Lucifer Hightower

Lucifer Hightower is the former Lord of the Hightower and Oldtown. He is now a man of the Night's Watch.

Appearance
A handsome man of powerful build in his early fifties, Lucifer Hightower looks little like the skinny young man of his youth. Known for his piercing blue eyes and their unsettlingly cold gaze, he is often accompanied about his business by his nephew and personal secretary, Dorian Hightower.

The Prodigy
Born in the harvest moon of 356 AC, the eldest son of Dorian Hightower and Allyria Dayne was a sickly child, born early, who few expected to survive the first night, let alone the first year.

However, the child survived, and spoke his first complete sentence at the tender age of eighteen months. Yet despite the best efforts of his nursemaids and maesters, he would not speak again until the age of six, despite being observed as being able to read from the age of two. For almost four years, the eldest son of Oldtown's heir remained mute. To some in the Hightower, this was remarked upon as a source of concern. But to the boy's father and grandfather, this was treated as merely a phase that would pass.

And pass it did.

When he did speak, it was to an Archmaester of the Citadel during a history lesson, for his grandsire, the Lord Morgan, had ordered the boy tutored nonetheless by the Citadel's brightest. To this day, no-one knows exactly what it was young Lucifer said, but it is known that Arch-maester Norbert immediately postponed the publishing of a script that had been whispered to be his life's work.

Young Lucifer Hightower proceeded to take the Citadel by storm, attending lectures by the foremost authorities on alchemy, history, the natural philosophies, and mathematics from an early age. An exceedingly clever child, with quick, intelligent eyes, he astounded the archmaesters with his quick grasp of subjects esoteric and mundane, progressing soon beyond acolytes a decade his senior. Some whispered of him as the bright, new hope of a Citadel ruled by old, conventional thinkers. After his mother bore another son, Erron, noted to be a strong and lusty infant, those same whispers dared wonder if this precocious young prodigy of Dorian's might forswear the Hightower's flame to light the Citadel's anew.

The Prankster
Soon, however, these rumors reached the ears of the Lord Morgan, a man less inclined to the frivolities of academics. While he would have had the boy yanked entirely from the lecture halls and set to the martial and political education expected of all of the lordly line, his son, the boy's father, Ser Dorian, intervened on Lucifer's behalf, brokering a compromise that would see Lucifer attend classes and lectures at the Citadels in the morning, to return for training in the yard in the afternoons--a surprise to his young son, who'd never completely got along with his father. While Lucifer was never noted for skill in the knightly arts, he did apply himself sufficiently to discover an affinity for the morningstar.

At the Citadel, Lucifer surrounded himself with a circle of gifted young men from diverse backgrounds. Some were the sons of great lords like himself. Others hailed from the merchant houses of Oldtown. A significant number were the get of tradesmen and other commoners. One lad was even rumored to have been sired by an infamous pirate-lord. All were united in two things--an aptitude for the scholarly, and a predisposition for the wild.

Earning link after link, Lucifer Hightower collected an impressive reputation for pranks and parties. Known as the 'Son of the Morning', a play on his Dayne ancestry, and his only attending of morning classes, Lucifer Hightower earned infamy for loosing a herd of cattle in the Citadel even as the Archmaesters sat conclave, setting off sulfur powder during a lecture and causing the aged Archmaester Hullon to enter a state of apoplexy from which he never recovered, and paying the most beautiful of Oldtown's whores to run naked through the halls on feast days.

Lucifer's development into an impetuous youth as prone to mischief as to brilliance did little to quiet these whispers of the plans for his inheritance.

The Traveller
Some say that it was the Hightower boy's exploding of the alchemy labs while dabbling in the manufacturing of wildfire. Others, the news that he intended to sit for the examinations for his final link before the maester's vows became expected with his chain's completions. An Archmaester of some relation to the Hightowers had been heard to say, deep in his cups, that it was, in fact, the link itself Lucifer had intended to forge--the Valyrian Steel link of the higher mysteries.

All agree that at the age of sixteen, Lucifer Hightower departed for a tour of the great cities of the East, one link shy of his chain.

And returned forever changed.

Little is known of the years Lucifer Hightower spent abroad, but what is known is that he returned much changed.