Gerrick "Gaby" Tatarmoff

Biography

Black sheep, improviser, and unexpected Baron Brooverton—the second son who inherited responsibility only after helping save two worlds.

Gerrick “Gaby” Tatarmoff entered the Rosenthorne crisis as the younger son of a noble household in which his older brother Trevor more naturally embodied rank, accomplishment, and inherited authority. Gaby had his own advantages: he was young, composed, socially assured, and dangerous with a sword, with the kind of manner that made refinement and violence look less contradictory than complementary. At Rosenthorne he could move as someone who belonged there without needing to prove it. The catastrophe surrounding Project Sunrise stripped away the comfort of that position. By the end, Gaby would inherit not merely a title but a household marked by two deaths in succession, a rescued child placed formally in his care, refugees from another world living under the consequences of his family’s history, and mysteries that victory had not solved.

Markus Tatarmoff’s Project Sunrise was already extraordinary before it became disastrous. The observatory apparatus was intended to establish a lasting bridge to a wholly separate plane. During the family gathering at which the work was unveiled, armed attackers struck the estate. The dining room was blacked out, intruders came through the windows, and the observatory exploded. Markus and the researchers were killed. Two sets of small footprints remained near the vanished portal, suggesting that someone had moved through the breach during the chaos.

For Gaby, the death carried an immediate family consequence even though the title did not fall to him. Rosenthorne’s household recognized Trevor as the new lord, placing the older brother at the head of an estate that had just become a murder scene and the center of an interplanar emergency. Gaby remained beside him. That choice would recur throughout the following months: when danger expanded, he did not detach himself from the household’s problems or leave Trevor to carry them alone.

The investigation quickly found betrayal inside the estate. Vika Yeetfield admitted helping an outsider gain access after being told the plan would incapacitate the dinner guests while something was stolen; she denied expecting murder. Captain Lena Glitz arrived to begin an external inquiry. Yet the assassins ceased to be the only threat when Skumpy, a four-armed visitor, emerged through the breach and hostile creatures followed. Gaby and the others fought them. Skumpy identified her world as Naa, warned that the Nardics were turning the bridge into a beachhead, and said that a woman and child had crossed to the other side.

The evidence in Drankov made the warning concrete. An inactive Nardic gate stood in an emptied town, and marks across the ground showed that residents had been dragged toward it, some while still alive and resisting. The crisis was no longer confined to the Tatarmoff family. Whatever Markus had intended, his bridge had become part of a system through which entire communities could be taken.

The search for the human conspirators continued alongside the larger threat. Robbie Karmov was captured alive and described an apparent Agrarian sponsorship as a false flag. He said Markus had been the intended target and that the other dinner guests were collateral. His leads drew the group to Westbridge, where Staffley signaled another ambush when confronted. Later intelligence pointed toward a Red Shield assassin gang and a mole working inside the Agrarian Guild, but not to a final sponsor who could be named with certainty.

Gaby therefore faced an unusual division of loyalties. The attack on Rosenthorne demanded an answer as a son and brother; the disappearances through the gates demanded action beyond the family; and the bridge itself could not be fully destroyed from home. When the decision was made to cross into Naa, he committed to it with the others. A final hit squad attacked Rosenthorne before departure and was defeated. Then the household’s problems ceased to be local at all.

The crossing into Naa was imprecise and dangerous, but Skumpy led the travelers toward City Six through the understructure and into contact with Malomo’s resistance. Gaby’s confidence was useful in a place where authority was strange but still recognizably dependent on appearances, access, and fear. Nardic institutions might be alien in form, yet they could still be deceived, infiltrated, and turned against themselves.

The City Six temple raid established the pattern. Captives were found and released. The local bridge apparatus was destroyed. Records revealed that a mother and daughter had been sent to the capital for the Queen’s personal use. The entries did not name them, but the family significance was impossible to ignore. The search for those missing from Rosenthorne now pointed directly toward the center of Nardic power.

The route there forced repeated improvisation. Malomo’s resistance secured passage aboard the Empress Queen, a civilian airship. A hostile craft crashed into it and sent boarders across the decks. After surviving that attack, Gaby and his companions took control of the vessel rather than remain dependent on its original course. They forced a safe landing, learned enough to operate it, and continued toward City Two.

