[OOC] The Black Prophecy (Dead now; requiescat in pace!)

[Legion02]

Try 2, this one should be better (I hope).

Allura the War-maiden

Identity: Allura, the War-Maiden, Blade-siren
Type: Scion
Myth

Curse of the Ganden Abbey

“Sister Joyce, I would say it's a surprise but then we would both be lying.” Said abbess Mathilda. She put the book she was reading down and peered through her spectacles at the young sister entering her office. The contrast between them could not be greater. Where the abbess looked old but wizened and stern, sister Joyce was barely twenty-five and radiated a restless energy. It was a shame she was sentenced to the Ganden Monastery.

“You can’t keep making me scrub floors!? Is this how you all live!?” Sister Joyce yelled out. “Just praying and scrubbing and eating and- Aargh!” She burst out in anger. The abbess had seen it a hundred times over. Young girls doomed to the dullest life possible. It rarely worked out. Still, she had vowed to help them when she took up the oath of the abbess.

So she got up and took a torch from the nearby barrel. “Come with me.” The crone said as she moved past sister Joyce. The two of them walked through the truly ancient corridors of the monastery. It was littered with derelict furniture. Some of it was half chopped up, ready to be thrown in the fireplace for some warmth. There were cobwebs everywhere. A great many doors in the abbey were locked these days but at the end of a corridor, the abbess opened one that looked almost exactly like any other. Except behind this one was not an abandoned room but a stairwell going down. The two of them followed it down to the oldest depths. Somewhere along the way, the abbess had lit her torch. Yellow firelight burned away the darkness, but a place like Ganden Monastery could throw long shadows.

Eventually, the two of them reached their destination: the lowest crypts. Sister Joyce felt a cold sensation creep up her spine. There was something wrong here, but she couldn’t put a finger on it. The abbess gave no indication that she felt the same chills. They marched on. Until the stairs ended in front of a lonely hallway. The abbess motioned sister Joyce to come closer to the wall of the hallway lit by her torch. It showed a relief sculpture. It was old and weathered and showed a row of knights with their swords raised and shield held firmly in front of them. Sister Joyce could just recognize the carved halo around their heads.

The abbess noticed her looking at the halos. “Once those halos were adorned with gold.” She said. “These were the champions of the Exalted One. They fought the darkness and slew demons. Nothing could stand against them.” She moved her torch to the left. Revealing the horrors that had fallen before these champions upon the mid-relief. There were horned devils and brutish orcs but they had all fallen to the ground. “On the battlefield, they could not be beaten. So the Dark One send something else.” The abbess said as she moved her torch to the right. The fire burned away the cobwebs revealing a knight carved like the ones from. But now he was on one knee and without a halo. He was kneeling before a woman dressed in a cloak and long flowing hair. In her hand she held some sort of crystal with beams radiating from it towards the knight. “It is said that she sang to them, and with her song she cursed the Exalted One’s champions and took their souls.”

“Lies!” A hissing voice whispered in the back of sister Joyce’s head. She looked back to see where it came from. She saw nothing but more reliefs upon the walls. There was not even a breeze down here.

The abbess saw her turn. “Ignore the voice, sister.” She said, before following the wall and the story it told. “She took their souls and corrupted them. They became stronger, yes but also colder and more menacing. When she was done with them, these champions were but pale reflections of their true selves. She put them into new bodies of black flesh, doomed to fight against the one they worshipped.” The relief showed the same woman holding up the same crystal. Its carved rays now touching something that looked human but was far too big to be one. It wielded a great axe and stood against a score of haloed knights. “Every champion sent after her was either killed or cursed. Until-“ The abbess continued on. Following the relief upon the wall further. “-the Martyred Lady. She was the wife of one of the champions that was cursed. She and the other grieving widows marched upon the Dark One’s servant with her lantern in hand.” And the relief did show this. “They surrounded her stronghold and prayed to the Exalted One. The servant attacked. Expecting an easy slaughter. But when the blood of our Martyred Lady was spilled the curses were lifted. The tears of the widows and the blood of our Martyred Lady broke the power of the servant and rendered her defenseless. But no prison could ever be strong enough for her and death was not as certain to her as it is to us either. So she was imprisoned here. Not with iron shackles and steel bars, guarded by men armed with swords. She is kept here and surrounded by just us.” The two of them reached the end of the hallway. Both of them now stood in front of a simple door. It looked old but still sturdy.

The abbess turned towards her wayward pupil. “That is why we are here. Not to seek glory. Not to be known. We do our duty as the Martyred Lady did her duty. We pray and scrub the floors because that is what is keeping that monster locked up.” The abbess paused for a minute then said, with a calmer tone: “I hope you will start taking your duties seriously now.” With those stern words spoken, the abbess turned on her heel and walked away. Leaving Sister Joyce in the lonely hallway. Sister Joyce was young and curious though. Despite the history lesson she couldn’t help but feel the siren song of curiosity as she rested her hand on the wooden door.

“Is this the life you desire?” The ethereal whisper said. “You will live for another forty years perhaps. You will toil in gardens for your own food and then you will die alone and forgotten. How many graves count your cemetery? Go and see how many of them still bear readable names. Is this your fate, Joyce of the young House of Clarfield? Or will you etch your name in history? I can remake-“ The whispers were cut off when sister Joyce pulled her hand from the wood. Every sane fiber in her body feared those whispers. As fast as she could she ran up the stairs again. Away from that crypt. The distance never lessened that lingering sense in the back of her mind though.

[Leotamer]

Attempt two of Cucaniensis

Cucaniensis

Name: Abbot Cucaniensis, Cocaigne, Luilekker

Type: Scion

Myth

A young man from Marleon stood over the freshly dug grave of his father. His hands tightly grasped a rusty key as he contemplated his life. His father once lived as an important and honorable man, but he died in a backwater woodlands from a common ailment. He had nothing left. The traitor had taken everything from his family, or at least almost everything.

He picked up a shovel from nearby and moved to behind his log cabin. A part of him knew he should just leave it buried, but he no longer had any choice. One of his ancestors had gathered occult items concerning one of the black god's servants. They were well-hidden, few people in the family even knew of their existence. The reasons why they were collected where lost to history, but he knew his father needed to flee with it after his fall from grace or else give credence to the liars.

He pulled the wooden chest from the ground, and fidgeted the key in the lock until it opened. He picked up a few scrolls. They were correspondence from a warrior of Paterdomus to some unknown person during one of the campaigns into orc land. He had read them before but he felt it prudent to remind himself of what happened. This was the first recorded encounter with it.

The first read in old common, "Morale was low and there was talk of retreat after one mere attack against our supply line. However, an abbot by the name of Cucaniensis has arrived with supplies of water and bread. He has also began to preach about how must continue to fight against the darkness and that our efforts will not be in vain. This must surely be a sign of the exalted one's hand ushering us forward to victory."

There were presumably more sent, however only four were recovered. The next read, "We caught a young man attempting to desert. The punishment for desertion is severe, however Cucaniensis convinced me that we should not allow him to die in dishonor and grant him a chance of redemption. His sacrifice will not be forgotten."

The next one was written in sloppier hand-writing than the previous two, "I have discovered the reason behind our failure. Traitors are in our midst. How else could stupid orcs so quickly identity our supply routes and preempt our attacks. Cucaniensis has told me about a group who are planning desertion. I believe he is too naïve and trusting to see their true agenda."

The next was distressing short and barely legible, "They are all traitors."

Placing the scrolls back, he turned his attention to a supposed portrait of the fell sorcerer. The dark one appeared so normal, as it had an inviting smile and was fair-headed. He heard that some demons had red or black eyes, but this one's were a soft blue. He had also heard that this artist had taken to making far less pleasant pieces.

Trying to dispel the mental imagines from his mind, he moved on to another document. A report of a scaled man who breathed fire. At this point, he was only half paying attention but he knew that this was the end result of an encounter with the demon. Something he noted was that he had bled a black, oily substance. He was curious what was offered to the victim.

Finally, he pulled out a old servant's bell and a dusty book. It told of the evil's powers, of note was its power to drain people of abstract concepts and grant them to another person, even their luck. The book detailed a way to bind the demon to serve whoever carried the bell. It was how it was originally defeated, but the magic in the bell has faded. It was a stupid idea, but he had nothing left. Everything had already been taken from his him. He had nothing left to lose. The last reagent he needed to recover everything he had lost was the heart of an evil man.

[Cyclone]

And another round.

@Dead Cruiser for Emel

Hider

This depiction of magic as used to kill Maro’s son seems much more in line with what’s intended for the setting, and Oraculum said that he talked to you a bit about the magic trick and is likewise satisfied. So with that matter settled, we’re glad to accept the CS now.

@Forett for Sol’Kureth

Hider

This iteration is much better than the previous one that we reviewed, so well done!

I’m fond of the narrative change to have the two trolls rather than the human wizard; it seems more fitting and I also like the implication that you’ll probably be having some arc early on that involves rallying (or corrupting, haha) the trolls and potentially then going on to invade the mainland with that force. Now, I will note that Oraculum in particular told me that he wasn’t enthusiastic with their speech being portrayed as so primitive and ‘caveman-like’. Maybe Oraculum had something more like Norse mythology in mind where they’d be more sinister and clever to contrast the ogres’ explicitly dim-witted nature. In fairness though the OP didn’t indicate how their speech might be portrayed, and with the Lord of the Rings as an obvious major inspiration, I don’t mind so much that your portrayal of them is more like how they appear in the Hobbit.

I told you about Ora’s thoughts in case you found yourself agreeing with him or reconsidering, but at the end of the day I think that either way of depicting the trolls would be fine. I’m glad to let you be the one to flesh them out as you see fit, seeing as it looks like you’ll be interacting with trolls far more than anybody else. Just try to be consistent in your portrayal of them, whichever route you go.

We noticed some minor typos and other errors, and in a few places there’s strange phrasing or word choice, with Oraculum citing this line in particular, “Flesh twisted and crawled over the skeleton until it looked more and more like a creature of flesh.”

My main concern from before, that of the misuse of the conditional tense, is mostly fixed but I still did see one or two instances of it. I’m not totally sure if you understand exactly what we’re talking about, so I’ll give some examples.

This was fine: “He had to follow his vision, if he did not he would not get what he desired.”

Switching from the past tense narration to conditional made sense for the end of that sentence, because you stated a condition ‘if he did not’.

Now for contrast, here’s two instances where you’re making an error because the surroundings are in past tense and there is no condition or discernible reason to use the word ‘would’:
“He would utter another word of power, and the stone glowed the same as the other.”
“The ground around the skeleton would crack...”

Having this error pop up just a few times rather than dominate the entire second half of the myth is obviously a massive improvement, but I’m staying a stickler about you fixing those last few instances, in the hopes that I can be reassured you understand what we’re talking about.

The narrative content of your myth and overall CS are quite good so I hope this isn’t discouraging. You’re like 95% of the way to the finish line; if you can just do some grammatical and structural corrections we’ll gladly accept your sheet. In fact you’re so close that another formal review seems unnecessary. Just catch our attention on the Discord after you’ve made some edits, and if we think it looks good we’ll tell you then and approve you on the spot.

@Tuujaimaa for Máthair-Amaidí

Hider

I praise your narrative myth for possessing the great trinity of being enjoyable to read, succinct, and a good demonstration of your writing skill.

Something that struck me about the first sentence -- you say, “Long before the White One began their...” and use the word ‘their’ when the Exalted One is unambiguously male, meaning ‘his’ would be correct, or maybe even ‘His’ if you want to point to the Exalted’s godly nature. That’s actually all that I found to nitpick though, so consider this paragraph just another pat on the back.

As GMs Oraculum and I find ourselves wondering what sort of things a character might do early on. Your character seems to have at least two suitable motivations: spreading this magical disease and its resulting insanity, and of course trying to somehow break free. I can infer that you’ll be able to put together a solid early plotline and find things to post about to further those two motivations, and while your position both geographically and as a pretty thoroughly imprisoned scion might limit your ability to interact with others, Pagemaster’s’ twins are somewhere in the same general region so maybe you two could still find a way to work on something together if you wanted, even before the big amphibious kraken-monster breaks free.

Sheet accepted!

@Legion02 for Allura

Hider

Oraculum’s chief complaint was the prevalence of sentence fragments, and I still see a few of them. Here’s two examples:
“The servant attacked. Expecting an easy slaughter.”
“They marched on. Until the stairs ended in front of a lonely hallway.”

The flow of many of your sentences, even some of those that may be technically grammatically correct, strikes me as very choppy. This is just stylistic advice now, but I suggest that you do try to make a conscious effort to string some of these thoughts together more fluidly, make more use of the comma, and try not to devote an entire sentence to what could just be a clause in a longer, compound sentence. Reading sentences aloud might help with this.

Anyways, if my memory serves then the sentence fragments were much fewer in number this time than they were before. You’ve made strides in the right direction for sure. If a few remaining sentence fragments were the only issue I’d probably be willing to take this CS, but there’s a bit more.

