Dawnscroll — Roleplayer Guild

Harbinger of the Natural Order, Guardian of Harmony, God of Kings and King of Gods, I AM THAT I AM
Level 4 God of Order
45 Might 5 Freepoint

Screams reached his ears.

Logos’s eyes snapped open. He knelt upon on a metal road—with thousands of his Citadels around him, and all around his buildings burned in towering infernos and his humans ran past in panic.

A woman covered in burns walks up to the Lord of Order. And in her eyes is a look that Logos almost did not recognize, for he is so rarely given it. Betrayal. “My Lord... why did you do it?” she asks in a raspy voice.

“Do what?” Logos inquired quietly, a prickle of curiosity at the back of his neck. “Why did I do what?”

The woman looks up at the sky. “The sun...”

Logos stood up to his unknowable height and craned his neck back to look. The smoke rising from the city obscured the sky, but Logos could faintly make out the sun, hanging in the center of an orange sky, and looking far larger than usual. His eyes widened.

“I didn’t do this! I didn’t move the—”

The woman who walked up to him collapsed and her body disintegrated into a pile of ashen dust as it hit the ground. Logos took a step back, staring at the dust pooled around his feet. Snow had began to fall, but Logos realized it was not snow, but ash from the fire. He backpedaled even more, shaking his head as he clenched his eyes shut in denial.

“This isn’t real, this isn’t happening,” he said aloud, trying to convince himself.

As if giving hesitance at his words, time froze.

Logos opened his eyes. Ash falling from the fire hung still in the air, as did the smoke and the fires. Then, everything began to collapse. The flames, the towers, the people that were frozen mid-run, all of them began to slowly dissolve into black dust that pooled onto the road.

Then the dust picked itself up off the ground. It formed a swirling black sphere that’s the size of continent, the black dust in it churning in a vortex. It exploded outwards at Logos, forcing his eyes shut and forcing him to put a wing up to shield his face.

When it faded, Logos slowly opened his eyes. A flat bed of white sandstone as far as he could see and a sky of darkness graced his vision. His mind worked slowly to make sense of where he was as he looks at the sandstone beneath his feet. It is familiar, yet alien. In a dream within the dream, the ghost of a memory, comes the countless years; the wandering across the desert oblivion.

He realized he’s back.

He sat down and for a while he did not move. The only sound in the desolate plain was his own mind, because nothing ever moves and nothing ever changed in this place, because it was faceless, dark, and dead. He sat, tense and alone, waiting for the apparition that chased him since he first Knew.

But it did not.

With little else to do, he began walking across the barren, but just as he started, he paused.

“Come out!” he shouted, spinning around in a circle. “I know your hand is in all of this!” To his great surprise, black dust gathered from out of the cracks in the sandstone and the apparition appears before her. He blinked, not entirely believing it worked.

“What is the meaning of all this?” he asked, eyeing the spirit with an untrusting sidelong glance. It doesn’t reply. “Why are you doing this?”

The black apparition tilts its head as though it’s not sure what he meant. It is with building horror that Logos began to realize what the silence culminated into. 

“You are the only thing I know of that existed before the rest of our Kin. We are brothers, you and I. You understand my design,” Logos declared to to shade. “Now answer me and plainly and do not go into that Darkness. For if I must walk the road and endure and remember, then surely you must as well.“

The apparition looks down for a moment as if thinking. Then it looks up at the Lord of all the Order in the Universe, still as a statue.

“Don’t leave me.” Logos whispered.

The apparition turns and begins walking away, its footsteps making a monotonous sound against the hard sandstone.

“Wait! Don’t go!” Logos shouted, beginning to follow it, but he falters as the apparition begins slowly dissolving into black dust as though there is a breeze in the motionless plane. As it disintegrates in the wind, it gave one last look at Logos over his shoulder before being carried away.

Logos raised his hand after where the ghost disappeared the looks down and lets out a shudder once he realized the finality. “Please don’t go,” he whispered. 

Order wept.

The tears trickled down the side of his face, falling and hitting water with a splash. The sound of his tears hitting water made Logos suddenly aware of the wet feeling around his feet, and he opened his eyes to see stars, millions of them, and his moon. Their image reflects off of the inch high water covering the ground.

