Arkis, the First Mage, is renowned across all of Terultimae for being the first mortal to ever understand the Arcane.
Born in Whitelake, Arkis was selected by the Church of the Nine Gods at a very young age to be a scholar and priest, serving as a librarian in the churches of the Knowledge Gods, Abditus, Kyna, and Scias.
Educated in the church, Arkis devoured books on the theoretical underpinnings of magic with voracity, eager to understand how the supernatural manipulations of the world that the gods granted her worked.
Reaching adulthood, Arkis gained employment as a librarian, rotating regularly through the three knowledge churches of Whitelake, gaining a reputation for always being buried in some theoretical textbook, and increasingly often, writing her own notes in increasingly incomprehensible jargon.
One day, late at night, Arkis took the piles and piles of notes on how the simplest cantrip, Light, worked, and revised them, holding all of the formulae of how it worked in her mind, and asserted her will. Touching her finger gently to the tip of her pen, Arkis willed it to glow - and it did.
This was the first Arcane Spell ever cast.  
Arkis went on to discover dozens more, and founded a school, teaching six students who went on to become the first Council of Masters, and set the schoolhouse floating in the sky, becoming known as Arkis's Grand Academy of the Arcane.
After establishing the school and charging her students to run it in her absence, Arkis's curiosity won out over her again - and she set out to the west, curious to see what was beyond the Barrier Mountains. Her last message was reporting a basecamp at Watchman's Peak, and that she would attempt to cross through the pass in the morning - and she was never heard from again, presumed dead.