I’ll address something that I don’t think Oraculum did, which is your dialogue punctuation. I see some very consistent errors here; you terminate quotations with periods in some places where commas would be correct, for example in the very first sentence. And then right after that your dialogue tag ‘said’ is capitalized when it should be lower-case, as it’s technically part of the same sentence as the quotation that precedes it. I think that this is a page that you might find very helpful as it has numerous examples and can explain more thoroughly than I.

The content of your narrative myth was all quite good and I think Oraculum and I both dislike playing grammar Nazi, but hopefully you can appreciate our perspective -- if we don’t insist upon corrections here and now, it’s all but guaranteed any consistent errors will be carried over into all of the IC posts. As I said, you seem to have made steps in the right direction, but the grammar and punctuation still have enough errors for me to withhold acceptance for now.

@Leotamer for Cucaniensis

Hider

The content is good and I enjoyed this second myth.

That being said, to its detriment there's an assortment of typos, extra words left in, and other miscellaneous errors. These errors weren't of a consistent nature which is good and makes me more willing to overlook them as minor mistakes, but at the same time there were several of these small errors and some were to the detriment of clarity. Look no further than the first paragraph, for instance, "His father was once lived as an important and honorable man..."

I can't tell for certain if that was intended to be 'was an important or honorable man' or 'once lived as an important and honorable man' and this confusion then ripples into the next sentence or two where it's unclear whether 'he' refers to the narrator or the narrator's father, and I'm also confused as to who the traitor is supposed to be. The father, I guess? Or maybe just someone else that isn't elaborated upon?

This isn't enough to make me reject the sheet (though you should still fix these quickly before posting this in the characters tab, and proofread) but it was treading near the line. Accepted.

Lauder, Oraculum hasn't had the chance to give me his thoughts on your sheet yet, so it hasn't been reviewed. Unfortunately I don't think he or I will be doing anything on RPGuild for Christmas, so you'll probably have to just wait until the 26th. In the meantime I'll give you some quick and informal feedback: I like what you're going for and most of the character ideas, but for the dying words of some tired of great seer, those parts at the beginning were pretty long-winded and filled with what seemed like an unreasonably big amount of information. In Christmas terms, the present was good, but the wrapping was quite sloppy and it bordered closer to a description (as compared to a narration) than we would've liked; you know, the point of the sheet's weird format with the myth is to challenge you to 'show us, don't tell us'.

Merry Christmas everyone, and hopefully when we reconvene in a day or two the IC will be sprung into action! I already have a solid idea for an opening post.

[Antarctic Termite]

fuck it

Peks

Scion

Sir Galn Erbius of Paterdomus, Knight of the Hare and leader of 'this merry little jaunt of an expedition', pushed a cobble around the rubble with his foot as he inspected what remained of the granary. Whatever hopes he had of discerning from the little ruin a culprit for its destruction had been carried away with the grain, which had for the most part survived and been recovered by the villagers with much excavation and heaping-up of the simple mortar and masonry. Their greatest concern now was rats- rats infesting the sacks of oats and barley they had moved to bury in a makeshift storage pit while they rebuilt the grainhouse.

Their second greatest concern, of course, was the ogre.

Sir Hasse Lomar of Paterdomus, also a Knight of the Hare and more easily bored than Sir Erbius, saw nothing worth noting in the rubble and had already questioned the villagers at length (that is, for about five or six minutes). "The beast was especially large, you say?"

"Aye, m'lord," said the nearest farmer. "Ain't none of us seen it, o' course, but they do say an ogre ain't meant to be bigger'n twelve feet at the crown. And they see 'em too, sometimes, stealin' sheep. Well, this one had footprints bigger'n I am tall, so..."

Sir Lomar frowned. "Are any of these footsteps extant?" Beat. "Are any of them still around."

The man raised his eyebrows and pulled a half-shrug. "Been a fair few days, m'lord, but you can still see the dent o' them, aye..."

That became the closest thing they had to any hard evidence of the beast: a string of muddy ditches shoved into the soft earth of a fallow field in a rough pattern of a man's gait. None of them looked particularly like footprints, nor were they so large as the man had said ("Well, they've filled in a bit, sir..."), and Sir Lomar suspected it would not take especially long to produce the very same thing with two men and a shovel.

"I suppose we'll have to investigate the plateau," said Sir Erbius over dinner, a generous and simple offering of chicken, carrot and bread. His squire was chasing village maidens outside, and the longer he spent eating the less he had to care about untangling the mess that was no doubt about to be made.

"Bollocks to the plateau. I'm not taking my horse round those cliffs without even a single eyewitness to tell us what we're looking for. It's bad country, Galn, this is the Ashmonts; there could be orcs up there, or worse- Cales."

Sir Erbius raised both eyebrows. "We won't make a whole quest out of it. I'm just saying that if there really is an ogre, and it comes back, and we hadn't even bothered to look for bones or such around its nest-"

"Shut up, I know." Sir Lomar sighed and drained his mug of beer in two long gulps. "I'm just cross about it. Let's go first thing tomorrow."

So they did.

---

"My arse hurts."

"Your arse would hurt worse if you'd been my squire and I had caught you cavorting with a peasant lass." Sir Lomar's own squire flinched at his words. "She wasn't even pretty."

"I thought she was pretty."

"Shut up."

Sir Erbius held his face away so neither of them could see him laughing. Eventually Sir Lomar's squire piped up.

"Sirs, I'm not sure we can make it up this valley by horse..."

"If we can lead them over this rockfall, we'll be alright." Sir Erbius anticipated the question and followed, "Squire, climb to the top and tell us how bad it is on the other side." His squire nodded, dismounted painfully, and began to clamber.

Sir Lomar smacked his squire around the shoulder. "Well, you heard him. Go!" -Barely a minute passed before Sir Lomar himself sighed, dismounted, and began to lead the horses over the easier parts of the slope.

A shadow passed over the sun.

Sir Erbius's steed panicked with such suddenness and terror that the horseman was immediately thrown, hurled from his saddle and beaten across eight feet of mountain stone before his foot slipped out of the stirrup. The earth quaked. Horses screamed and men screamed with them. He heard the sound of a great mass of gravel sliding.

Through bloodied weeping eyes, the knight watched a shape like a man bend its oak-thick legs and leap up the valley wall, out of sight. Ungodly laughter echoed and was gone.

---

"So, to be quite clear on the matter... no one was killed, in this attack?"

Sir Hasse nodded. His colleague, still in bandages, had been firmly advised by the physicians not to move his neck overmuch. "No, my liege. None of the villagers were injured."

"None of them saw the ogre?"

"Only its footprints."

"It... stole horses? Other livestock?"

"Three of our horses, yes. The fourth bolted. We found it later."

"Cattle?"

"Sheep, sometimes. The, uh, the villagers suspect that may have been a different ogre."

"And the grain? Lost along with the granary?"

"...No, my liege. Under the debris most of it was quite unharmed."

"I see." The Count laced and unlaced his fingers. "I see no reason to investigate further. Perhaps such assignments should be left for... others of your order."

Sir Lomar gripped the arms of his chair, nearly rising from his seat. "My liege, we are ready to swear-"

"Sit down, Hasse. I know you are." The Count smiled warmly. "I will have it marked by the cartographers that the plateau has an ogre presence- of course, I believe most of them note this already. In the meanwhile, I wouldn't want any giant to turn into a waste of my best knights, would I?" He laughed a fatherly little politician's laugh. "Dismissed."

The knights looked at each other, bowed and departed. Bastard idiots, thought the Count, and called his mistress back into the room.

---

"Wake up. Sheng! Wake up! We need to light the fires!" Yorgh kicked the fur-laden mass of his brother's sleeping form until it twisted violently into wakefulness. "Get your tinderbox. Light the bonfire!"

The big orange orc eyes scowled at him, then flew wide. Sheng scrabbled from his bed. "What's she got?"

Yorgh turned back and squinted into the dark. "Horses. Three of them." Sheng swore a lurid orcish curse. His brother turned to the other orc, already roused by the commotion.

"Peks is here."

She too flew into action.

So great were the lungs of the beast that approached them that her laughter was almost too deep for orcen ears to hear, but so powerful was her mirth that they heard it clearly anyway. Weak flames began to lick the piles of tinder under the great heap of mountain-pine they had already prepared as she threw down the fresh carcasses she had claimed and seated herself on the barren earth of the plateau. Her lips smacked across teeth set in a skull twice the size of the largest in the archives of Paterdomus, and easily four times its weight.

"Make fire!" The six orcs flinched under the force of her voice. "Fire for Peks!"

"Fire for Peks," yelled Yorgh in reply. He knew that you should always trick an ogre, as his grandfather taught him, and never obey it, but one's wits have a way of departing when faced with a giant who eats two warhorses in a single sitting. If it wasn't for her willingness to share meat, the six of them would have fled this accursed plateau long ago.

"Fire! Meat! Meat for Peks, and fire!"

"Yorgh..." Sheng pointed to the horse his wives had dragged into the firelight to butcher with crude hatchets. The hooves were the first to go, horseshoes being a precious boon of iron if the ogre didn't eat them. "This isn't even horse country. Where in Hell's name did she find these? These look like warhorses..."

Yorgh grimaced and turned away. Peks laughed until the mountains rang with her voice as dawn trickled over the horizon.

[Terminal]

Ex Nihilo

Ex Nihilo

The Call of the Void

Type:

• y = ^a/₀

Myth

The Journal of Faculus Alarune

The Journal of Faculus Alarune

August 1st, 314 P.F.
I have arrived at the estate of Lucion Terramis. It is a woodland manor, well fortified, situated in the Southwestern wilderness of Arcos. I received a most timely and auspicious invitation to attend the Prince shortly after fleeing for my life across the Marleon border; evidently he is in need of expertise and my infamy has unexpectedly yielded dividends as to my prospects here.

The invitation arrived by personal courier and directions to a carriage station in a nearby town. Under normal circumstances I would have been quite suspicious, especially as the Prince's letter claimed he had been tracing my movements using arcane (!) means ever since he had heard of the incident in Gold Crossing. My choice in the matter was simplified by widespread news of my activities and the inevitable bounties the Templars and their agents are doubtlessly beginning to circulate throughout Arcos after having given them the slip.

The choice has proven to be most salubrious. I am not the only practitioner of note the Prince has called into his service. When I arrived, I was escorted to a wing of the manor where a sizable gathering of mages was convened and quartered, including Drejak of the Broken Isles, Juikon Kinslayer, and Aramis the Renouncer (!!!), amongst others. I am barely even a footnote compared to the council Lucion has assembled here.

While so many high-profile heretics and neer-do-wells would normally pose substantial risk, our location is optimal for security. The manor is surrounded by an exterior wall, the Prince has numerous and well-equipped retainers, and companies of patrolling Arcosi soldiers wander nearby as deterrents to Marleon invasion. A sizable force would be necessary to threaten us here, and we would have ample forewarning of the approach of any such group. I am heartened by the unexpected sanctuary I find myself ensconced in.

I am exhausted from the journey and am retiring shortly. I imagine Lucion will soon reveal the purpose he has assembled us all for.

August 7th, 314 P.F.
Although the Prince did manage to pique my curiosity, his recent declaration of our purpose here has exposed this entire venture as a waste of our time. The fool desires us to bring back his dead wife. In addition to being exasperatingly trite, the notion is utterly impossible. From what he has told us she is very thoroughly dead, with her remains burnt and the ashes scattered.

I am not the only one aware of this. I could practically see the crest of rolling eyes spreading across the ranks of everyone called to meet with Lucion earlier today when he made the announcement. Still, this gathering is not utterly without recourse. A few more individuals of note have trickled in since my last entry, including Lilirn of the Cerulean Sect and Hanuzeth, an Orc (!) who I am given to understand is a Warlock of some sort amongst his people. There was a great deal of outrage amongst our gathered number. Quite a few individuals stormed out of the room and presumably fled the manor. Many still remain however, undeterred even by the somewhat apprehensive presence of this savage in our midst (myself included). Many amongst us have already begun to meet in private and gather into impromptu cabals. This is an opportunity to learn and forge new alliances while stringing the Prince along for as much as we can.

August 10th, 314 P.F.
Underestimating and dismissing the Prince has resulted in a rather disastrous turn. He has become aware of the pall of mockery and contempt the gathering has for his proposed venture and taken to it poorly. As it turns out, in addition to being utterly besotted with her, she was also the connection between Lucion's estate and a number of state-owned commercial interests, which are now subsequently at jeopardy due to her passing. He beheaded three of our number just to underscore the urgency of his interest, and then subsequently threatened to turn us all in to the Templars in order to make up for his losses if we did not produce results. He attempted to alleviate his coercion by indicating he still intended to reward us handsomely upon the successful resurrection of his wife, though this is of little comfort given what he asks is simply not possible.

I have begun devising a means of escape with several of the others.

