Sir John Horace Maelock

Sir John Horace Maelock was the first in a long line of great Maelocks. Born in the Elizabethan era to the daughter of English nobility and a man strongly suspected of being a French spy, he went on to establish a renowned reputation as an explorer and sailor, famously captaining the legendary ship known as The Eternity.

In Sir Maelock’s hands, his small inheritance exploded into what would one day be known as the Maelock Family Fortune. He would also be the first in his line to be rumored to have gone insane. In his later years, after returning home from his voyages around the globe, he would tell stories claiming to have discovered such things as the lost Precursor city of Shambhala, a genie’s lamp, Pandora’s Box, and even the Fountain of Youth - locating it on the Arabian Peninsula and openly calling Ponce de Leon a fraud. While most would attribute his many claims to the simple madness of an old man who spent too much time at sea, very few outside the Imaginary World would ever recognize his many discoveries as genuine.

In addition to his adventures, Sir Maelock would also be one of the few to supposedly interact directly with relics of pure imagination, such as Pandora’s Box. This fabled artifact is said to have unleashed all of human misery upon the Earth, but is it actually a powerful item fabled to have been forged by the god Hephaestus between the Imaginarium and the Real World, acting as a sort of portal between the two realities. Through the Box, it is said that Sir Maelock crossed into the Imaginarium and back. Upon returning to our reality, Sir Maelock undertook the task of hiding Pandora’s Box and other similar artifacts, believing them to be too powerful for even a king to possess.

Legend says that, at the end of his many voyages, Sir Maelock hid away the greatest of his many discoveries on a long-forgotten island that has never been plotted on any map. Sir Maelock’s treasure is believed to be the most dangerous collection of artifacts in all of imagination, even more terrifying than the combined vaults of all the sorcery academics. A letter he had written to his eldest son even refers to a particularly curious and mysterious artifact: the Atlas. In the letter, Sir Maelock stated that should anyone ever discover it and claim it as their own, they would have the power to change all of reality as we know it.

Not long after sending this letter, Sir John Horace Maelock disappeared and was never heard from again.