Benthamic

"Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one."
Benjamin Valentia Holliday was a Valencian black mage and revolutionary. Initially operating out of his home country as a criminal syndicalist and insurgent, he later joined the insurrectionary anarchist and occultist faction, the Kokushi, becoming a student of the fanatical sorcerer Izahdera. After the fall of the Kokushi, he became affiliated with the Reunion Coven and later the Outlanders, attempting to use his mastery of the dark arts for good. He participated in the Aether War as a friend of the Alliance and amassed a cult of acolytes known as the Oathbreakers near the end of his life before disappearing from Aquila.
==I - Therion==
===Early Life and Background===
Benjamin Valentia was born in 4785 during the waning years of the Second Valencian Republic under the Luccan regime. He was the third of Lord Holliday II’s four children, a scion of the wealthy and influential Holliday family – a younger but respectable faction of the hallowed mercantile aristocracy of Valencia. The Hollidays were of Occan descent, with their founder, Benjamin’s grandfather, arriving in Audax just before the turn of the century and fighting tooth and nail to forge his own legacy among the elder clans. He found his wealth by investing early into the Fleet Reclamation Trust, a joint-stock founded to rebuild the once proud Valencian fleet after it was destroyed in the Battle of Kent – by the Occans, ironically. He distinguished himself by encroaching upon the stagnating redstone and iron markets as well, just before the predominant coal market peaked. By 4735, the first Lord Holliday had seized control over 95% of the Trust with fingers in the climbing redstone mining industry as well. His influence in restoring the Republican fleet earned him the favor of the dominant Lucca family, cementing the upstarting Hollidays as a force to be reckoned with and thus incurring the ire of the elder nobility.
In the shadow of rapid industrialization in urban Valencia, animosity between the rival noble families grew, as did a general distrust of the land-owning elite by the lower class. Organized crime became rampant in the inner city with new criminal syndicates rapidly springing in the 4740s. Initially, these syndicates were more or less spontaneously formed as civilian-overseen neighborhood police forces to protect workers from outside crime; the nobility quickly adapted and began to finance these regional syndicates, effectively “sponsoring” them into becoming their loyalcrim underworld enforcers. In his twilight years, Lord Holliday I brokered an alliance with the powerful Andolini crime family, who controlled the underworld of the ship-building Aragon borough (the namesake for the state in Bobyrujsk), effectively giving his clan control of both the white and black markets of the little Republic’s naval manufacturing sector.
Shortly after Ben’s birth in 4785, his father, Holliday II, made an unprecedented powerplay by having the Boss of the Andolini family assassinated and replacing him with a conspiratorial capogrime who swore total fealty to the Hollidays. Now rather blatantly in control of the entire Aragonese shipyards, Ben’s father used his virtually unopposed authority to begin a mass racketeering campaign which ended in him owning the property of every major local business and collecting “protection” fees from the rest. The rise of his criminal empire gave him the name “King of Aragon,” which infuriated the head of the Lucca family, the Doge of Valencia himself. The Doge used his own criminal army, the National Police, to begin interfering in Holliday’s domain by disrupting his contraband supply chains and charging several of his capogrimes with extortion. After a brief turf war, the Andolini muscle were able to keep the Police from establishing a permanent hold on Aragon, though the cracks in the family’s empire were beginning to show.
In 4789, a new street gang, the Free Aragon Society, emerged in the shipyards – swearing allegiance to no crime family, instead functioning as a network of industrial saboteurs participating in coordinated attacks against both Andolini and Holliday strongholds. Their early successes in disrupting Lord Holliday’s empire gave the Society popularity across the city, with much of Aragon’s workers supporting their actions. In 4789, Holliday’s enforcers, with the Police behind them, put down a mob of protesters outside the Holliday estate, resulting in 7 deaths. Evidence collected by Andolini spies implicating the involvement of several rival noble clans in the formation of the Society, but after the massacre, worker unrest had evolved far beyond Free Aragon; in an event known as the Brightstar Movement, several Holliday-owned factories refused to operate until all racketeering ceased; dozens of other shops followed suit, and within days the situation had spiraled out of control with worker strikes springing up across the entire city in solidarity. Strike-breakers and imported mercenaries, many of them Hinterlandic, eventually spelled the death of the Movement, but the bloody week of civil unrest before then had left Valencia in a state of political and economic chaos. The nobility enacted the Brightstar Reforms shortly after the strikes were broken, ostensibly banning any nobles from consorting with organized criminal elements for political purposes. As a result, the Andolinis began to operate more as an independent crime syndicate, but their ties with the Hollidays stayed strong.
Young Benjamin came of age in the years of turmoil following the Brightstar Movement. While his two elder brothers feuded over who would control the family’s assets once Holliday II passed, Ben took a keen interest in the arts; he studied the intricate styles of the expensive paintings which dotted the estate and became a prolific painter in his own right, sketching avant-garde illustrations of daily Aragonese life in his own eclectic style in defiance of the realist approach of the old guard of the city. He blossomed into a connoisseur of classical literature and poetry, becoming the talk of the Doge’s court for his dramatic and revolutionary recitations of the works of the old masters. His confident yet modest charm as a young man earned him much prestige in Valencian high society – much to the ire of his brothers – and landed him a lucrative career as assistant clerk for the esteemed Sivellan Opera House, where his sister Bianca frequented as a crowd-pleasing ingenue. He managed much of the company’s finances, and his respected position afforded him special privileges within many parallel institutions such as the ancient Library of Valencia. While he enjoyed the glamorous life, his constant exposure to the intrigue of the Republic’s bourgeois elements left him disillusioned to the aristocracy, believing that only some type of mass uprising, guided by his superior intellect, could change the system. In his spare time, he wrote hundreds of essays theorizing about different revolutionary scenarios and what society may look like without the aristocracy.
