Thomas Land

A Life Alone

The man now known as Thomas Land was born and grew up in Western New York, just outside of Rochester, the only child of two anthropology professors. His was a comfortable and boring life. From the beginning, he was not very adept socially. He grew up with few friends, relying on books for company, and it was no surprise, then, when he went into library science in college. After receiving his Master’s Degree at the age of 25, he found a job at the University at Buffalo library and special collections, where he would work for the next 20 years of his life as a subject librarian for the History department. His loneliness and isolation only grew with time, specially after the death of his parents in his mid-30s. His only excitement came from researching obscure topics, more and more esoteric and occult in nature.

Durance

One night, his search for some occult text led him to a sub-basement storage room in the library; and in that sub-basement was a door. And when, unable to contain his curiosity, Thomas opened that door, he found—oddly enough—a cave. At that end of that cave, he found his new master: The Blind Lord. The Blind Lord lived in a Castle shrouded by darkness, a darkness that no light could possibly pierce. And in that darkness, Thomas became a monster. He was one of the Lord’s librarians, fetching and sorting books that the Blind Lord read only by touch. Day in and day out, Thomas ate nothing but grubs and insects, worked only by the feel of his fingers, the variations of scent in the pitch-black, and felt his body twist into something animal—he couldn’t know what, exactly, at the time. For it pleased the Blind Lord to make those of keen mind among his servants into mere beasts, still possessed of intelligence, but never smart enough to escape.

Escape

But escape he did. Though the feat is only remembered in flashes: literally, blinding flashes of light glimpsed for the first time in what felt like decades. And then he was back, stumbling out of the woods in Delaware park, Downtown Buffalo, after what turned out to be only a year away.

Finding a Place

The Freehold of Buffalo was welcoming enough and it didn’t take other Changelings long to find him. He’d come back through a Gate that was known to them, watched consistently, and they scooped him up pretty directly. In the two years that followed, the strangest thing for Thomas was learning how to belong to a community. After a life of loneliness and a durance in the dark, interacting with others still presented a huge problem for the Mole Man. But he kept at it, knowing that the only way to survive was to find himself a place among others like himself. During this time, he began to amass a collection of books focused on the arcane topics, especially the Changeling condition and Hedge lore, thereby making himself useful to the Freehold at large.

The Sins of the Fetch

Things took a bad turn, however, when his Fetch—who had seamlessly taken up his life—went off the deep end. Apparently, that Thing was not able to handle the loneliness that characterized Thomas’s existence and was caught planning a mass murder on the University at Buffalo’s campus. And while Thomas had created a new identity for himself, the scrutiny his Fetch had drawn would not serve his best interests, nor those of his freehold. So he moved on, finding an entry position as a librarian at the California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) and moving to the city with his personal library in tow.