August 12th, 314 P.F.
Escape is likely unfeasible now. After the partially successful attempt to leave by a small group, the Prince has since ransacked our quarters and posted a heavy guard in our wing of the manor. His thugs confiscated many of the materials and tools necessary for more potent magicks and indicated that if anybody desires to leave or attempt any rites of consequence, we will have to present to him a reasonable course beyond appealing to the impossibility of what he wants.

It is not all bad, however. Having considered it with several of the others, we have since arrived at the conclusion that we do not actually have to revive this fool's wife. All we need to do is convince him we have done so - or else show him what he wants to see until he gives us the materials we need to conjure an escape from this place.

August 22nd, 314 P.F.
Prince Lucion sorely tries our capabilities and patience. The conclave, for lack of a better term, has devised a number of rites capable of conjuring a convincing simulacra, seeming, or construct capable of fooling our captor and patron. What we lack, however, is a reference point. The idiotic man's wife died and, on top of her mortal remnants having been utterly destroyed, there are no depictions of her. No portraits, no wood-cuttings, no written descriptors except for the cursory details of a birth certificate. The few that existed were consumed in the same fire that took her life. Lucion would predictably refuse to avail his mind to the conclave to supply a reference memory (aggravating his already heightened suspicions in the process), and isolated as we are any hope of tracking down somebody who could either render a likeness or provide a memory is remote. Various forms of divination are aimless without any remnants to serve as a catalyst, and the matter is further confounded by the fact that she even shared her full name (Kalitra Aylus Remnest Terramis) with three other women in her lineage! Stupid, stupid, lazy, inbred mongrels!

Predictably, Lucion himself has very little patience for these excuses. His threats of consigning us to Paterdomus dungeons grow more pointed by the day. What does he expect us to do? Pull her spitting image straight from the void?

August 30th, 314 P.F.
Lilirn of the Cerulean Sect has offered a possible solution to the problematic absence of any reference visage. She managed to, with some rather miraculous persuasion, gain access to Kalitra's personal library of correspondence and business documents in the hope of gleaning anything useful. One discovery made which Lucion conveniently failed to mention was that both he and his wife are household names in Arcos. The death of his wife was nearly a national tragedy, and there is even reference to a playwright commissioning some sordid theatrical production about it. My initial reaction to learning this was to panic - surely if this couple's romance was so renowned, there was no means by which our presence here in Lucion's estate could remain undiscovered. A fear which is mirrored in many of my erstwhile peers - it is perhaps likely that Lucion's patience with us will end once the inconvenience of concealing our presence begins to outweigh the notion we can produce results.

According to Lilirn there is a silver lining to this situation: Because the wife's personage is so widely known of and held within the greater public's awareness, it may be possible to divine a likeness of her by tapping into that collective conceit. The end result would be some grossly embellished caricature of the real Kalitra of course, but all we need is something superficially similar in appearance.

The tricky part will be giving our seeming true substance. Even with a collective notion of the woman to tap into, without any material catalysts to act as an anchor rendering the image into a high-fidelity construct will take some work. More still, to create something that will not rouse Lucion's suspicion.

September 4th, 314 P.F.
A golem-binder by the name of Irus has proposed creating a body of malleable clay to project the image onto, which will then shape itself to match the illusory seeming. The principles seem sound and Lucion has approved a fabricated proposal presented to him, and provided the necessary materials without raising issue. Many amongst the conclave, myself included, are cautiously optimistic.

September 6th, 314 P.F.
Irus is dead, Lucion had him drowned in a basin of molten brass. His encased corpse now presides over the ballroom where the conclave takes its meets and meals.

We need a new approach. As evidenced by Lucion's thrice-damned retainer, on top of all the other impossible aspects of this project, whatever we create will need to be perfectly internally stable - nonmagically and incapable of being disjoined. Or at least sufficiently convincing that the Prince will not want to disjoin whatever we fabricate.

September 10th, 314 P.F.
Hanuzeth the Orc has proposed we summon a demon - something he called a 'Lesser Scion' - from the Abyss to act in the role of adviser. Few amongst the conclave were amenable to this suggestion, though I suspect it has more to do with it having come from Hanuzeth than due to any misapprehension concerning the summoning of a Demonic entity. After some belabored debate we nonetheless presented the idea to the Prince, who agreed immediately and provided the necessary materials. Given he invited Hanuzeth into our midst to start with, perhaps I should be less surprised. The rite is to be performed in confines of Lucion's choosing and carefully guarded. Any misstep here might also potentially turn the fiend against us.

The cost to conjure it will be great, even with the most powerful members of the conclave assisting.

September 13th, 314 P.F.
Tired and empty. Senses are deadened. There is no color in my world, nor texture to my touch. All is ash in my mouth.

The utter absence of scent is actually something of a blessing, as none amongst the conclave have been permitted opportunity to bathe in over a month.

will write more tomorrow.

September 14th, 314 P.F.
The demon was, insofar as I could discern, intrigued by our predicament. It described to us a most curious arcane principle that it referred to as 'Conceit's Constant,' and how willpower and cognition continuously shape and reshape the living abstraction of magic, and why any attempt to comprehend or encompass it is inevitably doomed. It is why every member of our conclave has a different comprehension of magic, and different means and methods for utilizing it. The fiend retold ancient legends of how amassed faith, worship, belief, and prayer could reshape creation itself in the Dawn Times, when the Exalted One and the Black God still caused the world to quake - and then warned that any attempt to replicate their feats was likely futile due to Conceit's Constant, except perhaps by blind, juvenile chance.

It also indicated that such a phenomenon is normally impossible. Mortal Conceit apparently does not have the requisite Impetus to reshape creation in any meaningful or immediate fashion, at least not in practicable timespans. In bygone times, Mortal Conceit was catalyzed by certain beings - namely the Exalted One and the Black God - by some ineffable quality internal to them, absent from the rest of the world and the beings that inhabit it. A spark of divinity, perhaps? We did not think to query the Demon on this at the time. The conjuring was otherwise unproductive - the fiend was just as certain as we were that what the Prince desires is impossible. At least for mortals.

September 18th, 314 P.F.
Drejak and Aramis have both agreed that it might be possible to approximate a suitable catalytic effect that can be used to channel the collective abstraction of Kalitra into being. They, much like myself, have decided that what we require is an embodiment of the same Divine Spark as was borne by the Exalted One and the Dark God.

As neither entity is available for our use, we will have to make do with subgradient materials. Artifacts, tokens, sacrificed inhuman servants - if these are taken and reduced, the sublimated essence of Divinity can be rendered. The problem being, of course, that there are not enough of these materials to go around. This is not the first time an effort such as this has transpired. Many of the old Exalted Myths of Martyrdom and Sacrifice, where Celestial beings sacrifice themselves to produce some untold miracle, are based in truth. But the days where sufficiently powerful beings still resided upon Outremer are long gone, meaning we will have to pool together multiple, disparate sources - potentially even mixing the power of both Exalted and Profane sources. It is questionable whether there is even a singular quality of the two that can be isolated, or if it will even be possible for us to replicate their use of mortal belief due to Conceit's Constant twisting the nature of the power we would be attempting to imitate. The inner circle has nonetheless accepted that, whatever quantity of the Exalted and Fallen powers made it possible, that state should be reflected whole in the power we intend to extricate from whatever items Lucion can procure. We have taken to referring to it as quintessence as a convenient shorthand amongst ourselves.

In addition to the troublesome obstacle Conceit's Constant represents, the conclave is showing signs that some amongst our number are starting to lose sight of our primary interest - that is, of deceiving Lucion and escaping from this captivity with our lives and freedom. Summoning that Demon was a terrible idea. It has planted in their heads ridiculous notions of godhood and immortality and seven other kinds of tripe, and this latest proposal by Drejak and Aramishas only fueled their delusions. Perhaps a third of the conclave now actually desires to genuine revive Kalitra, while another fifth predictably wants to use the aggregate Spark for their own apotheosis.

This may truthfully be to our benefit...or at least, my benefit. A resource we have been profoundly lacking in since the onset of this venture has been Lucion's trust. There may be a way to eliminate these troublesome elements while regaining a measure of his confidence.

September 21st, 314 P.F.
Nearly half the conclave is now dead. The inner circle agreed with my reasoning and plan, albeit all for different reasons. The shaky consensus we have arrived at is that even with Lucion's resources, we will not be able to reduce enough artifacts and the like to reproduce any Miracles akin to the true restoration of the dead. But it might just be enough for half a miracle, in a matter of speaking. Enough to grant our simulacra the internalized stability necessary to persist without magic, once it has been made.

We spun Lucion a yarn about the more troublesome elements in the conclave planning to deceive him and use their quintessence for their own base purposes. He ordered their purge on the spot, without even requesting evidence!

We still have not earned any true measure of trust from him, but he is now letting some of us - those he deems to not be great risks - to leave the manor grounds under escort, myself included. I am heading out to the nearby village early tomorrow for various purposes, most importantly to discern how aware the surrounding populace may be of our presence. I will write more tomorrow.

September 22nd, 314 P.F.
We tread upon thin and melting ice shoals. Lucion has not been so circumspect as we would like with the means by which he has been procuring and transporting the materials we require. I am certain the entire village knows of the conclave's presence, and tales of the Prince and his thrice-damned wife are still in circulation to the point half of them are convinced we are there to try and revive her.

Moreso, somebody in the village definitely recognized me, from their look and way they were eying me. They were not familiar to me in turn, so they may be an agent of the Templar Knights. If I was able to glean so much in but half a day, they likely also know what transpires at Lucion's estate.

Only our fortified position and the presence of an Arcosi field army is stopping Paterdomus from launching a siege of the manor, I reckon, but that cannot last. What force they cannot bring to bear militarily, they will and doubtlessly have been exerting politically. Prince Lucion's days are numbered, and so are ours. This project must come to fruition soon if we are to have any chance of getting out of this alive.

September 30th, 314 P.F.
Our plan has hit a snag, and it is only thanks to the peerless capabilities of Juikon that our efforts have not been wasted.

Lucion has, over the course of the last two weeks, procured and had shipped to his estate a number of potent Exalted and Profane artifacts with residual power of the Exalted One and the Dark God respectively. They have since been destroyed, and their energies extricated - but we cannot get them to meld. They were on the verge of dissipating entirely before Juikon intervened.

We have the quintessence we need, but it is all sorted into incompatible parcels. If we are to go any further, we need a way to make them meld together.

I admit to some measure of excitement over this prospect. This is wild, untamed magic that has never before been touched nor fathomed by mortalkind before. The prospect of reshaping motes of divinity for our own purposes might be a portent of the dawn of a new era of magic - though I am getting ahead of myself. I also must bear in mind the failing of my now deceased colleagues. My objective is escape, not aggrandized and vainglorious ritual shaping.

October 8th, 314 P.F.
The quintessence cannot be melded as they are, but Hanuzeth believes it might be possible to 'wash' away their affinity for their respective sources. To unbind the energy from the quality of the Exalted One and the Dark God. The notion seems quite queer to me, although then again nothing like this has ever been done before in all of recorded history so perhaps that was inevitable.

What is Divinity, divorced from any substance or intellect? Even rootless and unbound as the quintessence we possess is now, it is still alive in its own way - aware, in a sense. After a fashion, I have been thinking of it this entire time as if we were dealing with infinitesimal shards of two godlike beings, and the idea that their identity could be divorced from their power never occurred to me.

Hanuzeth claims that there exist certain Exalted rites that can sactify Profane relics, and contrawise, there exist Dark rites that can desecrate Exalted relics, effectively changing the nature of the quintessence contained within. What he proposes will not be altogether unlike those rites - only instead of converting the quintessence from one form to another, we will instead purge its affinity and leave only raw, unaligned quintessence behind. Hanuzeth's churlish presence has finally been to our unquestionable benefit. Were it not for his nature as one of the Fell People, we would doubtlessly have had to devise another roundabout process for approximating one. Though most of the lower conclave still detest him immensely, the inner circle has grown to tolerate and accept his counsel, difficult as it may be to understand him due to his mangled handling of the common tongue.

October 11th, 314 P.F.
Hanuzeth's ritual worked, although the wrath that was called down upon our heads was more fearsome than we expected. Juikon and Drejak are dead, Juikon's corse is a charred lump while Drejak's whole body boiled and dissolved into bloody steam. It would seem the Exalted One and the Dark God did not approve of our efforts.

We were still ultimately successful, although we are faced with two new problems. The first, of course, is that every soul within twenty leagues is now likely aware that something is afoot here if they were not aware already. The atmospheric events that accompanied the smiting of my colleagues unearthly and impossible to miss, not to mention unmistakable. Lucion has announced he is having us moved elsewhere entirely as the efforts to deter investigation of his estate are now too unfeasible to continue. It is likely to be either some random hole in the ground if not a run-down storage shed, bringing to light how much I have been taking our otherwise quite amenable accommodations for granted.