===Entrance into the Underworld===
In 4802, by way of gossip within the Doge’s court, Ben heard of unusual activities in Valencia’s underworld. Despite the enacting of the Brightstar reforms, powerful crime syndicates were allegedly beginning to collaborate with the noble houses once again to intimidate workers and strong-arm petty merchants. Though Ben suspected his father was involved in the increasing boldness of the Andolinis, his brothers kept him at arm’s length from the family’s secret financial activities at all times, prompting him to take the investigation into his own hands. He came into correspondence with the young scion of House Furnace by the name of Josef, whom he was aware had extensive knowledge of Valencia’s criminal underbelly. Admitting he had precious little knowledge, Josef suggested they get to the bottom of things by attempting to infiltrate the Andolinis themselves. To their shock, the increase in syndicate activities was due not to collaboration with the nobility, but solidarity among themselves – the crime syndicates were banding together to dominate Valencia.
Believing the nobility could not be trusted, Ben hatched a plan, to which Josef hesitantly agreed, to take the fight against the syndicates into their own hands. They orchestrated a series of sabotages against secret syndicate hideouts and storehouses whose locations they obtained by anonymously bribing inside men and hiring professional noble spies. Their attacks started as simple “warnings” that their actions had not gone unnoticed and that the people were watching – within a month, gangs-affiliated warehouses full of smuggled weapons and ingredients were regularly going up in flames, with every hit bearing the same calling card of a white mask with blood red streaks through it – the symbol of a fictional revolutionary they called Therion, named for a spirit in the pantheon of the Old Ways associated with anarchy and rebellion. Over the ensuing weeks, the gangsters scrambled to protect their assets and attempted in vain to deduce the identity of the saboteur, creating an air of paranoia amid suspicions of a mole; meanwhile, Therion slowly became a symbol of revolution for many of the thousands of destitute workers in Valencia, who had long felt abandoned and preyed upon by both the state and the syndicates.
As Therion’s attacks became even more brazen and his movements even more erratic thanks to efforts by Ben and Josef to throw pursuers off the trail, the revolutionary symbol began to gain a following of his own. Taking a calculated risk, Ben decided to organize a secret rally of all of Therion’s faithful to prove his existence; dawning the mask and an ornate cloak, he addressed a crowd of hundreds of radicals, many of whom felt that the Brightstar Movement and its reforms didn’t go far enough. He requested that they go and spread Therion’s word and begin to build secret cells of their own to prepare for the moment of revolution. Many of the lesser syndicates broke their previous partnerships and decided to throw in with Therion’s rapidly growing movement, establishing a revolutionary presence in Valencia’s underworld. Ben and Josef decided to divide and conquer; with both under disguise and working simultaneously, Ben would negotiate deals with potential gang allies to grow their numbers, while Josef would take a cadre of trusted rebels to attack the hideouts of any gangs who refused to join Therion. His preferred method was indiscriminate arson.
Towards the end of 4802, Therion’s power and influence had become undeniable. Mass rallies of disgruntled workers, all wearing replicas of their leader’s famous mask, took to the streets daily, demanding the arrest of the gangs and the permanent dissolving of the aristocracy. Anarchism had taken a definitive hold in Valencia. With his own supply of capital from the family and the Opera House combined with the constant stream of revenue generated from seizing a significant portion of all underworld activity, Ben, knowing that the hour of revolution was approaching, made his next move: Making allies. The loyal syndicates were powerful, but in order to seize the Republic and hold it, even greater assets were required. As Therion, he arranged for a meeting with the largest occultist faction in the city, the Valencian sect of the ancient Acolytes of the Beyond, whom he knew had contact with other cells belonging to the larger Followers of the Old Ways movement. Upon promising that the revolution would bring about an end to the already waning persecution of the Old Ways, the Acolytes saw wisdom in lending their aid to the movement and joined Therion’s ever-expanding revolutionary coalition. The Acolytes’ main contribution to the effort came in the form of heretical contraband – most notably, enchanted books. Fascinated with the Old Ways, whenever he could, Ben studied these forbidden texts and resolved to learn whatever they had to teach him in preparation for the revolution. He mastered the theory of simple enchantments via tomes first, and as he studied the arcane language knowledge of Shibboleth, became proficient in complex rituals which required special sigils, sufficient sacrifice as payment, and enormous willpower. He was just beginning to study the way of the black mage – a master sorcerer who can channel Chaos by his own right, without ritual – when the time to strike had come.
