied organizations. This included Steorra, who was barely in his twenties now but yet was a full Magister of the Tower (one of the youngest in its history actually). He was propositioned by Necromancers rubbing elbows with Nature mages rubbing elbows with artificers rubbing elbows with enchanters. But they wanted to build a tower that would be so grand, that it would be a fitting residence for 20 or 30 elites mages who would then try and send it all through the fabric of time and space into...the beyond. Whatever that would be. And they wanted his time magic to help stabilize some of the enchantments and gizmos and such of the tower.
The project, they said, could potentially not only help advance the collective knowledge of magic as a historical and legendary accomplishment, but it could potentially allow Steorra himself to make a breakthrough into his own time magic time the fabric of time and space itself would be twisted as a part of shifting the tower to another plane. Steorra simply couldn't resist the excitement of it all, and join in on the project.
OOC: And that's how he heard about the project, was from his affiliation as a Magister of the Tower of Magic, an elite mage guild operating out of the capital that answered only to the Crown. And given the nature of his magic, he definitely worked with the teleportation mages in helping with the ritual to shift the tower across dimensions.