Secondly, this new, wild quintessence we have created continuously attempts to ground itself into something, anything of substance. The flagstones of the floor, the aether hanging about our heads, even torchlight and our very bodies. Hanuzeth was able to keep it corralled for the better part of a day while the rest of us fashioned a crude vessel from the remnants of the artifacts Lucion procured, capable of constraining the quintessence in its ungrounded state.

Its behavior - permitting that this is likely the first time any such thing has ever existed in the annuals of magic - is most peculiar. It is adamant in its efforts to embody itself in something, anything. Why and for what purpose? If it is now divorced of any and all will, all identity, what is guiding, channeling it to act the in this fashion? Perhaps there is some underlying principle betwixt it and the nature of creation itself?

A riddle for the ages, and one unlikely to ever be solved. Lilirn has proposed that the quintessence had best be permitted to ground itself into the peculiar arcane array she had designed. The array made to tap into the collective conceit of the populace writ-large as well as Prince Lucion himself. We scarcely have much time before we are moved, so the array will likely need to be dismantled and reassembled, which is likely for the best. We need more time to devise our choice method of how we are going to embody the conceit of Kalitra in flesh, now that we possess the means.

October 19th, 314 P.F.
Evidently Lucion espied my worst fears and elected to combine them. Our new workshop is a hole in the ground, the entrance of which is sequestered within a run-down storage shed. The remaining members of the conclave are up to their pits in each other every which way, myself included - I was scarcely able to even get a moment alone to myself in order to write this entry! The accommodations here are so dismal that one of our remaining Earthshapers, Fobin, died from the stink of all our filth, I am certain.

Despite the misgivings of quite literally everyone, we have nonetheless elected to make another golem for our embodying of Kalitra. Magic will have to be used in for the initial rite to reshape its form and substance to match the collective conceit of the blasted woman, but with the grounded quintessence thereafter its state should become perfectly internally stable and capable of persisting without magic. All that lies before us now is to finish reassembling Lilirn's array and to put together the golem.

November 1st, 314 P.F.
Utter failure.

Upon reflection, our mistake was likely grounding the quintessence in Lilirn's array, rather than in the golem. It is probably now flitting about and recirculating across tens of thousands of minds, accomplishing nothing much in particular except, perhaps, to potentially awaken Psionic capabilities amongst some of the Arcosi commoners.

Lucion is displeased, we are all going to die. He has sealed the entrance to the cavern, and we are running low on supplies. I imagine quite a few of us will perish before the Prince finally deigns to toss the rest of us to the templars.

We failed to heed my own warning. We got swept away with the grandiosity of what we were attempting, not thinking things through as carefully as we should have. We have been blessed to have gone so long with only minor setbacks in this calamity of an endeavor. Completely novel, utterly unknown and undocumented magic never before seen nor heard of by mortals, wielded and shaped for the first time in history by our hands. It is nothing short of miraculous we were even able to come this far without more severe mishaps.

And it will take nothing short of a miracle to scheme our way out of this mess we have been left in now.

November 5th, 314 P.F.
Something is up. Lucion unsealed the entrance and stormed in with his guards, demanding to know what we had done. I was not present at the time, as I was delirious from thirst, but I am told he was acting infuriatingly vague. He left behind several casks of provisions before storming off though, so it seems our death sentence has been briefly postponed by whatever it is that we have inadvertently done.

November 12th, 314 P.F.
This past week has been most surreal.

I find myself with the last few surviving members of the now defunct conclave - Hanuzeth, Aramis, and a few other hanger-ons. Many of the inner circle perished within that hole and the rest of us were due to follow shortly, until Lucion had us all brought out. He had us all bound and hooded before packing us away in a carriage of some sort. I was utterly convinced we were being sent to Paterdomus. Imagine my surprise when I come to in a rather well-appointed private suite.

We have been recovering somewhere unfamiliar. We are in another estate, in the mountains. There is snow all about us and the air is quite chilled here.

Hanuzeth was all but prepared to die throwing himself at Lucion, even weakened as he was. To be truthful, I would have been right at his side. But Lucion scarcely even had time for us. He made a brief appearance when we first arrived to congratulate us for...whatever it was we did, and then vanished. We have nearly free reign of the estate, the guards permit us to come and go as we please, and a number of women I shall charitably refer to as chatelains have been nursing us all back to health. I just now today finally felt up to attempting to resume my writing herein.

Although I cannot help but be grateful for this unexpected turn, I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I need answers - I need to understand what it is Lucion believes us to have done, for we most certainly have not brought back his wife as far as I am aware. Whatever is going on, it could all end at any moment and turn the Prince on us once more just as quickly as before.

November 13th, 314 P.F.
I wish Lilirn had not died of thirst in the cavern - this mental rot was her area of expertise, none of us who remain have any great insight here.

I spoke with Lucion in order to determine what had happened, taking care to talk around my ignorance of whatever it was.

Evidently, the Prince is now experiencing transcendentally vivid and lucid dreams featuring Kalitra. So vivid, in fact, that he has been spending most of his time imbibing sedatives so as to spend more time with her in the realm of sleep. It completely defies any semblance of logic. Lilirn's array did not even explicitly target Lucion, it was keyed to most of the Arcosi coastline. Yet somehow, the Prince is seemingly the only one experiencing these dreams.

I was surprised with the degree of satisfaction he exhibited as, after all, a dream is a far cry from the resurrection he had been demanding. Especially in light of the jeopardy her death had placed Lucion's business interests with the Arcosi state in. He apparently has all but forgotten about the urgency of the affairs of his station.

Love conquers all in the end, it would seem.

November 18th, 314 P.F.
Whatever we did to Lucion, it is...progressing, I suppose. It is still too early to determine if it is good or ill. The Prince is now experiencing waking dreams and visions of Kalitra, accompanying him in his waking hours, to the extent he has spent less time asleep as of late. He has been most insistent upon inviting us all to dinner in order to discuss arrangement we would like to have made for our eventual retreat from this mountain estate (which we have since been informed is, in fact, Kalitra's legacy estate, abandoned when she married into Lucion's lineage). He has the most disturbing preponderance to become distracted by 'her,' holding extensive conversations with the empty air. He seems quite aware that she is not real, but he has taken to relaying certain attributions made by Kalitra. 'She' is evidently just as grateful as Lucion. With the way he rambles on about her, I almost swear I could picture her there in the room with us. I would be more worried about the portents for the Prince's mental health, were it not for the extent to which he has gone out of his way to be generous with us.

Us, as in the remaining conclave, have had little interaction with each other as of late. Hanuzeth has, to put it delicately, been tending to the figurative harem Lucion has arranged for him. Where and how the Prince managed to find courtesans with such abominable standards is utterly beyond me, and has in fact completely turned me off of those he attempted to foist on me. I question where and with what they have been. Aramis has been writing all manner of texts and letters, likely theories and details of our time together. The few other hanger-ons
have likewise been attending to their own affairs. It would seem the original opportunity I saw in this venture for forging new alliances has fallen to the wayside, though we can hardly be blamed. I imagine the others all simply want for this sordid affair to be over and done with, a sentiment which I whole-heartedly agree with.

November 25th, 314 P.F.
I see her.

I swear it, multiple times. Fleeting glimpses. I even hear fleeting catches of what might be her voice, indistinct and distant. Aramis has experienced the same. We confronted Lucion, who was visibly straining not to hug us. He claims Kalitra will soon return to the living world. That she is but an apparition for the moment, but that her power waxes by the day, and that she will be whole soon. When I asked how he knew, he said he just 'had a feeling!'

He has been making the most outrageous promises of remuneration I have ever heard in my life. He is so convinced of her return that he is planning to announce her recovery to her extended family, so as to reclaim the interests of his estate.

Aramis has scarcely any notion as to what is transpiring. The writings he has been making largely document the minutiae of arcane practices and rites he observed during the conclave's activities and shed no light on any of this.

As far as I know, this may very well just be the ghost of Kalitra, haunting her old estate and glutted on power from the quintessence bouncing around the Arcosi collective unconscious, rooted in the ideal of her.

December 2nd, 314 P.F.
Lucion called us to his personal chambers early in the morn, and she was there, lying in his bed. Weak as a newborn babe, but solid and very much alive.

Insofar as Aramis and I can discern, her state is - as projected - perfectly internally stable, and completely nonmagical. Aramis attempted a discrete abjuring just to test it! Hanuzeth has not said a word since he went into the room, and has been acting most perturbed. One can tell, as he has dismissed his army of whores and locked himself into seclusion in his suite. Perhaps he knows something we do not?

As for Kalitra herself, she seemed deathly ill and frail while we were there. She was barely conscious or aware of our presence. Over and over, she kept muttering the word 'Dearest.'

It is nothing short of a miracle. Even if her health falters and she dies a second time.

We have, quite literally, embodied the living conceit of a departed soul. It is not quite resurrection - I severely doubt it is actually her - but it is still a feat normally reserved for the like of demigods. We have fabricated a living being out of thin air, wrought from nothing but the thought to shape it.

I am uncertain of our course from this point on. I was considering leaving this place, not too many days prior, but this could be, as I ventured in an earlier entry, the dawn of a new age of magic. I think I shall be staying to observe and document the construct as it continues to...progress. I will have to speak with Aramis and Hanuzeth about this further. We do not have all the puzzle pieces, but we are the last living souls with intimate knowledge of the rites and methods involved.

December 9th, 314 P.F.
She is whole and hearty, and is blossoming in the very light she carries with her. I am not endeavoring to come across as poetic. In addition to now being the very image of perfect health, Kalitra is followed by a wake of pale-blue flower petals wherever she goes and is surrounded by an aura of dappled sunlight, even when indoors.

Lucion has not been faring so well. His mental state has been waning almost as quickly as Kalitra's physical form has been growing in strength. The very will to live seems to have been driven from him, in favor of blind adoration of his returned goddess. He did, however, have a moment of lucidity early yesterday, and clarified what is going on to an extent.

This manifestation of Kalitra seems to be derived from a specific memory Lucion has held of her since her passing. Sitting on the stone bench of a patio, with columns entwined with blue flowers and with the light of the late morning sun illuminating her just-so. His memory of the day her first met his betrothed-to-be. The construct is, somehow, growing to match the memory from which it was sourced.

The implications are...frankly beyond me. There are too many unknown hows and whys in this matter. Why that memory? Why his memory at all? Most importantly, how is the construct continuing to evolve without magic? Its state is still perfectly internally stable. It is changing and metamorphizing as though it were as natural a thing as the passage of the seasons.

Aramis has taken to have very indirect interviews with 'her.' Alarmingly, despite the construct's perfect health, the only thing it will say, at all, is 'Dearest.' Over and over again, with and without prompting, at irregular intervals. Lucion has been acting as an interpreter, relaying statements evidently only he can hear from her. As mentioned, his mental state and attentiveness are not at their peak presently, and what little he has relayed has been uninformative and infuriatingly cryptic.

I am uncertain how the construct will develop from here on out, it is already littering the entire estate with flower petals and single-handedly illuminating rooms on its own. How much closer can it approximate Lucion's memory before it must cease?

December 16th, 314 P.F.
This is to be my final entry.

It is the shape of the woman Kalitra.

It is the sound of the woman's voice.

It is the sunlight that framed her form.

It is the columns of blue flowers that were there.

The thing we have made, is these things, and these things have begun to overlay everything else around them. The thing is destructive, anathema, where it goes it leaves nothing but stone patios with columns of blue roses in its wake. The light is blinding. Lucion's eyes boiled out from their sockets. His retainers have fled. Those parts of the estate that have not collapsed due to being displaced by patio masonry are either buried in tangled forests of rose vines or smoldering from the intensity of the thing's light. It will all likely burn to ashes soon.

Hanuzeth awoke both myself and Aramis in the middle of the night to steal us to safety. He revealed what he had been up to in his isolation. He had been using what little earthshaping magic he knew to harden and strengthen the golem we were to originally use, as a precaution in case our creation had to be destroyed. It is the only thing now that can safely approach that monstrosity. A golem cannot be blinded or burnt by the light. Hardened as it is, the rose roots should not be able to worm into it.

This abomination - its state is, as written, perfectly internally stable. Nonmagical, incapable of being abjured or disjoined, and yet possessing a supergradient nature that renders its every aspect hazardous. But it is not indestructible. Aramis sacrificed himself proving as much. Even as his eyes and flesh were seared away, he cut the creature's legs out from under it. Even supergradient flesh still fails. So can the rest of it.

I can hear its cries. Dearest. Dearest. Dearest. It is like resonant magic, a keening, maddening pitch. In time it will likely turn our brains to sludge, if we do not destroy it first.

Hanuzeth makes ready the last of his enchantments. I will leave this journal behind, perhaps somebody will find it in case we fail and finish what we started.

I am not a particularly religious man. I have offered grave affront to every creed and faith during my brief life. In these final moments however, I have found the sudden conviction necessary for a final prayer.

