Firstborn

A black-haired, greying wizard with a scraggly beard and mustache who wears animal-skins and a broad-brimmed hat and filthy hides. He smokes a long, wooden pipe, carved to appear as a branch covered with vines and leaves. His eyes are bead-black, like the eyes of a crow.
His name is Smokelight, which is a nickname given to him by the children of rustic villages, when he entertained them with pyrotechnic displays andsmokepuff cantrips. He keeps a low profile, often journeys as a country tinker, a fur merchant, or a wandering pilgrim.
He has a central Flanaess accent. Wild Coast? Urnst? Greyhawk? It's hard to tell. He expresses knowledge of the Central and Western Flanaess, especially the Bandit Kingdoms, the Velverdyva River, the Lake of the Unknown Depths (and surrounding lands), Highfolk, the Nomad Lands, the Yatils and Perrenland. He seems well-travelled, and lacks urbanity, yet he is is well-educated.
Smokelight is course, gruff, at times overly blunt and even quarrelsome.
For some months now, Smokelight has been wandering the regions of the Velverdyva, the Wild Coast, the Ulek states and even into the woody hills of Keoland. He's mostly kept a low profile, dressing as a peasant tinker or rustic tradesman, but he's also caused a row, here and there. In one village, he irrited the locals by pursuing the affections of a young farm-girl, and expressed drunken overtures to the tavern bar-maids. He argued on the road with some young nobles, when he insolently refused to "make way for his betters." He's engaged in vehement debates with roadside ministers and village priests, about theology and "how Neutrality and Balance" fits into the scheme of things.
On a more pleasant note, he's entertained children with fireworks and balls of glowing light, and on one drunken afternoon he gave a sack of silver coins to some acolyte-monks who were dutifully transcribing some Old High Oeridian parchment into codices for Common readers ("Fine quill-work! Good scholarship! How about some illustrations to illumine the young minds?" He commented).
Smokelight has avoided large cities. He's also neglected to mention where he's from, or to confirm what his profession is. Rumours have only been circulating about an unkempt drunk wizard, or an eccentric trader who never seems to engage in much trade. A strangely erudite bumpkin, is what
he seems to be.
But Smokelight has a secret.
And a strange origin.

At the Obsidian Citadel, high in the misty Yatil mountains, an arch-wizard by the name of Mordenkainen felt the burden of power weighing heavily upon his shoulders. He could no longer wander the wide world, doing as he pleased: adventuring, exploring, and gathering knowledge. Mordenkainen was embroiled in political and supernatural affairs beyond the ken of most mortals... yet he retained the thirst for danger and adventure, that, as a young apprentice, first drove him out into the world to seek power and excitement. That feeling never went away.
Mordenkainen also felt that, as he was no longer a wandering adventurer, he had given up a certain way of serving balance: he was no longer helping the common man, the out-of-the-way farmer, the brethren who followed the way of the Old Faith in remote villages and glens. He was also no longer "out there" uncovering secrets and treasures in the wide world, or furthering his knowledge.
As a major piece in a Cosmic Game, Mordenkainenwas ever and more bound by the great affairs of Balance: checking Iuz, guiding the Circle, repelling the Euroz hordes in Highfolk, participating in the machinations of quasi-deities, hierophants, and a certain Demiurge... His life was no longer his own, or so it seemed.
One night, ruminating upon these and other thoughts, Mordenkainen stood outside on a balcony jutting our from the Obsidian Citadel's central spire. As he watched the sun set into the orange Western sky and the purple shadows of the Yatil Mountains, a spell occurred to him that inspired him to act: a solution, of sorts, to his malaise.
Descending into the workroom where he conducted his alchemical processes, Mordenkainen set himself to the task of a rarely-cast dweomer. Over the next few days, he toiled over a cauldron. He also took a patch of his own skin, formed it into a pouch, and filled it with a gill of his own
lifeblood mixed with the glittering red dust of a crushed ruby. He tied the pouch off with a lock of his own greying hair. Then, gathering ice from the highest Yatil peaks, he sculpted a rough-shaped human form from the ice, with the skin-pouch inside, where a heart would be.
Stirring chemicals and spells in the vat, he brewed an elixir of smoking fumes. Taking a ladle, he scooped out some of the potion, and poured it over the ice-form's head, all the while muttering incantations of a spell from a past age. As the potion poured over and seemed to melt the ice, human flesh and hair were revealed beneath. Several ladles more revealed a man, naked, and physically identical in all respects to Mordenkainen himself.
"Rise," Mordenkainen commanded.
The flesh-manikin opened its eyes, rubbed away the film that covered them, and stood.
"I should have been a sculptor," Mordenkainen chuckled, marveling at hisown handiwork.

