Sir Yannick Florian

Yannick Florian was Knight-Commander of the White Rose until Pelleas and Tyffayne joined the order. The experienced knight fought for the White Rose until a jousting accident nearly cost him the use of his legs in his early thirties. Yannick promoted Pelleas to Knight-Commander; when he returned, he preferred the young, chivalrous knight's leadership to his own and decided to become Lieutenant-Commander, mentoring both Pelleas and his half-sister, Tyffayne, who he had allowed to join the order against the initial judgment of the Archbishop. Yannick watched Pelleas die and did not take up Unfaele himself but rather let Tyffayne take up the blade, deciding her a fitting successor and perhaps his better student. In the years afterward, a division grew between the Knight-Commander and her Lieutenant, however, and eventually Yannick left the order, with little known about what has become of him since. The former Knight-Commander was found by the Dawn's Herald, a hermit and guardian in Mere Fleur's Tomb, devoted to guarding his ancestral home. He had won the castle back from pirates lead by Captain Marciano Oleastro, who lead his men to the castle when the panic in the Shrinelands caused by the outbreak of the Rasping Pox lead to a power vacuum causing the Church of Tiamat to gain ground across the southern trade kingdom of Wraemore. Once the pirates were established, they quickly began to gain ground; Baron Matthias Tilly of Larret sent word to the Marquess and the Duke, but neither could spare effort, it all could only go to preventing the plague, and the roads north of Newport were scourged by the disease, hardly fitting for trade. It was then that Sir Yannick Florian appeared, the former Knight-Commander of the Order of the White Rose; the knight agreed to deal with the pirates, asking from the court of Newport only that he be allowed to steward the ruins afterwards. William Norwood granted the old knight’s request, laughing afterwards before departing for the brothels. Yannick defeated the pirates, but the victory was anticlimactic and short-lived. Not long after their fall the Child of Stars would come to take the castle for herself, and soon after the fey'ri noblewoman Quirelle would make it her new lair. With the tendrils of the demon-worshipping Court of Locusts, an ancient kraken calling himself Morag, and both their followers entangling the castle, Yannick was left to guerilla warfare against the cult until the arrival of Solveig and later the Dawn's Herald helped to turn the tide against the elven witch who had both bewitched his nephew and ransacked the ruins of his ancestral home. Quirelle and the Child of Stars were both slain, but at the high cost of Jae Florian, who was turned to vampirism and abducted by Count Riordan on his great ship On Leather Wings. Left thus, Yannick gave Solveig a final refusal and stayed behind to train both the Dawn's Herald and their men in the ways of the knight.