Exalted One and Dark God, and all other deities that may exist: Pardon us for the crime of what we have wrought. Pardon us for the forsworn calamity we have birthed into this world.

Paterdomus Sect Briefing

The Sect of the Sanctic Palisade, in addition to serving as an order of the Templar Knights responsible for investigating and dispatching heresy wherever it may be found and in whatever form it takes, is principally directed to combat the manifestation of the entity herein named as Ex Nihilo.

In the late winter of the 314th year past the descent of the Holy Kingdom, the Arcosi Merchant Prince Lucion Terramis gathered into his employ a conclave of heretics, warlocks, witches, and other piteous individuals for the purposes of using magic most dark and reviled to resurrect his wife, Kalitra Terramis. Their efforts, which the Sect of the Sanctic Palisade has investigated and studied carefully since then, not only failed but invited into creation a most malignant and insidious presence that our order has since been dedicated to thwarting. Ex Nihilo as it has been branded by the highest court of Paterdomus is a force that manifests by using Mortal wishes and base urges as a catalyst in order to conjure a form that crudely reflects those very same desires. Investigation has revealed that this force either cannot or generally does not harness the wishes of any common man or woman for this purpose. Ex Nihilo instead takes root in the minds of of individuals gifted with uniquely great strength of will and with ambitions or desires that are either tremendous in and of themselves, or otherwise reflected in awareness by a vast number of other individuals. The most common victims are great leaders of men, kings, generals, governors, warlords, and so forth. The more reknowned the individual and the more generally aware the greater public is of their aims and philosophy, the more susceptible to the influence of Ex Nihilo that individual is. For this very reason, the most vulnerable individual known to our order is, in fact, the High Father of Paterdomus himself. Rest assured, any possibility of his falling prey to this threat has already been addressed by our order. The fact is presented as a cautionary statement in order to impress upon all members of our order the pervasiveness of the threat Ex Nihilo represents.

To date since the turning of the year, our order has been made aware of two additional successful manifestations of Ex Nihilo, in addition to a third partial manifestation which was successfully prevented by our timely intervention. Much of our sect's knowledge as to Ex Nihilo's methods are due to our investigation of these occurrences post-incident. In the former two cases, both manifestations were mistaken as Scions of the Fallen One, and the High Court of Paterdomus sees no need at this time to correct this misapprehension. Although knowledge of Ex Nihilo is not a state secret, the members of our order are reminded that specific knowledge of its nature is not necessary in order to cooperate with other sects in combatting its manifestations.

In the first instance, an Orc Warlord from the Arugoth vale abruptly acquired the magical capability of telekinetically levitating and setting aflame stones and masonry, typically in the form of siege boulders. They utilized this capability to breach one of the Church's main fortifications in the Howling Gap, at which point Ex Nihilo manifested in the form of a flaming boulder riding astride a mound of shifting, broken masonry. This entity then proceeded to meander about the battlefield, indiscriminately displacing fortified structures and killing anybody who stood before it. Eventually, a company of Templar Knights confronted the manifestation and destroyed it with the use of siege weapons and warhammers, and its remains were ground to dust. Subsequent interrogation of surviving Orcs revealed that their Warlord had become more and more obsessed with breaching and destroying the specified fortification in question, which had successfully repulsed more than ten previous attacks he had led. The magical capabilities Ex Nihilo bestowed upon the Warlord did not enable him to fully accomplish this ambition as the fortification was not wholly breached and was quickly restored. The theologians of our sect have concluded that the purpose of bestowing the powers at all was to facilitate the manifestation of Ex Nihilo in the approximate realization of the Warlord's ambition, rather than strictly the accomplishment of the ambition itself. A distinction for which we are to be thankful.

In the second instance, the War Chieftain of a raiding band from Twenty Halls experienced an unexpected streak of good fortune while pillaging Calesbail. His raiding band successfully attacked multiple merchant caravans and generally made a nuisance of themselves with little in the way of retaliation, and even managed to attack and rob an armored wagon carrying silver bullion. Immediately prior to the raiding band's attempt to sail back to Twenty Hauls with their plunder, Ex Nihilo manifested in the form of the heaped, shifting mound of lucre they had acquired, interlaced with the War Chieftan's gore and bones. It caused little in the way of overt destruction beyond a few lives lost underneath the crushing coils of its shifting mass, and was shortly contained by a Calesbail militia in a deadfall pit. Shortly thereafter, our sect was able to successfully convince the local governor that the manifestation was in fact a lesser Scion of the Fallen One, and it was relinquished to our custody and melted down to slag which was then diluted in Aqua Regis. Interrogation of several of the raiders revealed that the War Chieftain had become obsessed with the idea of swimming in a pile of riches stolen during successful raids. Although this manifestation was instructive in showing that the forms Ex Nihilo takes are not always formidable, it also demonstrated that its capability for influencing the world at large is worrisome. There is no indication as to how it enabled the raiding band to operate with such runaway success, beyond the inference of several raiders that the War Chieftan had been granted inexplicable flashes of insight or gut feelings that informed many of their raiding strategies.

In the third instance, a clerical worker and prolific author living in the High City became obsessed with abstracted Muse, who compelled him to finish a peculiar treatise he had been in the process of compiling over several years. As his work on the treatise progressed, his Muse began to manifest as an overt haunting, which was shortly reported by the man's neighbors. Our sect was only alerted to the matter when initial efforts to ward and sanctify the author's domicile failed to evict his Muse. The incident was used as a test-bed for preventative measures by our sect. During the testing, the author's treatise was doctored to seem as if it contained only fugue-derived gibberish, and he was additionally prescribed a diluted tincture of nightshade extract in order to induce dreamless sleep and to steady his nerves during the waking hours of the day. Convincing the author he had been writing while suffering from fever-induced delusion almost immediately caused the haunting to cease entirely, while the administration of the tincture completely eliminated the vivid dreams and visions he had been experiencing. The author was executed (under the pretense of heretical writing) via beheading at the conclusion of the examination in order to deter any future manifestation attempts by Ex Nihilo.

What has been learned over these occurrences is as follows: Almost uniformly, victims of Ex Nihilo experience profoundly vivid dreams and visions of a desire or ambition the individual deeply holds. Over time, these dreams and visions will heighten in clarity as Ex Nihilo embellishes them. By what means this insidious force operates in order to do so remains unknown at the time of writing, and whatever the means completely bypasses all known forms of magical warding. However, at this stage its influence is nonetheless readily detected, and the most telling sign it has targeted an individual is the persistence of these singularly vivid dreams and visions to the exclusion of all else. Once detected, Ex Nihilo's influence is trivially thwarted simply by administering mundane sedatives to the afflicted. Certain common concoctions including trace amounts of nightshade extract resulting in dreamless sleep or steadied nerves during waking hours have shown tremendous efficacy in completely preventing any and all visitations by Ex Nihilo.

In cooperation with the Church and the widespread institutions of our creed, our order has already devised a common libation and sacrament that shall be included amongst the ordinary rites of our faith. Any and all proper followers of the Exalted One who attend church regularly should thus be safely guarded against the profane touch of Ex Nihilo. As an added benefit, church alchemists have indicated the widespread proliferation of this new libation shall improve dental hygiene. In order to extend the protection of this libation to the unfaithful and the more blasphemous aristocracies, a variant mixture of it is being commercially marketed as a tooth-cleaning remedy that is to begin distribution across Outremer shortly.

Early detection and prevention of Ex Nihilo's influence despite this measure will not always be possible, especially in regards to the more barbarous and unclean peoples such as amongst the lands of Twenty Halls and Portus Cruor, not to mention the Fallen Creatures who reside in Arugoth. It thus falls to our order to remain vigilant for the signs of Ex Nihilo's heightening influence and to be ready to combat it wherever it arises and whatever form it takes.

Sect Briefing

[Frettzo]

Lysiallys

Lysiallys, The Forgemaster.

Scion

---

It was the ever present stink of human waste and rotting matter of all sorts that topped the list of things he hated about the Underbelly.

He needed to purchase some… Exotic equipment for one of his jobs, and had just gotten a tip about someone who could supply him with what he wanted… Probably, at least. Such was the way in which business was carried out in the Underbelly. You never knew for sure if you were going to get what you were looking for.

He turned a corner, deftly avoiding a pile of waste and going into a rather dark, narrow alleyway. At its end there was an unassuming door which perfectly blended in with the other doors at either side it, with wood rotting in places and the handle in the process of rusting.

He knocked loudly on the door, then pushed it open even as the hinges protested. It almost felt like his father’s knees when they locked up and he had to help him straighten them.

The young man went into the store and closed the door behind him, taking in a deep breath of the scent of low quality herbs being burned for fragrance. Still, it was better than the stink of the alleys and sewers.

He walked up to the counter and nodded at the figure behind it. It was slender, slouched over, and had long, slender fingers that ended in dark, sharp nails.

The young man’s left eyebrow twitched as he leaned on the creaky counter.

“Hey Old Man, got anythin’ to put out fires before they start?” The young man asked, trying to catch a glimpse of the Old Man’s eyes through the thick shadow covering his face. He was unsuccessful.

“Hmm…?” The decrepit old man hummed, slowly tilting his head at the new customer. He started to click the tip of one of his fingernails against the counter.

Click. Click. Click. Click.

“You know… Somethin’ I could wear to go through a burning buildin’ without gettin’ burned?”

“Ah!” The Old Man suddenly perked up, a movement that saw him fix his posture. The Old Man was easily a head taller than the young man, who was already considered tall amongst his peers. The young man grimaced. “Why yes... I do have something for you, boy…” The Old Man said in a low volume and proceeded to reach for something under the counter, which turned out to be a small box with glowing words of power etched onto its surface.

“Huh, you have really high quality stuff, Old Man… I don’t even wanna know what someone like you is doin’ in this dump.”

“Wisdom like yours is rarely seen down here, boy...”

“I learned early on that questions can be lethal. Anyway, what’s in the box?” The young man asked, making a move to grab the box. He was cut off by the Old Man putting his skeletal hand over it, however. The Old Man then opened the box and showed the young man its contents.

A single ring, seemingly made of bronze, betraying its ancient nature. Unintelligible words of power were carved in an unbelievably small size all along the inner part of the Ring. They glowed a faint blue as the Old Man’s hand grabbed it and offered it to the young man.

“I’ve never seen anythin’ like it, Old Man… Isn’t bronze real expensive, too? I don’t have that much paste with me. Show me somethin’ else, that thing’s givin’ me the shivers.”

The Old Man chuckled. It was a short noise, followed by coughing.

“Boy… This ring was crafted by none other than the Forgemaster…”

The young man furrowed his brow and looked at the ring again, grabbing it and inspecting it more closely. That was a name he had heard before, but he didn’t quite remember when or under what circumstance.

“The Forgemaster… She of blood-red skin... With scars gained from honourable battles with the Great Heroes of Old... She who in ages past created the famous Third Talon… You’ve heard the stories, haven’t you boy...?” At that moment, the Old Man seemed more like a Demon than a Man.

The young man gulped, holding tightly onto the ring.

“The sword that killed countless heroes… But I thought-”

“That they were only stories...? That the Black One and his Loyal Scions were a made up tale meant to scare children into blindly worshipping the White One, and that the White One was the only Great One to ever walk upon our lands...? Naive young boy...”

Click. Click. Click. Click.

“... I’ll take it. The ring. How much?”

“Name the price, boy… The more things you sacrifice in order to obtain one, the stronger it will be…”

The young man barely held back a nervous smirk. What a dumb old man. By asking him to set the price, he was basically begging to get swindled. He fished into his pockets and threw two misshapen copper coins onto the counter, then turned and began to walk away.

“There are many more Artifacts where that one came from, boy… Not just rings, but sets of armour worthy of Kings… Weapons worthy of Heroes… Clothing fit for only the finest and cleverest men… I am sure we will meet again… If you survive…”

The last thing the young man heard before he closed the store’s door on his way out was the incessant clicking of the Old Man’s nails on the counter.

[Cyclone]

@Cyclone

Here's my new character! I worked long and hard on it!

Father Caius

Father Caius, Ordained Priest of Paterdomus, the Lawyer, Servant of the Exalted One

---

Breathless, Caius slid onto the ground and pressed his back against a thick tree. The cold, rock-hard bits of bark poked into him as he hid silently in its shadow. He strained his ears, listening for footsteps, yet all was quiet. The branches above were bare now, but there were no leaves to crunch underfoot and betray the coming of his pursuer. There were never any leaves now, because all these trees had been dead for a really long time. Nobody was sure how long; the trees around Stonetree had been dead and turned to rock even before their village was first founded, his pa always said.

“I’ve found you!” his sister shouted as she burst from around the other side of the tree, but Caius was already laughing and sprinting away, just barely escaping the touch of her outstretched hand. His sister was quiet, but she wasn’t fast, so she always lost at tag.