===Valencia in Chaos===
4803
In the backdrop of the revolution, the Doge was waging a minor war with the Tyrellians in the south over a stretch of fertile land called the Aurelian Plains, the source of the majority of Audax’s winery fields. With half of Lucca’s National Police fighting in the Aurelian cliffs and the other half tasked with containing the inevitable anarchist uprising, the Doge’s forces were spread too thin for either effort to be counted as successful. The Valencian general of the Aurelian campaign, the Doge’s son Lord Paolo, finally returned to the city in late 4802 after his forces scored a pyrrhic victory over the Tyrellians – securing the plains but destroying most of the vineyards in the process. Paolo came home to a city on the verge of revolution and, feeling that his victory was going unappreciated, practically immediately assumed control over the Republic’s entire Police force and began to implement his own counter-insurgent strategies. The soldiers with whom he’d returned from Aurelia were mostly loyal to him as his strategies in the plains, while costly, did save the lives of many Valencians; the city’s guard, however, were increasingly helpless to quell the rebellion and resented the General for assuming he could succeed where they could not.
Three weeks after Paolo declared martial law, Therion’s hideout in the sewers received a coded telegram from a faction of treasonous National Police offering an alliance with the anarchists. With all the pieces in place, it seemed Ben’s revolution was about to begin. Before giving the order, he met with the leader of the Acolytes, the master of rituals Thoreau for counsel, believing that he must ensure a spiritual victory along with a political victory. Thoreau revealed that the Acolytes had become aware of his activities early on by his use of the name Therion, the vibrant spirit of rebellion; they initially dismissed him as a mere criminal, but aligned with his movement at the behest of the mysterious and powerful sorcerer Kastor, leader of an occult group known as the Kokushi – the primary benefactors of the Acolytes’ heretical contraband. Thoreau advised Ben that his revolution would ultimately succeed, but only after he mastered his destiny by tasting the Void.
One week later on the first day of the new year, Therion officially called for a general strike to force the aristocracy to surrender their wealth and dissolve the government. Paolo promptly ordered the Police to crush the strike; half of his forces officially defected and seized control of the barracks, signaling the beginning of the Second Valencian Revolution. Fighting immediately broke out in the streets as the anarchists entrenched themselves in the slums and factories, constructing massive barricades out of scrap and rubble. Therion continued to operate from the shadows and seldom making public appearances to protect Ben and Josef’s identities; as a result, many pretenders stepped up to the plate and declared they were the true Therion in attempts to seize control of the movement. However, much like the Brightstar era, the Revolution quickly evolved beyond its founders. The castrated Confederation of labor created by the aristocracy as a concession from the first revolution voted itself out of existence, and in its place the National Syndicate of Sivella – or simply the Syndicate – came into being at the first congress of the new trade unions spontaneously formed by the Revolution. While the rebel forces of the early stages were quite unified in praxis as a means to drive out the Loyalists, by the time the Revolution “succeeded” and became more or less autonomous, a number of factions emerged in the Syndicate.
The Republicans sought to form the Third Valencian Republic to restore rule of law under a more democratic governance; the Communards wanted to seek peace with the Loyalists; the anarchist Autonomists dreamed of a free Valencia in a state of permanent revolution, with the Syndicate replacing the traditional government. Therion’s followers were divided. Their faceless leader was more or less a ghost who espoused little in the way of ideology apart from “breaking the chains.” Sensing rising internal division and fearing that it could spell the end of the Revolution, Ben decided that Josef’s strategy of propaganda by the deed would not be sufficient – his Revolution needed a leader. By the time his brothers outed him as the true Therion, he had already revealed himself to the Syndicate and made his case; though many of the rebels were extremely reluctant to put their faith in a former noble who was barely an adult, he was welcomed into the fold and immediately went back to work as a soldier of the Revolution, slowly swaying the Syndicate to follow his wisdom. Josef’s lone wolf attacks only intensified.
Ben, still bearing Therion’s mask, launched a series of shock raids intended to take the fight to the Loyalists after being on the defense for so long. He became notorious for his daring bank-robbing ventures, embarking on a quest to systematically appropriate the wealth of the entire aristocracy. By the time the noble houses began to relocate their valuables to hidden safehouses, Ben and his crew had captured the equivalent of millions of lirae; most of it was freely redistributed to allies of the cause, though a peculiar phenomenon of citizens dumping buckets full of banknotes and coins due to their worthlessness in the closed syndicalist economy. The Commune held steadfast for months but soon realized that they would eventually run out of food and supplies due to Loyalist control of the shipyards. Ben attempted to penetrate his own family’s territory for weeks with little success, creating a high demand for international smugglers willing to work with the rebels. They became close partners with the Triads in Hamamitsu, who were able to ferry in arms and foodstuffs at semi-regular intervals. Meanwhile, Ben began to get quite comfortable with the revolutionary life. He enjoyed the culture of anarchist Valencia and even operated out of his former office in the opera house, looting all manner of abandoned expensive paintings, jewelry, and other fineries. He took a particular liking to a mysterious silver-banded onyx ring found in the study of a former noble accused of occult activities. As Ben continued to languish in comfort by reaping the spoils of the bloody struggle, the Syndicate’s faith in him evaporated. Many of the union leaders who once followed Therion now saw him as a vapid child, only stirring revolutionary sentiment for his own narcissistic benefit. He was soon purged from the presiding committee of the Syndicate by a vote secretly initiated by Furnace.