At City Two, nerve mattered as much as force. The damaged Empress Queen arrived under a fabricated story: insect pirates had attacked it, special forces had recovered it, and an urgent mission now required access and space. The bluff worked well enough to secure the vessel and buy freedom of movement. The travelers used that opening to attack another Nardic temple. What had begun at Rosenthorne as an effort to understand an attack had become an offensive against the structures enabling abduction and occupation.

The escape from City Two was even less conventional. When port authorities tried to prevent departure, the Empress Queen tore loose from its mooring. Rather than preserve the damaged civilian ship at all costs, the group turned it into a trap. They prepared it to explode, allowed a Nardic military team to board, crossed onto the military vessel, and destroyed the Empress Queen behind them. They then fought through the warship, cleared its command bridge, and continued toward the capital aboard a captured military craft. Another hostile skyship was destroyed in the running battle.

For Gaby, the expedition’s escalation was tied to a simple fact: the closer they came to the capital, the closer they came to Medina and the missing woman believed to have traveled with her. There was no safe middle distance available. Each successful deception or captured vessel merely created the chance to attempt something more dangerous.

The captured warship was finally driven into a capital docking port as a diversion. Inside the city, the infiltrators found portal machinery resembling the technology at Rosenthorne and then entered a laboratory devoted to fleshwarping. A lizard-like alchemist named Reginald was subdued and kept alive. Under questioning, he described routes through the capital and said Medina was being preserved by the Queen for some special purpose. The choice that followed was decisive: the throne room came before the general prison.

There, the family search reached its worst answer. The Queen was occupying Estera’s body. She claimed that she had eaten Estera and absorbed much of her. When the host body was killed, the Queen revealed herself as a brain-like parasite capable of leaving one body for another. Whatever the precise truth of Estera’s remaining existence, there was no ordinary reunion.

Medina was found alive in the Queen’s treasure area. Her recovery gave the expedition the personal success it had been pursuing since the first traces at Rosenthorne, even while her biological parentage remained unresolved. Gaby did not need that unanswered question settled before acting on what was already clear: Medina was family in the practical sense that mattered, a child who had been carried into Naa, held by the Queen, and now needed protection.

The rescue broadened again before departure. Roughly eighty prisoners were freed from the capital. The generators supporting the Naa-side bridge were prepared to overload. Reginald activated the portal home, and streams of people from Naa crossed with the returning group. The bridge was then destroyed, ending the route that Markus had opened and the Nardics had exploited.

The return should have ended the crisis. Instead Salmaya came with Sard, an enormous animated dead tree, and attacked almost immediately. Sard was destroyed and Salmaya killed. Baby Yeetfield delivered the final blow against Salmaya, but the victory was purchased with the death that reshaped Gaby’s life. Trevor was struck down by an overwhelming death spell. Attempts to find a way around the finality of the attack did not save him, and his funeral confirmed that the older brother who had inherited after Markus was now gone as well.

Succession returned to Rosenthorne with brutal symmetry. After Markus’s death, Trevor had been the one to receive the household’s allegiance. After Trevor’s death, the family lawyer transferred the barony to Gaby. The younger brother who had once stood beside the heir became the heir. With the title came a second formal responsibility: Gaby became Medina’s official guardian and protector.

That guardianship is the clearest measure of what changed in him, not because it proves some hidden transformation that no one else could see, but because it placed his public obligations beyond abstraction. A barony could be discussed as land, law, privilege, and inheritance. Medina was a person who had survived abduction, captivity, and the Queen. Whatever secret lay behind her parentage, Gaby accepted responsibility for her without needing that secret as a condition.

The world around Rosenthorne changed with him. Refugees from Naa were incorporated into Drankov’s reconstruction, and the ruined town later became prosperous through the rebuilding effort. The assassination network that had begun the crisis was never tied into one perfectly closed chain of command, and Estera’s fate retained metaphysical uncertainty. Gaby inherited those unanswered questions along with everything that had been resolved.

He also inherited the memory of Trevor’s example. Trevor had spent his brief tenure as lord carrying a household emergency into a rescue across worlds and had died only after returning home. Gaby’s final position was not that of the carefree younger son finally rewarded with rank. It was the more difficult one: the survivor who understood exactly how suddenly rank could arrive, how little it protected the people one loved, and how much responsibility could fit inside the space left by a brother’s absence.