But she was stubborn and didn’t know when to give up either, so she chased him on and on through the old dead trees until they were both panting and nearly gasping for breath on the ground, and then suddenly they’d come all the way back to their little house at the edge of the village.

“Got you,” she finally said, smiling between pants, but Caius wasn’t paying attention to the game anymore. There was a pounding sound in the distance, not of the old smith in his hut hammering out some new plow or axe head, but of the hooves of horses. His big brother heard it too, and looked up from his work smashing up gravel into little bits to put into the buckets of gloop. “There,” he called out, setting down the big hammer in his hand to point over one of the hills, “the riders are coming from the road to the holy city. It’s the Templars!”

Those half-dozen Templars, radiant like the dawn with their polished steel helms and fluttering long white cloaks, rode down the little dirt path and to the small church at the village’s heart. They’d be going to talk to Father Lucius about things for just a little while and then they’d be back off to ride to the holy city again, where they’d protect the walls and guard the priests and carry out the Exalted One’s justice.

“I want to go see them closer!” Caius blurted out when the party of horsemen vanished behind some other houses on their way to the church. “Me too!” his sister cried as she grabbed at his hand and started to almost drag him over there, but their big brother frowned.

“No,” he said in that same growly tone that their pa used. “You know what pa says. Those priests and paladins and other shiny holy men are all busy, and you don’t wanna get in their way or speak to them ‘less you’ve got to. Nothing good can come of it. Best you bow your head if they come close, and keep back if they don’t.”

“But we see Father Lucius all the time! I talked to him just last week!” his sister pouted.

“He’s different. He’s not like the rest, and besides, he’s the one here for us. The rest? No good reason for us to bother them, and they mightn’t take kindly to it. Don’t take the chance.”

The door to their small house opened, and their father stepped out with his masonry tools. “Got that mortar mixed up yet, boy?”

Their brother reddened a bit as he looked down at the half-crushed stones, still very much not fine like sand and not mixed up into the goop. Their father scowled when he saw it too. “We were watching the Templars! They came down the road and rode-”

Their pa spat. “Tax season. They’ll have come to take their dues from our village. Maybe it’s best that mortar ain’t mixed yet; that wall can wait until they’re gone. Come inside now, Father Lucius will deal with those men, and we’ll stay out of sight until they’ve gone.”

And just like that, all the fun and magic was ruined. The three followed grumbling, and then they crammed into their tiny squat house with their pa, their ma, and the baby in her arms. And then pa pulled down the shutters so that the Templars wouldn’t even chance to see their faces looking out the windows as they rode by, and the family sat there in the gloom nibbling at bread and making smalltalk while they tried to ignore the baby’s frequent wailing.

But then an hour later, the sound of voices drifted through the windows. The voices drew closer, and their pa peeked through a window and scowled. A few moments later there was a rapping knock upon their door, and pa had no choice but to grab a bowl of silver that he’d counted out (carefully, and probably a dozen times over the last hour) and look into its depths, deciding at the last moment to toss in a half-dozen more coins for good measure even as their mother gasped. Then there was no more time, so bowl in hand, pa got up and went to open the door. Outside there waited Father Lucius, and just behind him were all those Templars, and to his side there was another man dressed in a clergyman’s white robes and a head of equally colorless hair, rather than the Templars’ armor and gleaming helms. But this was still a man who had a stranger’s face; Caius knew everyone in his little village, so this stranger had to have ridden in with those Templars.

Their pa bowed his head to the holy men quickly and low, then stepped outside to talk. That seemed a bit rude at first, but Caius realized there really wasn’t enough space inside their little house to let in all those men, and they wouldn’t have liked to hear the baby anyways. His pa tried to close the door behind him, but Father Lucius gave a tiny shake of his head. “That won’t be necessary, my friend. We have nothing to hide from one another, and why not let your children watch? One day that strapping son of yours will make a fine stonemason himself, but I fear he too will have to pay his tithes. Best let him see how this goes. Ah, but I am remiss! This good fellow besides me is Father Titus, come all the way from Paterdomus.”

“Father, your holy presence does me and mine a big honor,” Caius heard his pa say, even as the big man bowed his head again in an even more groveling way. “I have here the silver already for you to count out. Business has been good this year, so there’s more than last time. We can both be happy for that! Heh.”

Caius had never seen his pa this nervous. Something felt wrong, but he wasn’t sure what. Still, pits began to open in his stomach, and he heard a sniffle and looked over to see his mother with red eyes.

Father Lucius forced a small smile, but he didn’t really look pleased by the good news. More...sad? “The Exalted One has looked favorably upon you, for you are a good man. I can say with happiness that we have not come to ask for the silver that was the fruit of your toil, not this year. That tax will be waived as a sign of goodwill from the church; I’m afraid you know why.” Their village’s priest stepped closer and laid a hand upon his pa’s shoulder. And even from behind, Caius saw that his pa had gone pale.

“Please step aside, and tell your boy Caius to come out,” Lucius said after a long moment. And then his pa bent his neck again and did as they said.

Half-dazedly, Caius stepped out, wondering what was going on. He hadn’t done anything wrong! His big brother and his sister looked just as confused. That other priest -- Caius had already forgotten his name by then, sized him up closely and gave a slight nod.

“Caius,” the old white-haired priest spoke, “I’m told you’re nearly ten?”

Caius nodded nervously, looking to his pa and then back through the doorway to his gawking siblings and crying mother. He wasn’t sure what to say to make the men know he didn’t do anything! How could you deny something you didn’t do when you didn’t know what they thought you’d done because you hadn’t done anything?! Were those Knights Templar going to carry him away in irons like they did to villains and monst--

His thoughts were broken by kind Father Lucius, who suddenly interjected -- came to his defense! “He’s about the right age, in good health, and a clever lad too. I’ve never made note of any moral turpitudes, and he is as attentive as any boy his age can be when I hold sermon.”

Caius grinned sheepishly, happy that he’d always been good and quiet in church like his ma and pa taught him, that Father Lucius was a nice man and a kind priest and not like ‘those others’ that pa sometimes talked about.

But that other priest didn’t look troubled, or swayed at all! He only nodded, then answered, “Yes, I think he is a fine choice. Best gather him up in an hour or two with the other children you’ve picked. We’ll need to be off soon, but they will still want to say their goodbyes.”

’Where are they trying to take me?!’ Caius thought to himself.

The old priest saw Caius’ face and stooped down closer, carefully keeping the white of his robe from brushing against the dirty ground and being sullied. “Boy -- Caius, I mean, you must be brave. Think of this as an adventure! The start of a new life, an honorable one. I know that this might not have been your choice, but still, take heart knowing that the Exalted One will smile upon you for walking this path, and in knowing that there are some who would take this path if they could, but never managed to find it. My name is Titus, and now I am an old servant of our Heavenly Master, but once I was a boy just like you--”

“Where are you trying to take me? What’s going on?” Caius thought again, out loud this time.

His pa looked down, and now Father Lucius looked angry. Caius shrank and tried to murmur an apology for his outburst, but nobody heard because they were all looking at his pa.

“You didn’t tell him?” Father Lucius demanded.

“I-I-I knew you said it might happen, but I hoped not. There’s plenty folks ‘round with one or two more children than I, and I hoped -- well, I hoped with all this silver you might decide to take it instead, I don’t need this year’s tax waived, I done good enough for myself...” his pa stammered.

Inside his mother was now bawling along with the baby, and his brother seemed to have realized what was happening because his face grew long too. Only Caius and his sister were in the dark.

Father Titus had risen to scowl at his pa, but he remembered Caius then and looked back down to the boy. “Caius, you’ve been chosen to come with us back to Paterdomus. To become one of us, to serve as a clergyman bound to the Exalted One and his holy city and all his people.”

The bowl of silver pieces clattered onto the ground by pa’s feet as the man fell to his knees. “Please,” he pleaded, “I’ve only got these two sons, and my daughter, and--”

The baby’s wail grew to a crescendo at perhaps the most inconvenient possible time. “--and that infant, a third son,” Lucius finished. “This pleading does not become you. Sure, some folk have more children -- but a farmer has need for many hands to bring in his harvest, and you’re just a stonemason. You have your eldest son to take up your trade after you, your daughter to help your wife keep the house, and if the Exalted One is merciful then your fourth child will grow hale and you shall have his hand too to help you mix your mortar. Caius is especially suited for this. And besides, it is not a bad life that your son will live, not at all. He will be well-fed, and he will grow learned, and he will be permitted to send you letters of course--”

“But I can’t read them! And he can’t write them! What good are a few scratches on a piece of parchment, compared to a son’s smile?”

“He will learn to write,” Lucius insisted, “and whenever he should choose to send a letter to our village, I will make certain to read it to you. And besides, you may yet meet him again -- there is nothing to stop you from going to Paterdomus, and indeed a pilgrimage there can only be good for the soul. And not every holy man is bound to write ledgers in the capital or sworn to guard its walls as a Knight Templar, or to fight the Exalted’s enemies all across the land as a paladin. No, there is a decent chance that he will eventually be assigned to serve somewhere in the countryside, perhaps even to a place closeby. Perhaps he might find himself taking my place here in this very village, if my own health should fail so soon, though I hope you will forgive me for praying that is not the case!”

And just like that, the conversation was over. Caius offered all the heartfelt goodbyes that he could over the next hour, hugging all his family and kissing his mother in an ordeal that consumed nearly the whole time and left just a few minutes for him to go about the village stammering to his friends and cousins and uncles and aunts. And then he was mounting a mule (that was something new!) and riding it behind the horses of Father Titus and the five Knights Templar. There were other mules besides him, though. Two other children from his village (at least he had those friends coming with him) rode mules of their own, and the rest were packed with the silver and other tithes gathered from the village.

Their party journeyed for days through the bleak hills and past the ancient trees made into stone sentries along the path. After passing through a few more small villages much like his home, they came across one large town where they stayed a while to resupply and rest before they left Stonetree Point altogether. In time he grew at ease around Father Titus, who didn’t seem so bad. He even spoke a bit with those five Templar Knights, who were quiet and alert for the most part but occasionally willing to jest and talk at night when they made camp, at least the ones who weren’t circling around the campsite on first watch. One of the five knights was always awake at any given moment during the night, to watch the road and guard over the rest of them. That made Caius feel safer, if not any less homesick -- in truth he suspected they were watching as much to keep him safe as they were to stop him from trying to run away when everyone else was asleep. Caius had thought about doing that of course, but he realized that even if he did find his way back home, Father Lucius would be angry and send him right back to Titus. His ma always said he was wise beyond his years.

After leaving Stonetree Point behind, the roads became wider and more traveled; that slowed them down, because Father Titus stopped to bless everyone they passed. Anyways, they pressed on for several days longer before they finally came within sight of Paterdomus, Great Paterdomus, ancient and strong, the ifirst capital of the Holy Kingdom before some old king who died a really long time ago decided to move to its sister-city of Marleon. Paterdomus, the mighty bastion of good whose walls had once been blessed by the Exalted One himself, not long before the ramparts repelled ten thousand orcs (and the walls were smaller back then, too!) and withstood a siege that lasted a whole year. Caius hadn’t believed all these tales and things Titus had been telling them about Paterdomus as they went, but now to see it looming over them as it crowned the foothills, he found that he could believe all those things after all.

Paterdomus looked absolutely massive, and it only seemed to grow bigger for the rest of that day as they drew closer. With its fortified walls like sheer cliffs of grey granite and its towering temples and spires of marble almost like mountains, the fortress-city stood defiant, proud, and unconquered before those ominous Ashmonts in the distance behind it. Caius knew that somewhere beyond those black peaks were evil mountains that wept fire and smoke, and beyond even those was the accursed land of Arugoth filled with orcs and ogres and demons, but it was hard to imagine any army of monsters breaking this city. Caius had never seen a city before, and this one was a dozen times grander than anything he’d ever imagined.

They arrived in the shadow of the massive walls he’d heard so much about, and eventually passed through the main gate and into the city proper, and it still all felt surreal, a strange dream conjured into the realm of the waking. But the splendor soon faded as they were quick to assign Caius to his tutors - he met them after only one day of rest to recover from the journey, for his education was to begin almost at once. The learning of law and history and theology soon consumed what felt like every waking hour, broken by a few welcome times devoted to exercise (or ‘tempering of the body’ as the priests called it) and occasionally a foray into martial arts. The library was always his sanctuary though, particularly that one corner where they kept the books full of laws and the rulings of old judges, bulls of past pontiffs, and even decrees of the Holy Kingdom’s sovereigns and their magisters. Thoughts of Stonetree and home gradually grew rarer and rarer, until some day came when he realized that he’d started to think of Paterdomus as home.

And then the years passed quickly after that.

[Cyclone]

Next round of reviews.

@Cyclone for Caius

Hider

Oraculum tried to reject you because this CS doesn't demonstrate the dude's powers (but that's fine because he's just some measly human who's a low-ranking priest, so what do you expect?) and doesn't establish what he's up to at present and whatever became of his education (but that can be revealed really fast in the IC!).

