Damakos is from a quite wealthy family of former nobles. For the first third of his life, he underwent a strict upbringing overseen by his parents. He loathed all the studying he was required to do, and did the bare minimum necessary to appease his tutors. Damakos’s life was flipped upside down when his parents and several of his family’s servants were murdered within their summer home they were vacationing. His father gave the key to their estate to Damakos’s head attendant, Hartmut, and had him escape with Damakos as their home burned around him. Damakos blamed his ignorance for the death of his parents, and from that moment on he has had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. About half a decade passed in which Damakos did not leave his estate for fear of being attacked, and he instead soaked up everything that his touters could teach him, from arithmetic to calligraphy and drawing, and spent his free time reading through the books in his father’s study and the estate’s book room. Near his fifteenth birthday he ventured into the world beyond his estate in his quest to learn all there is to know. He spent going around all the libraries and other places of knowledge that he could find. He went to so many that he has a drawer full of library cards.

Upon turning eighteen Damakos fully inherits his family’s wealth, but when he goes to withdraw some of the money that his family’s investments had been making over the past thirteen years he is attacked. This is how he finds out that he is still being hunted by those who killed his family. With no way to know which assets have been compromised and which have not, Damakos has been unable to use the majority of his family’s wealth.

Damakos spends the next nine years bouncing from university to university, never staying at one long enough to be tracked down. He has attended classes in a variety of subjects and used that time to read through their libraries. He also spent this time growing his house’s book room, and now the large book room and his father’s study are not enough to contain the collection of books he has amassed, because of this many bookshelves can be seen throughout the estate.

The Zhien family’s estate can only be accessed via the use of a small ornate golden key with large red gem set into the back of it, and only those who share posses Zhien blood can go through the gate. The key is used by cutting it into the air as if inserting it into a lock, when turned a golden gate wrapped in chains appears, the chains then melt away and the gate swings open. The estate is completely cut off from the outside world when the gate is not manifested. While this is great from a security standpoint, it does cause issues in that the estate needs to be self-sufficient, and that when the gate is not out those inside can not access the internet.