Dishonored by both the ruling and lower class, Ben resolved to make one final gambit to either re-establish his image as a revolutionary hero or martyrize himself. He made a desperate assassination attempt on the Doge by sneaking into his bed chambers dagger in hand, but he was discovered and quickly apprehended by Paolo. Ben was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment, with his execution date left unscheduled for fear of fulfilling his wishes and martyring him. One month into his imprisonment, the situation for the commune turned dire as it was reported that a squad of elite paladins from the Templar Order had arrived in Aragon and begun to coordinate sieges upon vital revolutionary stronghold. One week before the Battle of Togliiatti which spelled the final defeat of the anarchists, a guard slipped Ben a slip paper detailing instructions for his escape. He was to await a massive explosion in the prison, disappear into the mob of workers storming the barracks, and then escape to the docks where he would inform a masked ship captain waiting there that his name was Therion. Following the orders to the letter, Ben took one last look at the ruins of his city and vowed that he would one day return to complete the Revolution. The ship promptly departed for southern Ertdor, bound for the lawless city of Zalibar.
==II - The Kokushi==
===The First Lesson===
Ben arrived at the port of Balok about one week later, quickly after which he was hurried into an abandoned astrology temple within inner Zalibar. There, he was greeted by a Khotani man named Izahdera, the leader of the mysterious Kokushi. The occult leader explained that he had formed the faction as an act of vengeance after his village was destroyed by Kazimiri inquisitors from the north, and saw the Old Ways as a means for the oppressed peoples of Aquila to rise up against tyranny and bring about a just world; after learning of Ben’s revolutionary activities through his spies within the Acolytes, Izahdera sought to recruit the young man into the Kokushi and thus give him a chance to fight for a cause higher than himself by putting his skills to use to liberate the weak. Ben quickly accepted his offer.
By 4803, the Kokushi had operatives more or less in every nation but had chosen to base themselves in the capital of Alamut due to its proximity to the Kazimir Empire – Izahdera’s first target for a world revolution. His plan entailed influencing the visions of the sultan’s prophetic Cult of Seers, whose mystic divinations had guided imperial policy for centuries. Corrupting their astral projections would be an incredibly difficult feat only attainable with a powerful ritual using the darkest and most dangerous sect of the Old Ways – the collection of dark arts practices variously called black, chaos, or void magick. While Aquila is rife with amateur mages who flirt with the dark arts, only master sorcerers who successfully tether themselves to the domain of the dead – who Izahdera called Bokors – could even begin to explore the possibilities of pure black magick, risking falling into the infinite abyss of the outer cosmos in exchange for unspeakable powers. The newly initiated Acolyte Holliday thus began his mission to master the Void.
The first leg of his journey led him to the Kazimiri capital of Akhtamar, the legendary city of marble built by Alamutian slaves under the rule of Ptolemos the Eagle. Here, he was tasked with mastering the first of three tenets theoretically required to learn any school of the Old Ways – the Mind. Donning a fashionable maroon fez and a new white suit, his task was to locate an ancient grimoire called the Or'azath Syha'hnahh (or simply the Book of Shadows) purported to have been written by the Void Priests, the original black mages, functioning both as a repository of countless profane rituals and as a reference for the dead language of Shibboleth – the cursed dialect used to channel the Void. The dangerous tome was said to have been won by Sultan Daroga after defeating an evil sorcerer, after which he had it locked in the bowels of the Athenaeum. Ben successfully disguised himself as a member of the imperial cult and cleverly slipped past the dozens of traps meant to keep intruders at bay, but found its lectern empty upon reaching the inner sanctum of the ancient library.
After escaping to the desert under hot pursuit by the sultan’s guard, Ben was able to consult some of the Kokushi’s underworld contacts in Kandar to get a lead on the grimoire’s current whereabouts. The dark artifact had apparently been stolen by members of a reclusive cult who called themselves the Fourth Vertice, worshipers of the desert spirit Z’uqqa-mogg – supposedly, the previous owner of the tome. All reports indicated that the cultists were based out of the Grotto District, a neighborhood of Dreiton located within the Wyrd. Stealing aboard a Mandate ship disguised as a Kazimiri official, he arrived in the city harbor two weeks later and booked a room in the Great Old One tavern within the Grotto. Sifting through rumors of vampires and enchanters, he finally came upon a meeting of the Vertice where he discovered their high priest wielding the Book of Shadows. Though he initially planned to simply steal the tome, in their congregation Ben discovered that the cult were a faction of Barsinan nationalists who worshiped Z’uqqa-mogg in hopes of protecting their nation from the Mandate. He secured a meeting with their high priest, offering them support from the Kokushi in founding a formal occult cell in Dreiton in exchange for ceding the Book; he expressed interest in allying with the Kokushi, but was unwilling to trade over the relic. The priest instead directed him towards the eccentric “King of the Wyrd,” Repelli del Toro, a known collector of occult artifacts whose vampirism was something of an open secret within the Grotto underworld. Repelli was known to have acquired the infamous Ars Goetia, a grimoire written by one of the founding Acolytes of the Beyond, Lexuriga Serroth, apparently based upon the collected teachings of one of Hades’ original dark disciples. The rumors were confirmed by city authorities announcing the theft of a vaulted artifact from the Dreiton museum.