Logos stepped forward slowly. The sky was indistinguishable from the horizon, and the sky and ground blur together, the world disappearing in the process.

Logos leans back and looks up at the stars. “Oh, Vowzra… you are the fool of Fate.”

As though hearing the name of who it was impersonating summons it, the apparition materialized behind him.

Logos glances back at the shade of his fellow deity. “It’s beautiful,” he said before returning to look at the stars. The apparition tilts its head back and looks up with him. “I do not forget. The others may close their eyes to what is and what must be, to focus on their small works and unnatural designs, but I shall not. I cannot forget.”

A while passed where neither of them do anything, both simply looking up at the tapestry of stars. Different patches of different shades of midnight blue stretched across the sky behind clusters of stars, creating a rainbow across the sky of just one dark color.

The two of them stand in mutual silence right until withdrew his head from the pool his brother had gifted him, standing side by side and looking up at the night.

But after what feels like an eternity of holding his eyes shut under the pool, nothing happens. Logos let out the breath he had been holding and gasped for air, face dripping with the sacred waters of the Pool of Nyvee.

He looked around the rock walls of the overhang, and outside at the snow, wondering if was still dreaming. Logos gives one last look at his hands, half-expecting to feel some vestige of emotion the waters had shown him.

But there is nothing in the God.

It takes him three days of constantly flight, his white wings of nothing beating against the aether to reach the mountain, and his daughter, once more. Elysium’s snores came in a steady rhythm, and the cold nipped her her rosy cheeck, as real and pervasive as ever.

He watched over her for the rest of the night, right up until the morning sun.
Elysium stirred beside him, letting out a yawn and stretching her wings, removing the one she had wrapped around her head. Logos looked down at her, giving her a look. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Elysium lied. She takes a deep breath to steady herself. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

Logos raised a singular eyebrow, his head swiveling to face her. “And?”

“I still don’t know,”[/b] Elysium admitted. “I want to visit the village down the mountain again, and meet talk with the boy who I met last month. I have a few questions I wish to ask him.”

Logos tilted his head. “What would you hope to gain from that.”

Elysium gazed out from the overhang, off the mountain and into the endless blizzard. “I’m not sure.”

“I’ll be going with you,” Logos said, folding his wings at his sides. “Discreetly, of course.”

Elysium shifted, uncomfortable with the idea, but noded her consent. “Very well.”

Her father walked to the edge of the mountain, peering down the side of it towards the village, though was whited out with snow. A moment of silence passes between them. Elysium walked up beside him, giving her a sidelong glance.

“When do you plan to travel down?” he asked.

“At dark.” Elysium answered quickly. She’s staring at the sky with a frown on her lips. “How long do you think this blizzard will last?”

Logos looked up, then shrugged. “I care not to know. I have seen blizzards last a fortnight this far north. Why? What makes you ask?”

“I’m not sure,” his daughter answered truthfully, chewing her lip, looking up at the clouds and stretching her wings and neck. “Will you come flying with me to pass the time? My limbs feel stiff.”

“I think I’d like to walk, actually,” Logos said, glancing back at the mountain trail leading past the overhang they slept under, and down the mountain. “Just down the mountain and in the forest below.”

“I have no qualms with walking instead,” Elysium says as she folds her wings away. She turned and begins walking down the mountain trail with her father following close behind. The path narrowed as they went down and the winds picked up. Soon they were forced to travel single file along the cliff.

It was a long and winding path down the peak, and the wind and ice tried to push them off at every turn. But it was Logos who was lord and master over these winds and ice, and they broke against his ebon form.  It wasn’t until they neared the base of the mountain that the path was wide enough for both of them and that the wind was tame enough to speak over.

Elysium stopped and looked back at the mountain, before turning back to Logos and the forest. “Flying from mountain to mountain... I almost forgot what it was like to stand on the ground.”

“It does give things a slightly more humble perspective,” Logos commented, glancing around the trees as they walk. “I’ve missed the forests. Seeing them from these eyes is not the same.”
“I could return home. To the Citadel. To you.”

“Perhaps...” Logos said none too enthusiastically. That would be an option if all else failed, but other steps could be taken first. 