Unfortunately that left us deadlocked at a 1-1 vote, so I had to make @Antarctic Termite into a Co-GM to break the tie and rig the vote. Call it GM packing. I suppose he'll do! Hopefully I won't come to regret this in future votes...

More serious reviews should be along soon, hopefully even today; Oraculum's finished most of the batch already. And the IC can probably start either today or tomorrow depending upon how quickly I can iron out a post.

[Oraculum]

Here you go, you scamps.

@Lauder for Batuul (How do you pronounce that? Battle? Lol, you made an Amazonian warlord named Battle?) god, i HOPE she is

Hider

Besides the inspired ahem quip above, Cyclone has already given some basic comments about the sheet, which I’ll paraphrase and expand on here for convenience. As previously mentioned, the concept itself is mostly good - no one is doing much with the orcs so far, and having a character fill that niche is a welcome development. From what can be glimpsed of her, Batuul fits that role well. Some more elaboration on how exactly she achieves this authority and enforces it could be useful to have, but not strictly necessary.

Having said that, there are a number of issues with how the idea is presented. The description does indeed not feel like the final words of someone overcome with a vision, but more like a lecture or recitation of facts, sometimes presented in an odd sequence. I’d recommend something like framing the description as a succession of fragmentary scenes instead, which would both better fulfill the narrative requirement and be more appropriate as a form of visual divination, but of course that’s up to you.

The content is also not wholly beyond reproach. As we’ve discussed with Cyclone, the myth does not make an awful lot of sense by saying that Chernobog would sabotage his own campaign by allowing for Batuul to be captured. As a godly being of brutality and destruction, he would’ve had no qualms about smiting an insubordinate scion, and since orcs, as said in the OP, value strength, such an overt display would have been the best way of ensuring they continue to revere him above all. On the other hand, the portrayal of the Exalted One as meting out punishments tailored to the culprit is quite fitting.

Overall, a few things will need to be fixed before we can accept the sheet.

@Terminal for Ex Nihilo (Ugh, using the ablative case for the default name. You deserve a lashing just for that)

Hider

Alright, this is going to be a long one.

For a start, the supplementary sections you added into the sheet - Presence, Infamy and Omens - can be safely cut out, and indeed should be. They can be placed into an attached “lore” hider, or something of the sort, but they are neither needed nor wanted in the application proper. By the guidelines, everything they express should be laid out in the myth, and to a large degree it is, making them redundant for every purpose but quick reference. Once again, this would be best served by giving them their own separate spot.

The strange equation under Type, which in the context of everything else reminded me of something from the Time Cube page, I take to mean that Ex Nihilo is neither a rogue being nor a scion. While I find that, given the nature of its origin, it would make some amount of sense to define it as the latter, I find myself agreeing that by and large it defies classification and can be left as an unknown. It’s an unconventional approach to character creation, and not one we expected anyone to take, but it’s not unacceptable, and has some potential for exploration in the story.

We now come to the myth, which by statistical inevitability gives me the most things to remark on. It’s certainly not the brief narrative requested by the sheet instructions, but both I and Cyclone found the quality of the writing engaging enough to excuse that. Having two separate parts to it also straddles the established limits, but it’s permissible in the interest of getting out all the relevant information and more concrete examples, which is necessary to properly describe a being of this sort. At the same time, it leaves even less of a reason for Presence etc. to exist.

Brief note - 314 is the date in years since the collapse of the Holy Kingdom (as "Post Fall" indicates), and not the victory over Chernobog as the wording in the top of the second myth suggested.

The portrayal of magic in the myth is one some might feel to be too clinical and matter-of-factual, which is to a degree inevitable when writing from the perspective of a practitioner. I'd personally say you do a good enough job at keeping it mysterious and not mundane (I liked the surprised emphasis on "arcane (!) means" at the start), and you are certainly mindful of the constraints of labour and cost, so besides some points I will remark on later, and the mention of "psionics", it's mostly fine.

One matter that sticks out is the orc character and his description - it seems extremely odd that the presence of an orc would be so flippantly accepted by even the dregs of human society, or that they would be able to communicate with him so easily (human and orcish languages have radically different origins). Being inhuman and legendary enemies of mankind, orcs are universally despised and feared, and while I could believe that someone as desperate as Lucion might turn to them, things like casually holding conversation or being entertained by courtesans are downright bizarre. It's also worth noting they don't have shamanic traditions (their origin and culture are not exactly conducive to that -- these are more like LotR-inspired orcs than WoW ones), and Hanuzeth acts more like a warlock anyway, what with contacting a demon.

A bigger issue is the description of the quintessence that is the source of Ex Nihilo. Here, I do believe your wording becomes too technical, with such things as the Conceit's Constant and having a quantifiable impetus. It's particularly jarring in that this is supposed to be an especially cryptic subject even in the magical field, but ends up being the most prosaically presented instead. I recommend you rework those parts to make them more vague and occult, removing the faux-technical terminology and focusing on the mysticism of the spark idea some more.

Aside from that, the concept of quintessence itself is generally fine, as is the entity and its manifestation. One final ill-fitting detail is the mouthwash ritual - with less sugar in the average medieval diet, dental rot would have been less of a problem than disease, and while such a habit could take hold in Paterdomus, where hygiene and cleanliness are taken to a peak, it would not have much of an impulse to spread elsewhere.

The sheet is on the whole in a good spot and close to being acceptable, and only needs some adjustments in the details mentioned above.

@Frettzo for Lysiallys

Hider

This one is fortunately much speedier.

All in all, the sheet is quite acceptable. It gives a good idea of the character and her abilities without dragging on too much, and even manages to drop in some description of her appearance, despite her not being directly present, in a way that’s not too contrived. We especially found the mention of Lysiallys’ creations being the more effective the more one gives away for them to be a nice detail, both setting up an interesting principle and maybe hinting at her purposes (it’s as good a way as any to subtly tempt people to excess).

There are some flaws to note - some words were repeated close together, sometimes in an outright confusing way, where synonyms or paraphrases would have been better (“a rather dark, narrow alleyway. At the end of the alleyway there was an unassuming door which perfectly blended in with the other doors at either side of the alleyway”, “the decrepit old man hummed, slowly tilting his head at the man”). The sheet also does not give a wholly clear idea of Lysiallys’ motives, though that’s a minor note and the implication mentioned above should suffice.

Accepted, but do fix those repetitions before posting it over in the character tab.

[DrRtron]

Withdrawn.

Scion

Identity: Ogrenauth. The Six That Are One. The Axe, The Spear, The Bow, The Smith, The Mage, The Shadow (individually).

Type: Scion

Myth: "Heed me, citizens of Marleon and children of the Exalted! Heed my words and learn from them! I speak the truth, and the Exalted speaks through me! Listen, and learn!

There are none more reviled by the Exalted than the Coward and the Traitor. Those of you who doubt my words need only to look at the most wretched and debased of the Fell peoples. Those foul beings we know as Ogres. They were not always these pathetic creatures we know today. They were not always driven by gluttony, cursed with stupidity, and eradicated to the verge of extinction. Indeed, before the time of the Great War, before the Black God's arrival, they were a proud and mighty people.

Do not laugh, children of the Exalted! It was many years before the Dawn Days, but they were not always the towering brutes we have defeated today. They lived on the Broken Isles, then a unified land off the coast of Outremer. The island's name, and the names of the six tribes that inhabited it, have been struck from the memory of man. The erasing of their name and history is the least of the Exalted's punishments. These six tribes were large and powerful, constantly battling with one another for control over their island. But even they could not withstand the foul armies of the Black God that arrived upon their shores. Pushed back by the hordes of monsters and the terrible Scions that lead them, the tribes turned to a terrible ritual in desperation. The mightiest champion of each tribe went forth to this ritual and in a profane act against all that is good, they combined their souls and powers for the strength to resist the invasion. Through this foul act, they reached powers they had never dreamed of separately and together they began to push back the tide. They began to save their island, and unite their peoples.

Then the Black God arrived on their shores himself, and smote them down.

Fearing for the fate of their peoples, the six made a deal with the Greatest of Evils. They and their people would serve him, and in return they would be allowed to live. The Black God agreed, and their island was spared.

Do not let pity enter your hearts, children of the Exalted! Do not think that this was a reasonable choice, an understandable act. Through this cowardly act, seeking only to save themselves and their kin, the six betrayed the Exalted and doomed their island! Through their cowardice, their willingness to give up their values, their lives, and their very souls, they butchered many an innocent on Outremer at the head of the Black God's armies! The six became known as the Ogrenauth, abomination in the Old Tongue. Their names have been struck from the memory of man, these shards of the abomination, but their titles and their atrocities remain!

The Axe. He who shattered the impenetrable gate of the Ruthan, the mightiest city of its age. He drowned the city in its own blood, for no weapon could pierce his skin and no armor nor fortification could resist his strength.

The Spear. He who lead the slaughter of the army of the First Crusade against the Black God. To face him in battle was to know defeat, for he saw his opponent's actions before they happened.

The Bow. He who destroyed the great griffins, the Exalted's favoured beasts of the sky. They could not escape his wrath, for his aim never missed.

The Smith. She who emptied the land of Arugoth. Using dark rituals she forced the souls of her victims to power her foul bronze creations, made in the mockery of man. Fire was her friend, and the blood of the earth did her no harm.

The Mage. She whose blood ritual of a thousand prisoners summoned the storm that sank the Exalted's first Fleet, preventing the invasion of her isle. Countless foul curses, dark blessings, and profane rituals came from her lips.

The Shadow. She who stole into the heart of the Great Marleon, and massacred the royal family. The shadows and night protected her, preventing her from being seen.

Separately, the Ogrenauth were powerful. Together, they were terrifying. Their powers expanded beyond themselves, and they were akin to a force of nature that seemingly could not be stopped. But stop them the Exalted and his chosen did! So great was the power of his Chosen that they battled with the Ogrenauth and the Black God's other Scions toe to toe! The Exalted, at the head of his great army, struck down the Black God in the war's final battles. Seeing their foul God fall, the Ogrenauth fled to their island with their people and abandoned their fellow Scions.

After finishing the battle, so great was The Exalted's disgust that he fell upon the Ogrenauth's isle with a burning fury. He shattered the isle, turning it into the Broken Isles we know today. He massacred nearly all of the six tribes, and cursed the survivors to the wretched, stupid, existence they know today.

And the Ogrenauth? The Exalted ripped their soul from the bodies it shared and bound its six parts to different parts of the isle, doomed forevermore to stare out over the shattered remains of their home.

The Coward and the Traitor, children of the Exalted. None are more reviled."

Rogue Being

Identity: Rukath

Type: Rogue Being

Myth: "But Da, you have to listen! I saw it with my own eyes! The hill moved just like gr-" Rogal was cut off by an angry hand wave and a harsh "Enough!" from his father. The two of them were riding the family wagon away from their small village, laden with vegetables and wool from their harvest, being dutifully pulled by two tired horses. They'd only been going an hour, but they were getting dangerously close to the cursed hill. The hill where the troll was almost certainly waiting for them. Rogal had tried to warn his father of what he had seen, but his father wouldn't believe him. It was incredibly frustrating.

Rogal's father sighed, rubbing a hand across his face. "Your grandfather had been mad from the day he slipped and cracked his head against that stone. You know that. By the White God, he would claim to see fairies cursing our crops! It was damn near a blessing the day he died, Exalted forgive me." Rogal shrank away as his father turned to face him, an angry look on his face. "The fact that you still believe in his mad babblings at 12 years old is disgraceful."

"But I saw it-" Rogal's protest was cut off by another hand wave. "No, what you did was fall asleep watching the flock again! You had a nightmare, that's all. This isn't even troll country, much less a secret resting place of a great monster."

Rogal shook his head in frustration. "Yes it is Da!" He kept talking, ignoring his father's groan. "It was just like Grandpa said. Midday, the hill started moving. Something clawed its way out of the ground, like it had been buried! I saw four arms and a giant mouth, filled with teeth! But there was blood coming from the mouth, like it had been hurt. It was struggling to move when this giant troll, bigger than the trees, came out of the woods! It howled and just started...started...eating the hill! The hill couldn't fight it off and the Troll just kept tearing into it! And it grew da! It grew as it was eating the hill! I tried to sneak away but I accidentally stepped on a stick and it saw me! It saw me and I'm sure it followed me and we have to go and warn the town and get the knig-!" Rogal's breathless stream of words was cut off by his father's agnry shout.

"That's enough Rogal! If you don't stop with your ridiculous tale, I swear I'll tan your-" There was a blur of green movement and Rogal was thrown from the wagon as something slammed into the front of it. He crashed against a tree and then hit the ground. There was awful screaming and tearing noises behind him. Rogal tried to get up, to move, but his lungs wouldn't draw breath. His head spun, even though he was sure he was laying on the ground still. With difficulty, he flipped himself over and looked at the road.