Believing del Toro was simply a gangster with a morbid curiosity in the dark arts, Ben opted to confront the King in his own home and demand the Ars Goetia himself. In the ensuing battle, Repelli hurled dozens of arcane curses towards the young mage, who just barely survived the confrontation by taking cover in the mansion’s massive library, casting spells randomly taken from ornate bookshelves, and then accidentally turning his adversary into a sugar glider. Ben emerged from the Grotto district that evening with the Ars Goetia and a reluctant winged spirit guide in tow, beating a hasty retreat back to the Zalibar temple with his narrow victory. Izahdera praised the young acolyte’s handling of the mission, noting how his cleverness in simultaneously procuring a powerful grimoire and making a new ally for the cause demonstrated an understanding of the Mind element of the Void. In preparation for his next journey, Ben studied the strange text of the Ars Goetia, attempting to memorize as many rituals as possible. He discovered that the dark language of Shibboleth could not be learned in the traditional manner, with its arcane symbols, which seemed to dance freely upon the pages in unpredictable patterns, only becoming intuitively readable as one’s connection to the Void strengthened. He did not remain secluded within the Kokushi temple long, however, with his master soon calling upon him to spread the revolution of the Old Ways to the city of Daguo.
===Old Wounds===
As his first task as an aspiring agent of the Kokushi, Ben was trusted with investigating and, if possible, exploiting the unrest brewing in the Olnek capital of Daguo. He arrived to a city in a state of political chaos as the previous warlord of the clique had died with no apparent successor. Daguo’s status as one of the major population and commercial centers of Kilran was jeopardized, with the Kokushi merely one of a host of parties interested in seizing power. Izahdera and his students, however, had the simpler goal of maintaining the growing anarchy and inspiring popular revolution to draw international mercantile interests out rather than creating a new government. Donning his white mask and Therion pseudonym once more, he spent several months along with his fellow cell operatives disrupting trade activity in the harbor, distributing syndicalist propaganda to the lower classes, and eliminating government officials either by blackmail or abduction.
Though their anarchist propaganda did not gain much traction, their meddling in the city’s affairs successfully elevated the civil unrest to a state of social and political emergency; grain storehouses were cleared out by hungry mobs, banks were seized and their contents burned on the street in mass demonstrations, and poorly guarded state barracks were raided for arms and supplies. With the practically nonexistent city government no longer able to distribute dole, soldiers once loyal to the warlord deserted en masse to join the riots. In 4805, coinciding with the disastrous Herobrine Incident which destroyed any remaining trust in the state’s ability to protect its citizens, the council governing the state of Olnek totally collapsed, leaving Daguo in a state of hectic anarchy similar to the Valencian commune of yore. Therion and his operatives revealed themselves as representatives of the Kokushi, asking the people of Daguo not to submit to their rule, but rather join them in founding a new order of Aquila free of the shackles of religious persecution and mercantilist exploitation. The Kokushi’s victory of a gang syndicate terrorizing the docks cemented their image as liberators, and the people of Daguo began to timidly accept their ideology.
Kokushi influence over Daguo some of the surrounding former Olnek lands remained tense but steady over ensuing weeks, with Therion winning the loyalty of a multitude of popular militias and using his operatives to enforce the loose laws of anarchist Daguo, mostly entailing intimidation and/or coercion of grain hoarders and stubborn landlords. The surrounding states of Yago and Lysiak, however, became increasingly alarmed by the escalating situation and fearing similar uprisings in their own spheres of influence. Citing concerns over disorder in the countryside and the open practice of the Old Ways, the warlords petitioned for the aid of the Templars – the same order that crushed Valencia. A company of elite Templar paladins and clerics arrived the following week by way of the nearest monastic stronghold in Krak, Bobyrujsk. A series of brutally surgical and efficient Templar strikes upon anarchist hideouts in the countryside immediately ensued, with the knights hoping to surround the city and force the occultists to capitulate. Learning from his failure in the Siege of Valencia, Therion roused the most capable of his loyal volunteers whom he had fully converted to the Kokushi ideology and organized them into small bands of cavalry who would roam the Olnek country and keep the Templars from establishing any permanent bases by way of mounted guerrilla warfare. This strategy of effective asymmetrical warfare prolonged Therion’s control of the city for several weeks, allowing them to enlist the help of other hidden Kokushi cells around the world to bolster their defenses.
However, in the latter half of 4803 numerous Templar strongholds which had been caught up with containing a daemonic convergence in Kalga Bland were now being dispatched to aid in the siege of Daguo. The elite cavalry of the Kazimir-aligned Zenda stronghold easily destroyed the roving bands of Kokushi raiders, allowing the knights to set up a base camp just outside the city across the river. The emboldened siege put a major dent in Therion’s existing consolidation of power, allowing a nationalist faction named the Maximists to gain control over Daguo. As a result, the open practice of magick in the city was quickly re-prohibited and the Kokushi were forced to retreat to the autumnal forests of the north. As the spark of revolution rapidly faded, the Templars began to offer terms of surrender – led by their notorious cleric and emissary Sir Furnace of Valencia. Meeting in secret, Josef explained to the furious Ben that he had regretted their uprising in Valencia, becoming disillusioned in their anarchist ideology in favor of a strong leader to control the masses, whom he saw as incapable of organizing themselves and thus deserving of a firm hand to create a balanced society free from crime, poverty, and politics. Within the week, Furnace and his paladins were able to pierce the walls of Daguo and seize the city. The status quo was more or less restored with the return of foreign capital, though free elections were held to build a new municipal parliament. As the Templar cross was symbolically hoisted over the city, Ben and his comrades fled by horseback through the Durand valley and back to Zalibar. While they had failed to take the city, their successful establishment of a permanent Kokushi cell within its walls coupled with a significant blow to monetarist elements in the region was seen as a victory in the eyes of Izahdera and his cult. Meanwhile, the Maximists retained power in Daguo, quickly gaining a commanding majority in the new parliament and establishing a long-lived system of one-party democracy.
