Elric of Melniboné

Elric appears in Michael Moorcock's Elric sequence (first appearances in stories beginning with the novella "The Dreaming City", 1961; the collected novel Elric of Melniboné 1972). He is presented as the 428th emperor (styled Elric VIII) of Melniboné, heir to a long line of rulers whose political legitimacy rests on ancestral pacts and sorcery. Brought up in the decadent, long‑lived Melnibonéan culture, Elric is physically frail, scholarly, and morally introspective—at odds with his people's callous traditions—and comes to rely on inherited pacts (notably invocation of the patron Arioch) and, later, the black sword Stormbringer, events that shape his tragic, doom‑laden narrative within Moorcock's secondary‑world cosmology.

Primary descriptions portray Elric as albino and strikingly pale: "the colour of a bleached skull" flesh, milk‑white long hair, "two slanting eyes, crimson and moody," and "two slender hands, also the colour of bone." He is presented as beautiful but physically weak and anaemic; one passage depicts him emerging from the loose sleeves of a yellow gown.

Within the fiction Elric is an accomplished sorcerer and summoner who can call upon the traditional patrons of the Melnibonéan emperors—explicitly Arioch (named a Lord of Chaos and "Duke of Hell")—and uses ancient ancestral pacts and agreements with various non‑human beings. His rulership and magic are rooted in imperial institutions (including the ability, culturally, to summon dragons that sleep in caverns beneath Melniboné). Elric's personal power is also bound to the sentient sword Stormbringer, which grants him vitality and martial prowess but must be fed on the souls of intelligent beings and brings disaster to those close to him.