A sennight later, Mordenkainen descended into his workroom again, this time with a visitor. The visitor was bald, with slightly pointed ears, several earings in his left ear, and was garbed in various overlapping shades of leafy green. Mordenkainen and his green-garbed visitor appraised the unmoving flesh-manikin before them.
It lay on a bench, breathing, as if asleep; but in some way, it did not seem fully alive. It was clothed in plain grey wool tunic and trousers. Curley was somewhat taken aback by thefact that it was an exact physical duplicate of Mordenkainen.
The half-elf wrinkled his nose up, as if he smelled something unpleasant.
"What do you concoct here, old friend? It reeks of sorcery."
"This, Curley, is what I need your help for," Mordenkainen said, gesturing to the prone body. "Only one high in the Tiers of the Old Faith, such as yourself, can re-direct life force from the Great Green Cycle."
"Then it's not a clone."
"No. A vessel to serve Balance. Another pawn for the forces of Green - that's how some would describe it," the old mage chuckled.
Curley shook his head and grimaced. "A simulacrum. Why not just let Nature take its course? Why do wizards delve so close to the creation of life itself?"
"All I've made is a lifeless hulk, a phantasm of blood and ice and spell-stuff," Mordenkainen said, a bit defensively. "I'm at least wise enough to know I myself cannot create life!"
The half-elf sighed. "I'll do as you ask. Although some would consider it unnatural."
With holly-leaf in hand, the half-elven druid uttered his prayers for ten minutes. At the end, the flesh-manikin stirred, as if shocked. Its eyes opened. It looked around, saw the two men staring at it, and started in fear.
"Don't be afraid, spirit! You're back in the Cycle of Life. There's nothing to fear," Curley said, in an attempt to calm the now-living duplicate of Mordenkainen. It acted like a dumb, spooked animal, and froze in place, unsure of what to do.
Mordenkainen, meanwhile, was already casting another spell of his own: he was wording a Wish, albeit one of limited potency.
At the end of Mordenkainen's brief casting, the simulacrum started again, but now its eyes glittered with intelligence.
"Hopping Hells!" it exclaimed, in a voice identical to Mordenkainen's. "Curley? What's going on here! Why am I naked? And who's that fellow that looks like me, standing next to you?"
"Don't get your panties in an uproar, Junior," Mordenkainen said to the duplicate, and then handed him a golden goblet filled with Velunan Fireamber.
"Drink this, and sit down and relax."
"We have a lot to tell you," Curley Greenleaf chimed in.
Warily, the simulacrum accepted the goblet, and slowly sat down on a wooden stool nearby. And listened.

After a few months of the Simulacrum's existence, Mordenkainen was puzzled.
The creature, whom he had not yet even named, was showing a dark side, a depression that had never, in all his years, taken him. All his magical powers could not determine what the problem was, and it was only when Curley returned for a visit that he had someone else to puzzle the matter over with.
Curley laughed as Mordenkainen finished descriing the depths he had gone to in order todetermine what had gone wrong. He shook his head balefully.
"My friend, you are too long alone in these mountains. Did the thought never occur to you that maybe you should ask him?"
Mordenkainen was speechless, and felt more of a fool than when Tenser had beaten him at Dragon Chess using Falko's Bluff.

"Who am I?" the Simulacrum said.
For the second time that day, Mordenkainen did not know what to say. He had examined every possible avenue of magical research, goen over the creation process a thousand times or more, and yet the answer ot the problem was simple. Perhaps it was the part of him that was Mordenkainen, perhaps it was simply the potency of the magics. Yet here was an animated beast, a creation of alchemy and magic, who asked hte same thing that every man who walked the Oerth had asked since the dawn of time - who am I?
Could it be possible - could this creation have somehow 'evolved', in some form of freak of magic where the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. Did this creature have a soul?
"Smokelight!" Curley said confidently.
Both Mordenkainen and the creature looked at him quizzically. Curley smiled, holding back his laughter at the sight of these two men who reacted identically. He pointed to the pillar of grey smoke drifting up from the pipe which Mordenkainen held in his hand, and traced a route up to where it met the morning sunlight flooding in from the huge glassteel window of this magnificent lounge, with its fine panoramic view of the Yatils.
"You are Smokelight," Curley repeated. "Like us, you are a traveller in this world, and like us..."
He reached up to the sunlit smoke and wafted his hand through it, dispersing it into nothingness.
"... you are but ephemeral."
The Simulacrum thought for a second, then bowed his head and left the room. Mordenkainen scowled at Curley.
"Thanks a lot, good 'friend'."

A tale by Gary Welsh and Scott Rennie.