Sighing, Elysium shook her head. “I’ve known you for so long, but it feels like I’ll never understand the way your mind works.”

“You will. But you are yet still young.” Logos said genuinely, only to receive a cutting laugh from his daughter.

“You are right, father, I am. But I would like to see eye to eye with you on this matter of exposing ourselves, because I still simply can’t. The reasons you gave me... they don’t sound like good reasons at all. It doesn’t seem like you to be so illogical.”

Logos walked over to a tree sticking up out of the snow and rests a hand on it, staring up at its sagging, winter-covered branches. “Do you consider me perfect, Elysium?”

She blinked, caught off guard by the question. “Certainly not. Why?”

Logos stopped and turned to look her in the eye. “I’m afraid of how much influence and how much power I hold. Are you really not?”

“It’s never really been a thought,” Elysium admits as she shakes her head.

“I have turned over the task of nurture to you and I have decided not to interfere with humankind because I know of the potential I have to ruin everything.” Logos took a step towards Elysium, and she involuntarily a step back. “I can easily destroy all life on this earth. I made you from sand, and I can unmake you back into that sand right now. Doesn’t that frighten you in the slightest?”

“W-well I’ve never really thought of it. But why would you ever do that in the first place? I know you’d never do that.” She gives him an apprehensive glance. “Should I be... worried?”

Logos paused and stared down at the snow. “I don’t know.” He feels a hand on his and looks up to see his daughter staring at him.

“If you are ever in danger please—” She bit her lip, swallowing a lump caught in her throat. “Please ask for my help. I can help.”

Logos leans her forehead against  Elysium’s, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. “I will,” he lied.

The two of them stood with their foreheads rested against each other in the blizzard winds, their flesh becoming dusted with snow.  She looked up at the tree tops, watching snowflakes fall all around her. Silently she and Logos began to walk through the forest again, leaving tracks that blemish the otherwise untouched carpet of snow.

They walked for the whole day, speaking little more to each other, neither of them wanting to break the peace settled over the forest. Even the winds died down to let the forest fall silent, snow dancing down from the clouds and whiting the ground.

Elysium glanced up at the sky to see the sky turning a darker grey, the sun no longer behind it, lighting it. They arrive at the tiny village after nightfall. Everything is settled and quiet and only a few torches remain lit outside their homes, the rest snuffed out by the cold and wind.

She turned to her father. “Please wait here.”

Logos nodded, his eyes shifting between the Realta and the village. “Take care of your heart.” He turns and gives his daughter one last glance before his dark skin disappeared into the night.

Elysium walked forward, slowing down as she nears the houses and the dim glow coming from the village. She glanced back at the forest, wondering if she’d catch some sign of her father watching her, but the dark and snow make it impossible to see that far.

The sound of a wooden door shutting against stone reached her. Her head swiveled to the direction of the sound, spotting the boy from before, standing outside his home and shivering. Elysium crept up to the shadow of a house and peeked around its corner at him.

The boy trudges in a familiar direction, towards the wood crib, carrying a sling between his hands. His steps are slow and tired and his body is shaking like a leaf.

Carefully, Elysium followed him, matching her footsteps to his and masking the crunch of the snow under her feet. She follows him around to the back of his house, leaning out around the corner to see him put the sling down in the snow.
He clenches his eyes shut against the cool and his finger fumble as he undoes the latch. He shuts his eyes again, surrounding a log from the wood shed with trembling fingers, slowly moving it from the crib and dropping it onto the sling. He bends over, panting from the effort it took just to move a log.

Elysiym frowned at seeing him struggle. Looking closely, she noticed some of his bones are showing through skin.

The boy turns looks at the wood pile, shaking as he tried to move another log. It shifted, but doesn’t move far. Scowling, he grasped it close to it just, heaving it upright. He succeeded, partially, dropping the log out onto the snow before moving it onto the sling with his feet.

It’s painful to watch.

He picked up another log, struggling with its weight slightly as he moves it out of the crib. Once the tip of it was free, it swung down, its weight pulling him down with it. He dropped it with a loud grunt, reaching a hand up to his mouth and pulling it away to find blood on his fingers. He spat out a splinter and some blood into the snow, looking at the spot where it landed and shook his head.