The wagon was shattered, it's goods scattered over the ground. There was a large green shape crouching over the front of it. The screams had stopped, and all that was left was a terrible crunching sound. He tried to pull himself away, to get away from the overpowering smell of gore, but as he put pressure on his wrist sharp pain shot up it and he screamed.

The shape whirled around, a hand still hanging from its jaws. It was the troll from earlier, staring at him with those same golden eyes. It swallowed the hand and stood. Rogal could swear that it grew as finished eating the hand.

"Rogal."

The troll spoke his name, slowly and carefully. Rogal's mind and body froze in response. The troll had spoke. In common. It said his name. Trolls can't speak common. Trolls can't speak common. Trolls can't speak common.

The thought repeated through Rogal's mind as the large green hand reached for him.

"Rogal."

[Oraculum]

And this one's done too.

@DrRtron for Ogrenauth and Rukath

Hider

Seeing as the two sheets were conveniently posted together, we’ll do this as a two-in-one.

Ogrenauth’s myth has the same pitfall as a few other sheets, namely that it is less of a narrative than an overall static description presented through dialogue. It could be well to add some more animation to it, perhaps by giving more vivid portrayals of the six’s actions (“Lo! They stagger forth and kneel before the black throne!”). However, it still conveys events and writing style well enough, so it’s not really necessary to make changes of this kind.

The content is mostly fine - the story on the whole is good, and we’ve already discussed the matter of the characters’ abilities. Some details are worth pointing out, however. The existence of beasts like griffins on mankind’s side is a bit of an odd one, since the Exalted and his cohorts represent the advance of civilization as opposed to Chernobog’s wild chaos, but that could be explained by the creatures being tamed (and besides it’s understandable enough given Uhtric’s sheet mentions the griffin as a “noble” symbol even to date). On the note of the Shadow’s exploits, Cyclone’s other sheet mentions that Paterdomus, and not Marleon, was the first capital of the Holy Kingdom at the origin, so the royalty may not have resided there, but there would likely have been a local ruling family to throw into disarray, perhaps a branch of the same dynasty as well.

Another minor remark is the fact that the ogres’ current state is wholly the Exalted’s doing. It would in my opinion be more thematic and adherent to the OP lore if their positive qualities, like great strength, were a boon from Chernobog to better serve him (perhaps along with their hideousness, since evil always has a double edge and all that), while the White God’s punishment was to cripple their minds.

The sheet does leave some ends open, particularly as to the Ogrenauth’s current state (are they still disembodied? Do they need to possess someone to manifest into the world?) and motivation. While that can be handily answered in their introductory posts, it would still be good to have some words about it there for easier reference.

Rukath is much more straightforward, and as such has less to pick apart. His introduction is comprehensive enough, and while it doesn’t clearly spell out what exactly it is that he does you’ve separately explained that as well, so it’s fine. Some more detail about how he managed to overpower an awakening scion could have been good to mention (did he just happen to be there when it was still weakened, or did he plot it out somehow?), but that’s not easy to convey through a myth like this, and it’s not a major issue either way.

Rukath is approved, as is Ogrenauth once some minor edits/additions are made.

[AspenIvan]

Any room for another late joiner?

[Cyclone]

Any room for another late joiner?

@AspenIvan

Certainly, and happy new year! You wouldn’t even be that late because we’ve only just started the IC and several of us have yet to post. I’ll PM you a link to our discord server.

[Tuujaimaa]

Something something something JUSTICE.

Sir Aulus

Arnth’s Inn, Marcester -- Early Spring -- 315 PF

---

It had been a trying season for the small town of Marcester. The rains had come too late, and though they had enough in their granary to last another winter it would be difficult when the cold came the next time around and they had not yet replenished their stores. It would mean periods of long fasting in meditation for the learned folk, and a slight nibble of hunger for most of the year for the serfs--but worse had happened, and they thanked the Exalted above that a rain had come at all. The one commodity that the town shared in excess still enough to be called plentiful was ale, and owing to their location along the main road towards Arcos from Paterdomus they saw much in the way of travellers thirsty for the stuff.

They could scrounge together the greens to throw in a pot and a side of salmon to bake on the fire, and the wheat from the mill was still fresh enough to bake a half-decent loaf. They’d extol the White One’s virtues and His word, and they’d be thankful for small mercies and the fact that they had one another, and then life would go on as it always did. The wheel turned, night became day, and on one morning the fateful dawn brought with it a great flash of red and the sound of hooves breaking the lacquer coating of frost on the ground. Two thuds joined it shortly thereafter, a sharp whinny, and a firm hand coming into forceful contact with wood.

The inside of the inn had been relatively sparse for the time of morning--most would’ve already risen once by dawn and would just about be beginning their second rise if they were to work the fields, but owing to the large majority of individuals stopping along a commute at this time of the year they’d perhaps taken their second sleeps a little later and were choosing to wake at a time more amenable to begin travelling at. The knight--it was plain to see, owing to the blade strapped to his back, and the white tabard on his chainmail--sat himself down at a table and put his head in his hands as he waited for one of the earlier risers amongst the staff, likely the innkeep’s daughter or some such.

A gruff bearded fellow five or so feet away sat next to a lankier blond lad no older than 16, and the bearded fellow gave his companion a quick nudge with his elbow and nodded at the knight.

“Give him your beer, Arnza. I’ll grab ‘im a bowl of stew and a trencher.” he said, quietly enough to spur the young lad into quick motion without the knight paying much in the way of attention. The younger lad shuffled his way to the knight’s table with a wooden tankard as quickly as possible, just hastily enough that as the vessel hit the table a soft plink could be heard within it, as the elder pushed his way into the kitchen and his silhouette vanished behind a small plume of steam.

The kitchen was quite hot already, as they’d lit the oven for the nearby folk to come and bake their bread in while it was still dark. Though he felt the steam first, shortly afterwards the smell of those loaves now cooling on some table off in the far corner hit his nose and an inch of a smile began to creep up his face. He stared into a cauldron of stew--the leftovers from last night, no doubt--and he gave them a cursory sniff to find that they were still hot.

‘Must’ve been the lass, I saw a few o’ the Arcosi wake up and wander down while she and her brother were lightin’ the oven.’

It was a simple and practiced routine, even for Arnth himself, to have a quick meal assembled and brought out to the hall with a briskness only the disciplined ever managed to reach. In but a moment or two the knight had a still steaming bowl of stew and a flagon of ale.

“Will you be needing the room, Sir..?”

The knight managed to string together a simple “yes, and another ale” before slurping a mouthful of the stew and wincing at the sting, only to swallow through it and start the process over again. It would have been rude to interrupt him, the innkeeper thought to himself, before looking towards Arnza and nodding at him once. He gave a spirited nod back and made his way to a nearby staircase, into which he promptly disappeared.

“I don’t recognise your Order by your uniform, Sir..?”

It came out as a slightly more piercing inquiry than he’d imagined, but the knight had seemed to pay it no real mind, simply electing to mumble something about the searing dawn in between the gulps of ale and stew alike he was taking. It seemed authentic enough, and he’d happily clear the room out and just allow Father Pesna to make the judgement proper when it came time for prayer that day.

Many hours passed. The morning was filled with those eating before resuming their journey, the locals looking to peddle their own wares to the merchants on their way to the Holy City, and the traders coming in from Arcos--by the time noon had come around it had all reached a fever pitch that only burnt itself out after the sun started to decline in preparation for the evening’s entertainment. At this point the knight had elected to show himself once again, this time with a helmet and a few other more personal details. It occurred to Arnth that his horse must’ve had saddlebags that had been brought up to his room while he’d been busy earlier.

The Knight introduced himself as Sir Aulus of the Knights of the Searing Dawn, and told the innkeeper that he had been sent to the town by order of the Justiciar to oversee a charge of apostasy with suspected witchcraft. He left rather abruptly after that, but Arnth had the distinct feeling that he intended to begin his needling of the townsfolk immediately. He’d be expected to keep the room for the man, but some measure of his tithe would be waived for keeping such a room openly available to all those on holy missions--and even if it wasn’t a financial incentive, he had to think to himself that it was right and proper work too, and he had no small degree of admiration for the righteousness that kind of work took.

The day passed with only a steady trickle of custom until Vespers, by which time Arnth had gotten a chance to speak with the Father and confirm that the Knight’s story was true. The Father had explained that though he was yet to receive a letter, he was made aware of this particular order of knights’ presence in the area and was happy to give his blessing when Arnth recounted the peculiarly tapered and layered red cloak that the man had been wearing.

He paid no heed to the man in particular during his comings and goings over the next few days. Business for him was almost entirely as normal--most of the traders had little to fear from what they had mostly correctly identified as a witch hunter. Arnth’s wife had heard from the miller’s sister that the so-called herbalist who lived out towards the forest had received a particularly lengthy visit from their resident huntsman but emerged largely no worse for wear. It was peculiar, he reckoned, as they’d heard no small amount of gossip from knights errant and traders about the flavours of apostasy, witchcraft, and other such heresies against the Exalted One’s divine will across the land--and they’d made a number of correlations that did not seem to be availing them in this particularly peculiar situation.

Before they’d known it a week had gone by and little again had changed save more and more trickles of rumour about the inquiries that had been working their way into every facet of Marcester. He’d only actually heard fleeting snippets of conversations himself, and he could divine nothing more from the knight’s words than a particular sense of diligence about his job. He tried not to pay any more heed than necessary to the situation, but in the small hours of night it was all that his wife’d talk about--which of the women he’d interview next, what he thought he knew, who he was closing in upon. He admitted to some degree of curiosity, but piety won out--he reminded his wife about the sanctity of his mission and what was expected of a follower of the White One, and she nodded sagely and let it alone.

A few more days passed, and the peculiar knight had spent less and less time in the inn of late. Arnth could’ve sworn he’d heard prayers he didn’t even recognise from the room on the second floor, but the words he did recognise were proper and the tone seemed suitably reverent, so he tried to find solace in his faith and not worry about it too much. The night afterwards he hadn’t returned at all, though Arnza had told him when he got up after his second sleep that the Knight had returned, absolutely soaked through and positively furious. He almost asked his son where the Knight was, but that same strangely fervent prayer sounded from the kitchen across the way and he made a note to talk to the knight some time that evening.

---

The Knight is here, covered in reeking filth and blood and who knows what else. His face hasn’t changed since he sat down and he’s muttered the word “Drusus” under his breath for the past five minutes straight. I’ve half a mind to go and wake Father Pesna, but I daren’t leave him alone. His right eye is bloodied, swollen like a wildberry, and I think I can see shards of glass from the temple or the glassworks in his legs and ripping through his tunic. What in the bloody hells happened to him?

Then, in an instant, he seemed to gain a moment of clarity. He stood up, drank the mug of ale from my hands, and told me to listen very carefully:

“I have to report to Justiciar Drusus. Tell the Father that I’m sorry.”

And he started to gather up his things like a man possessed and ride off towards the Holy City without waiting for first light. I’ve not a bloody clue what happened, but I’ve never looked at a man before and been scared for ‘is soul like that.

[Cyclone]

I guess my whipping boy Ora can catch a break.

@Tuujaimaa for Sir Aulus

Hider

You privately told me that the general idea was to have a sort of corrupted (or at least susceptible to dark influence) knight from Paterdomus as your rogue being. It's a cool idea and one that we like, though it must be said that this is only vaguely alluded to in the myth. Still, from my own CS for Caius I know how it can be hard to portray the powers etc. of human characters especially if they are meant to be a more progressive thing that develops IC.

That lack of being able to demonstrate Sir Aulus' powers or general theme in the myth is the only thing to really criticize, and it's not even a big one. For early plotpoints we already know he'll be going to Justiciar Drusus, which is a nice tie in, and hopefully over the course of an IC post or two the character can be established and fleshed out.

Something worth noting is that Aulus is also the name of the current Pontiff of Paterdomus -- an interesting coincidence (or maybe not -- the Pontiff is an old guy and seems to have held his rank for quite some time, so maybe a young knight would have been named after him), but not a problem per se as Ora noted that history had plenty of guys named Gregory or James or Henry, and havign some common names makes sense in any setting.

CS approved.

[Antarctic Termite]

there's a Portus Cruor flavour post, now may it never be proofread.

[DELETED jdl3932]

Imma pull a cliffhanger. End my post on Tarr'kash reveal as I've already stretched the damn thing out long enough.

[DELETED jdl3932]

Posted. Will I edit this?



_No.

[DrRtron]

I unfortunately seem to have run out of time for this, and as such will have to be withdrawing. Thank you for your consideration, and good luck with your future writings!

@Cyclone@Oraculum

[Cyclone]

I unfortunately seem to have run out of time for this, and as such will have to be withdrawing. Thank you for your consideration, and good luck with your future writings!

@Cyclone@Oraculum

@DrRtron

Sad to see you go. Thanks for the kind words, and should you find yourself with more time on your hands we’d love to take you back.