===Baba Yaga===
4804
With the revolution in Daguo completed for better or worse, Ben took the moniker Benthamic, shibboleth for “Ben, son of the Flame,” (referring to Therion), in preparation for the next phase of his studies. Having achieved proficiency with the language of the arcane, he had learned to use the Ars Goetia for a variety of semi-complex rites such as basic hexes and utility spells, but was powerless without the grimoire and incapable of using practical combative magick. Thus, for his instruction in the second tenet, the Body, Izahdera sent Benthamic to the distant town of Kalassa for spiritual instruction under the witchdoctor Baba Yaga – quietly surmised by Ben to be one of Izahdera’s past loves. He hitched a ferry from Port Ramona to the city of Corona and then traveled to the harbors of Bakadaja, where he made a brief stop for a night of revelry before selling his camel and traveling the rest of the way by sloop. He took a liking to the strange city of Kalassa, whose verdant swamps served as a sort of haven from the outside world for the misfits of Aphelion and beyond.
Eventually he discovered Baba Yaga’s hut in the southern swamp after trudging around for some time, and was initially turned away. The reclusive witch insisted she wasn’t a teacher and was no friend of Izahdera’s cult; upon insistence, she challenged Benthamic to clear out a nearby cave of feral vampires to test his worthiness. Knowing he couldn’t defeat the powerful creatures by normal means, he elected to use his then-most potent enchantment on his rapier, granting it precious few slashes of ethereal fire before dissolving into quintessence. Luring them out with a minor illusion of a hapless wanderer, he was able to reduce all but one of the weak vampires to ashes, forcing him to eliminate the last creature by slashing its eyes out with a sharp twig and then leading it into the grasp of a giant flytrap. Entertained with his display and thanking him for feeding Grumhilda for her, she agreed to share what she knew of the destructive aspect of black magic which she called voodoo. She explained to him whilst he artfully evaded a horde of ravenous skeleton rabbits that unlike most other religions of the Old Ways, voodoo was an inherently dangerous practice which required its prospects to destroy parts of themselves in exchange for extremely destructive magicks; to use one’s dark will to corrupt the natural and ubiquitous “juju” around them into destructive Void, Chaos, or as she called it “bad juju” energy required sufficient corruption of the mage’s body in return.
She instructed him in the ways of blood magic, lending him an ancient ceremonial dagger once used by Zoshan necromancers for similar rites. By spilling blood, Benthamic could become a conduit of chaotic void energy and more easily bend the quintessence around him, though due to the practice’s cumbersome requirements it wouldn’t be of much use in combat; thus, Baba Yaga showed him how to cast from his own internal quintessence, or effectively bend and deplete his own soul to create black magic. Such a dangerous practice is the end of many an amateur mage – she explained that the vampires whom he had slain were once a coven of minor occultists attempting to tap into the Void and destroyed themselves in the process, turning their bodies into ravenous creatures of pure black magic. Intelligent and patient mages could preserve their physical hosts by enchanting protective totems, making deals with spirits, or sapping the life force of others, but she insisted that virtually every black mage will eventually be consumed by Moros and twisted into a vampire. As a test of his understanding of the Body, she tasked him with fashioning a staff for himself from the bark of the Hanging Tree, under which the Black Orchids grew, and using it to help him destroy a den of werewolves just outside town. He used the Ars Goetia to enchant his staff with magick fire, sending the beasts into a painful frenzy before using black magic to subdue them, conjuring up powerful illusions to dominate their minds and bow before him in subservience. He commanded two of them to flee the city and never return, then harvested the blood of the remaining beast before sending it away so as to restore his own partially depleted essence. With nothing left to teach him, Baba Yaga sent Ben back to Ertdor, though not before asking him to give Izahdera a kiss for her.
===An Ambitious Crossover===
Low on supplies, Ben departed from Kalassa to Dreiton in the east with his camellama. Upon returning to del Toro’s mansion out of curiosity, he discovered that the residence had been commandeered by members of the Fourth Vertice to serve as a base of operations for Barsinian separatist activities in the Grotto. He was more or less welcomed there as a friend to the movement to whom he was sympathetic. Under the advice of an amateur bokor from their ranks, Ben traveled northwest to the town of Barsina in search of a cursed artifact purportedly once wielded by a tyrannical sorcerer who ruled the Andaluz region in antiquity.
The mage took a liking to Barsina, greatly resembling his native Sivella on account of its Audaxian founders not long prior. However, the once-vibrant city was entering a chaotic era due to the increasing pressure of the international colonial interest based in nearby Dreiton, who sought to use the city as a base camp for massive excavation projects in the desolate Antenora region. Following a primitive dirt road, Ben came upon a recently exhumed temple in the boundless desert and discovered a hidden chamber which housed some type of map to a lost treasure, written in scrambled shibboleth which could only be decoded by correctly reading the accompanying star chart.