Elysium surrounded three of the logs from the crib with her magic. The boy’s head snapped around to stare at them as he moved them out of the wood shelter and lowers them onto the sling.

The boy looked behind him, spotting where Elysium was watching at him from. He spat blood onto the snow once more and lowered his hand from his mouth. “You visited again,” he said, smiling despite the obvious pain.

Elysium stays silent.

The boy glances at the sling. “Well, uh, thank you for helping me again.”

“Why doesn’t your father help you retrieve the logs?”

The boy blinks at the suddenness of her question. “Um, I would, but I don’t think I’m strong enough to stand on two feet right now.” He lets out a nervous chuckle. “We have to try to make the food last as long as we can—what little there is of it. We had a few bad crops this fall, and my father was—”

“The blizzard is going to worsen.” Elysium interrupts. “Your village will most likely die in the cold.”

The boy’s face falls, the words he wants to say dying in his throat. He looks down at the snow, swallowing. “I know...” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. “But what can any of us do?”

Elysium says nothing for a while, averting her eyes from the boy’s. “...Nothing.”

The boy drags at the ground with his foot, smearing the blood he spat on the snow into a light pink streak. “We’ve all known we’re going to die ever since the harvest,” he says quietly. “We’re doing what we can with our time left and spending it with our families.”

A quiet passes between them, and the wind picks up slightly.

“Can I ask you a question?” the boy asked, staring up at Elysium.

“Yes.”

“Are you a goddess?”

Elysium chuckleed, looking down at the boy with a benevolent smile. “No.”

“Oh.” He looked down at the ground, fingers running through his hair bashfully.

 “You looked like you might be, but then again I’ve never seen a goddess.”

“I’ve distanced myself from most other people.”

The boy peered up at Elysium. “But you’re not like most other people, are you?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I am not.” She noticed the boy’s lips were turning blue and her eyes horn lit up, radiating heat in the area around them. The boy’s shivering stopped and he stared up at her with a wide-eyed look. She smiled at him. “Better?”

“Oh, yes! Very much so!” He laughed and looked down at the snow around his legs, watching the surface of it turn to water. He looked back up at her with a grateful smile. “Thank you.”

Elysium simply gave him a nod.

Suddenly his smile fades and he looks back down. “Being warm won’t change the fact that all our food’s running out.”

“No,” Elysium says, “I guess it won’t.”

The boy gives her a sidelong glance, his eyes flickering between her bare skin and her wings. “What exactly are you?” he asks. A blush springs up to his face as he realizes what he just asked. “I-I mean, you’ve been out in this cold, which would have killed anyone without clothes. You have wings and do things that I’ve never ever seen... What are you?”

Elysium hesitates for a moment before answering, her gaze drifting back towards the forest. “I’m a Realta. My father. . . made your people,” he answered. She was not sure why she did what she did. Only that she did.

The little boy stares at her, his mouth agape, pointing a hand at her. “R-really?!” He nearly stumbled, falling quickly to his knees trying to bow, his head dipping down until his face was nearly kissing the snow.

Elysium shifts slightly, reaching down down and touching the boy’s head. “Please rise. I feel uncomfortable being bowed to.”

He nods and scampers to his feet. “That explains the warmth and the fire you gave me!”

“I can do more than just that.”

The boy looks up at her with wide eyes that hold something she hasn’t seen on him before: hope. “Can you save my village?”

Elysium opened and closed her mouth. “I... I don’t know.” The words didn’t feel like her own, and it doesn’t feel like she’s the one saying them.

“Oh...” A small trail of blood and drizzle trailed down his chin, and Elysium realized he doesn’t want to spit in front of her.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

He glanced up at her and then at the blood trailing down his chin. He nodded wordlessly.

Closing her eyes, Elysium concentrated on the feeling of her magic. The white light emitted from her outstretched hand turned snaked out towards the boy, surrounding the boy’s mouth.

The boy gasps and takes a step back in alarm, staring at the white glow around his mouth. Elysium opens her eyes and gazes at him softly with a warm, caring smile. Meeting her stare, the boy calmed down, his eyes darting between her and the luminescent glow around his mouth.

The glow from Elysium’s hand faded back, leaving the boy reaching up and touching his face. He licked the roof of his mouth. “It’s gone!” he exclaimed, staring up at her with the same awed look as when she gifted him the fire.

