About

When Lute started training to be a maze-runner, he was fourteen years old and thus at the minimum age that a citizen of the kingdom can take a job. Not only was maze-running his dream, but ever since his parents died when he was fourteen, he's had his little sister Siarra to provide for. Training can only teach so much however, and within a few months an older and more experienced maze-runner, a winged panther named Deyna, took him into the Obsidian Labyrinth to experience his first run. Lute found it both exciting and terrifying, and when Deyna asked if he was sure he wanted to continue on this perilous path, and that there was no shame in turning back, he said yes. Lute has been running the Labyrinths for close to two years now, and is in fact the second youngest maze-runner in history (the youngest ever was nine; something that wouldn't fly in the modern era). He specializes in finding herbs, though that doesn't stop him from making runs to pick up precious minerals and other such materials; including ones that only come from the monsters within. While the giant golems and ethereal shadow-creatures scared him initially, now he takes them in stride. He's come a long way since he first started running the Labyrinths.

Later on in the story, when Queen Yverre was unintentionally freed and resumed her mission of blanketing the world in blight, Lute, like Queen Bryne before him, gathered up his friends and allies and went on a mission of their own to stop her. Along the way, they learned about the origins of the blight, as well as the fact that Queen Yverre couldn't be killed, only sealed away. Queen Yverre, knowing this, had set up traps and rituals to prevent oracle crystals from being used, but one by one these were destroyed until there was nothing left protecting her. As soon as they killed Yverre, Deyna and another friend of Lute's gave their lives to cast the spell to seal Yverre back into her oracle crystal prison, saving the kingdom for the time being. But as she said, she can't be killed, only sealed away. Sooner or later, a group attempting to seal her back away will fail, and she will be free to blight the entire world.

Lute and his friends began researching ways that the Mother of Blight might be killed, before his friends Avis and Freja found something that might work. A poultice of each elemental star ground into a fine powder, king's lace, seeker's bloom blessed by an old runes unicorn and coated on a shard of an oracle crystal was found to actually kill samples of the blight itself when stabbed. So the pair gave it to Obsidia to forge into a dagger, before liberally coating the weapon in the alchemical mixture. Lute took that dagger down to where Yverre was sealed, and broke said seal. Yverre barely had time to move before he stabbed her, and while she started gloating, she froze in horror when she realized the blight was actually shriveling up and dying within her. Yverre died not with a bang, but with a whimper, crumbling into ash and dust once the twisted magics keeping her alive were destroyed.

Trivia

• Lute lost his best friend, Evan, to the corruption of the blight. He had no choice but to kill him, and even though the fight between them almost killed Lute he managed to succeed. Its a wound in his heart that he's carried ever since.
• Lute's mildly allergic to flowers. Thankfully he can still handle them just fine, they just make him sneeze. Otherwise getting many of the plants he needs while in the Labyrinths would be a bit tricky.
• Lute doesn't have a favorite color. He likes them all.
• Lute hates crabs, but tolerates them for his little sister's sake. They are her favorite animals, after all. Lute's on the other hand are birds - he could listen to their birdsong for hours on end, and often gets up at the break of dawn to listen to their morning song.
• After his and Siarra's parents died, Siarra convinced him to let her get a pet. Wanting to make sure to do it right, Lute took her to one of the pet stores in the diamond region, and out of all the pets there, Siarra fell in love with a blue and white shiba she promptly named Cloudy.
• Lute's experienced two cases of the blight in his lifetime: when he and Deyna found the oracle crystal corrupted on Lute's first ever Labyrinth run, and the blight from a damaged crystal that blighted a good chunk of the amethyst region as well as Evan.