Clad in his fez and robes, the mage consulted a Kokushi contact in the Kazimiri capital, Akhtamar, in search of a powerful enough astral diviner to solve the star chart’s riddle. However, all bribed diviners refused to touch the chart, claiming it was cursed with black loa; he was finally directed to the dark tower of Almagest, the home of an exiled breakaway coven from the sultan’s elite prophetic cult of the Starcallers. The coven’s leader, Kastor of the Anemoi, refused to read the star chart for him, but gave him the means to decode it himself through the use of a hostile version of the astral projection technique used by the Starcallers. Under the archdreamer’s instruction and with an extensive ritual, Ben tethered his conscious soul to the underworld to view the stars in their “dark” or Void aspect opposite to their natural state of order, then divined the location of the hidden artifact with the guidance of the star chart. He was forcefully excised from the dream plane by a projection of one of the Starcallers just after discerning the final dark star and wandering too far away from his body. The young sorcerer thanked Kastor for his instruction; his tutor left him with a warning that enacting the ritual unprepared could result in his soul being permanently separated from his body, dooming him to an existence of roaming the underworld as a formless shade for all eternity.
The dark star chart led Benthamic to an ancient crypt known as the Final Sepulcher, just across the Ptolemaic Straits from the outlaw and refugee haven of Jinora. As proof of his competency as a black mage, the tomb only opened upon his presenting of three drops of blood – one for each of the Dark Triad. Within, he was confronted by an alchemist named Ethyl, a necromancer hunter who had picked up his trail in Dreiton and tracked him all the way to the Sepulcher. The harrowing battle that ensued was essentially a tie as it amounted to a fierce duel between light and dark – opposites which canceled each other out. With the coveted artifact and its guardian destroyed, the two parted ways on ambiguously friendly terms with it unclear whether they would meet as allies or adversaries upon their next confrontation.
===Diplomatic Visit to Khotan===
Ben returned to an enraged Izahdera, driven to fury by his agent’s exceptionally long detour as well as reports that he had jeopardized the scheme to take over the sultan’s inner circle by entering the dream plane before he was ready to face other spirits. Though the master sorcerer commended Ben for his growing mastery of chaos magicks, he elected to punish his carelessness by testing him with a dangerous mission to the mysterious nation of Khotan. Deep within the imperial core in the city of Kalzoku, capital of the Mujimare Shogunate, a potential ally in the form of the Black Hand faction awaited a representative from the Kokushi to determine if they were a worthy international ally. Izahdera sent Ben to find a way past the imperial blockade and deal with the Black Hand alone, knowing that the shadowy organization were infamous for their violence and zealotry.
Though Khotan had long permitted foreigners in their international trading hub of Hamamitsu, imperial law dictated that no foreigner would be able to proceed past the city’s northern gate and enter the empire proper under any circumstances. Thus, he traveled to the “smuggler’s haven” of Anselm in the Yago Dominion, once the seat of a powerful stratocracy and now the center of all black market activity in Kilran. His search for a forged Ijin Traveler pass and a full suit of samurai armor brought him to the resident mystic of the Liar’s Drop corridor - a young witch named Sybil Hamm. She claimed that her powers of illusion could grant him entry to Kalzoku in exchange for a pile of gold and a great secret upfront. To prove her competency, Sybil reached into Ben’s mind to extract his thoughts, though his partial connection to the Void resulted in the clairvoyancy ritual evoking dozens of dormant daemons; her ability to aid in their banishing by “taming” the restless spirits and shepherding them back to the Void was evidence enough of her effectiveness for Ben. When he asked her if she still needed a secret from him, she simply stated that she had already learned everything about him that she needed to.
With the necessary ritual materials combined with a lengthy prayer to her patron Titania, Sybil would only be able to use her fae magicks to disguise her and Ben’s identities to fool the gate guards, leaving them in need of a ship and some legitimate cargo to pass the blockade as merchants. Through simple illusions and a few discrete fireballs, the two mages were able to secure a haul of grain from the nearby town of Makrovia and used most of Ben’s remaining funds to purchase a humble schooner for transport. Their goods allowed them to pass the blockade at Kuwaktana without incident, permitting them to dock at Hamamitsu freely for the next stage of their plan. Sybil was able to grant them perfect illusory disguises after the two incapacitated a pair of off-duty Heiren riders – members of the shogun’s elite cavalry. With the appearances two noble warriors, the mages slipped through the gates and quickly rode northwest, taking them to the treacherous city of Kalzoku just within the imperial core.
Arriving in Mujimare’s capital, the two quickly grasped the effects of the Black Hand’s presence there, with dozens of razed buildings bearing the insignia of the Hand and hardly anyone braving the streets even in broad daylight. They deduced, through witness questioning and official reports, the Hand’s base of operations to be the ruins of Castle Ronka a few miles to the west. Once the home of the infamous Prince Enlai the Conqueror, it was now used as a staging ground for the master necromancer Dr. Laogai and his invisible army of black mages across the entire empire. Laogai welcomed the two as emissaries of the Kokushi and treated them to a truly exorbitant feast before giving them the details of their mission the following morning.
The Dr. explained that the Black Hand were an older but similar order to the Kokushi, with the crucial difference of being sorcerers first and rebels second. He had spent decades as the Hand’s supreme leader, studying the dark arts in preparation for a climactic battle with the Immortal Emperor. The two organization’s goals thus aligned with the toppling of the monarchy in the Golden City, which would theoretically dismantle the entire empire due to its reliance on its theocratic sovereign. Ben and Sybil’s task would be to destroy the Mujimare province’s Shogun Ai Ming and implicate a fictional terrorist organization from the Olnek state in Kilran, weakening the Emperor’s legitimacy and allowing the Black Hand to emerge as the protectors against a growing foreign threat.