“Please try to be more careful in the future,” Elysium tsks.

“Y-yes Princess!”

Elysium blinked for a moment. It had been so strange to hear that title come from anyone but her father. She did not know if the boy said out of childish ignorance and admiration, or if the biological coding within him was finally surfacing in her presence.“I am not a princess,” Elysium said, letting out a huff at having to remind him.

The young boy shuffles his feet, casting his eyes downward. “Oh, right. S-sorry.”

Elysium tips his chin up, planting a chaste kiss on his forehead. “I need to go now.”

She turned and began walking away, the boy staring after her with his mouth hanging open. He limped after her rather weakly, his feet trudging through the high snow and his steps fumbling with urgency. “Wait!”

Elysium pauses and looked back at him. He threw himself at her feet. “Please, please save my village.”

Elysium looks down at him, his head pressed to her feet desperately. She hears the crunch of snow behind her and turns to see her father walk up beside her, appearing out of the night like a shadow. Logos merely gave her a nod and looked at the boy.

Elysium glances between the boy and her, her eyes wide and wings expanded in agitation. The boy at her feet paled slightly as he spots Logos, and he begins to tremble in primal fear.

“What do you choose to do, daughter?” Logos asked, staring expectantly at her. “I will not raise my hand to help them. For when they were designed, by my Hand and my Breath, I gave them all they needed in this world. A garden of plenty. And instead they would seek their own destruction. My place is to simply observe them. Is my place yours?”

“I...” Elysium stares at the boy wrapped around her legs, letting out a sigh. “No,it is not.”

The boy’s eyes light up, looking up at her. His eyes sparkle with pure joy and he hugs her leg tightly, sniffling with tears in the corner of his eyes. “Thank you! From the bottom of my heart.”

“At last you understand a least a portion of my Natural Order,” Logos said quietly, and Elysium thought she could catch a hint of appoval in his voice. At last, the shade of her father faded into wisps of shadow and light, dissipating into the night.

Giving the spot where her father had watched her a grateful nod, Elysium turns to the frozen village. Icicles the size young sapling hang from thatching and entire walls are encased in ice. Magic springs to life like a beacon from her body, the flare from it covering the entire village in light. She reaches for the magic her father had infused into the very fiber of the world, the very gridwork upon his system. In the sky, the clouds looming overhead part, opening the village to the night sky and the moonlight. The boy at Elysium’s feet stared up at the moon in awe.

The Realta magic turned a shining white, pure warm sunlight, expanding in a dome shape to cover the entire village and the fields surrounding it. Snow withers and melts under her magic, and people in their homes begin to wake and take notice of what’s going on around them, peering out the windows at the source of the bright, glowing light.

With the snow clear, she began to seep her magic into the frozen earth the village sits on, causing sprouts and grass to grow out of it. The carpet of green quickly spread across the town and its outlying fields, where apple trees begin to rapidly grow up out of the earth, ripe fruit springing up on their branches, along with bushels full of berries, carrots, and healthy leaf plants.

At last, Logos’s favored daughter cut her magic, and for a while after doing so the entire village stayed silent. People stared out of their windows, looking at the grass and crops that sprung out of the ground with disbelief.

Slowly, they began filtering out of their homes, inspecting the grass beneath their feet and testing that it is real.

The little boy finally rose to his feet, running up to the rest of the villagers. “The goddess! The goddess saved the town!” he shouted, pointing back at Elysium.

The boy’s father limps out of his home to his son’s side, wrapping his arm around him and looking at the young Realta. “How can we ever repay you?”

“I don’t seek recompense,” Elysium said assuredly. “We are just trying to help.”

The father’s legs shake, tears coming to his eyes, and he kneels down before the her. “Thank you.”

The rest of the townsfolk follow in his example, kneeling Elysium, daughter of the King of the Gods.

“Please,” Elysium said, motioning for them to rise. “Just eat.”

They glided in through the top of the open Citadel, landing soundlessly on section of the upper ring. “All things must exist in their proper portions. In perfect balance. This is the natural order.”

The Citadel thrust into the sky over the Forest like a platinum spear. Light blazed along its edges in complex sigils, and a beam of white energy shot forth from its point. A massive thunderhead had begun to gather above, lit from within by the shaft of light. 

Logos stepped back from the ring of the Citadel, recalling the fragment of his power to him. His daughter had made her decision as he had designed her. That was good.

Now his mind turned to other portions of the world. Everything had changed with the death of the Timeless one.

No intermediaries, now. No insulation to prevent the gods themselves from striking against one another. The moves that had brought them here were irrelevant, and now all that mattered was the pure and simple truth that this was the beginning of the long end.

Logos’s storm stood poised over The Citadel, a single titanic cloud filled with every ounce of elemental energy from leagues in each direction. It appeared solid on the outside—almost like a vast anvil. A vast anvil, on which a new world was about to be forged.

The air thinned as they made their descent, but only the empty dark was breathable to the Realta.

A third of them awoke at his command, as was needed. Their duel with the mistakes of Galabar would draw their gods forth, to cut the cancer that had claimed Time itself. The Codex would be reclaimed and safely stored within his Citadel, to outlast the death of reality itself. They would also prevent him from descending to the ground below and obliterating the resistance as easily as one might swat an errant fly.

They dove in tandem, their wings skimming the surface of a cloud as large as a city. Above the storm there was no wind, no life, no thunder. The world was vast, cold, and empty, save for the focused shaft of light that broke from the center of the nimbus, lighting it from within like a candle in a jack-o-lantern.

And for the being who stood in front of it. He was as vast, cold, and empty as the world around them. Impassive as the stars that burned above them, as powerful and contained as the storm that raged below. Older than the world they looked over, and every creature on it. As compassionate and alien as the empty dark high above them.

But for all that, he could love. The Realta believed this with an intensity that rivalled the burning of all their stars combined. They had to believe it. Because they were going to die for him.

He faced away from them, into the beam of light that would strip humankind of their souls. He did not flinch from the incandescent glow, or turn to look at the children he no doubt knew were there. The light put the edges of his silhouette into sharp, colorless relief, like the night lit by a flash of lightning.

They landed on the tightiy formed surface of the thunderstorm apart from one another, putting Logos and his beam between them. He stared on, heedless of their arrival. 

“You do not know.” Logos’s voice rolled over the aerial vista, powerful, cool, and emotionless. “You do not know of the care and effort involved in having children, as a god. The secret is lost to you, locked safely within The Citadel. It takes years,” Logos said. “Years, and something more. The spark of immortality is not something that can be hastened.”

His children of metal and fire waited patiently for him.

Logos glanced back ever so slight turned his gaze towards the Realta. “And in all this world, in all the universe, there is only one rule,” he said, looking back again upon the beam of light that pierced the heavens.

Like the dust being blown away from a buried treasure, the stream of light before him parted and flowed off of an object hidden within. It dwindled and thinned, until at last it was only a thread of energy bisecting a long, slender shaft of darkness. The light ran through the center of Singularity, and the blade came to rest at Logos’s side. The shaft of energy resumed its regular ascension.

Sheet lightning ripped its way across the sky, crossing from one horizon to another in three strokes, arcing around The Citadel’s beam. The world shifted and the Realta found themselves, and their father,  their creator, their God deep within a cave. Before them stood a seam in the fabric of time and space, torn their by a goddess and her puppets long ago. They had stolen from the Garden of their father. She would be punished. The Cancer that consumed would be punished. All who defied the King of the Gods would either bow or be forced to kneel.

The sound of thunder layered atop itself was nothing to Logos’s voice. “Mine,” he said.

Word reaches Logos of Vowzra's death and is touched by the shadow of the Time God's presence in the pool that they both made. Elysium comes to realize her place in the Order, and that her father did not abandon his creation. Rather, he was waiting for her to rise on her own. Logos realizes now is the time to reclaim the Codex and summons a third of his Realta, reforging the first sword before the Universe, Singularity, and reopens the portal between Galbar and Arcon, intending to march through and clean house, as it were.

26 Might used to bring Logos to Level 7.
10 Might Used to Reforge his Sword, Singularity - The First Blade.
1 Used to Create the Avatar that watches over Elysium while Logos is in his Citadel
1 Used to Reopen the Portal made earlier.
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