With the aid of two Black Hand agents - the brothers No Wei and No Hao - the team were able to assassinate the shogun during a public address regarding the growing black mage threat, with Sybil using illusory magicks to make the perpetrator appear to wear the distinctive armor of a Kilranian hussar. Chaos and confusion immediately gripped the entire Mujimare province as lower feudal lords squabbled to establish military and political dominance across the vast steppe. Dr. Laogai initiated a series of systematic horseback raids with forces loyal to the Black Hand traveling from vassal to vassal looting every village and castle they could find, and it quickly became clear to Ben that these savage attacks were not meant to weaken the landlords, rather terrorize the peasantry. At Sybil’s moral insistence, Ben demanded answers from Laogai, who insisted that his actions were no different from that of the Kokushi. One month later as famine fell upon the shogunate, the Dr. finally revealed himself to the people of Mujimare and declared himself their new military governor under the promise that he would put an end to the devastating raids and redistribute the grain hoarded by the landlords. He was fiercely rejected by a commanding majority of the populace who remained undying loyal to the Emperor, causing Laogai to order the Hand to carry out pogroms of any disloyal peasants.
Admitting that Sybil was correct, Ben and the witch infiltrated the renovated shogun’s palace intending to make Laogai pay for his crimes. The Dr. declared them hypocrites and idealists who did not realize the necessity of creating a strong vanguard so as to defend the Revolution from the Emperor, and insisted that his attacks had only targeted the disloyal, with petty landlords destroying their own crop fields to prevent the Hand from seizing them. Ben proclaimed the revolution dead, now believing that Laogai had failed to properly rally the masses who were still overwhelmingly loyal to the empire, and had destroyed his own legitimacy by targeting the innocent – a frightening parallel to Ben’s own failures in Daguo. In the ensuing battle, in spite of their formidable combined power Ben and Sybil were no match for the transcendent Dr. Laogai, whose legendary command of black magick distinguished him as one of the most gifted sorcerers of his era. The master necromancer very nearly succeeded in destroying Ben by forcefully excising his soul from his body - only saved by Sybil using her clairvoyance on him again to rouse his spirit and temporarily stun Laogai with the resulting Void convergence.
Hours after the two mages barely escaped the ruined compound, the order to rouse all of the Emperor’s available forces to retake Murijame came in from the Golden City, leaving the northern gate of Hamamitsu lightly guarded enough for the pair to slip through and reach the harbor where they were forced to hire a ferry due to the boat they’d arrived on apparently being impounded for dereliction. Sybil parted ways with Ben at Anselm, regretting her involvement in creating the crisis up north and refusing to associate with the Kokushi. The lone black mage returned to Zalibar empty-handed and was promptly excommunicated from the order by Izahdera due to his sabotage of a desperately needed ally, as well as confirmation that the Templars had become aware of the Kokushi plot due to Ben’s discovery by a Kazimiri seer in the dream plane months prior.
Disillusioned to revolution and scorning the destructive dark arts, Ben exiled himself to Dreiton to start anew, smashing the mask of Therion and leaving the Ars Goetia on Sybil’s doorstep in Anselm.
== III - Outlander==
===Fall of Ramona===
Mr. BV Holliday as he then called himself quickly threw himself into the urban life of Dreiton. Seeking to put the turbulent past few years of his life behind him and “go legit,” he took up semi-permanent residence in the ruined del Toro estate, now empty again due to the unfortunate destruction of the anarchists there. He used his financial experience to secure himself a clerk gig at the bustling harbor, a job he managed to enjoy due to the influx of interesting people from around the world, in spite of his reluctance to willingly accomplice himself to capital. The pay was good and stable, and with the Aquiles he accumulated in his three months there he figured he could open up his own tailor somewhere downtown. He was content to start over in the new center of the world.
However, as he feared would happen, the mess he’d helped create in the west finally caught up to him. Sybil Hamm herself appeared at his doorstep, Ars Goetia in hand, explaining that the Kokushi situation had spiraled out of control. Izahdera’s plan to take over the Kazimir Empire by corrupting the visions of their Seers had succeeded, and with the Sultan as his puppet, he spontaneously declared war on the Yago clique – the closest Kilranian state. With his motives a mystery to everyone and the entire west quickly descending into chaos, the unthinkable happened: The Templars, meaning Sir Josef Furnace, had proposed an olive branch with Holliday as part of a gambit to muster as much support as he possibly could in order to destroy their mutual foe. Though reluctant to leave his prospect of a simple life behind, Ben agreed to leave with Sybil, resolving that it was his responsibility to help bring down his former master any way he possibly could.
One week later, Ben and Sybil landed in Ramona, the prosperous capital of the Yago state which was often called the “gateway to Corona” due to its reputation as the long-standing trade hub of that entire emerald sea. There, Furnace’s coalition forces were gathering to prepare for the impending Kazimiri invasion; among them was Josef himself, Ben, Sybil, a Templar priest named Beryl Aster, as well as four “outlanders,” which was the informal name for any irregular civilian fighters on temporary employment for the Order. Their names were Ulysses, Ned, Amare, and Sam, and they had garnered an impressive reputation in the prior several weeks as travelers and adventurers from distant lands who had come to help face the growing Kokushi threat. Their victory over a horse-mounted squad of raiders attempting to take the Templar fortress of Krak had distinguished them as being among the great heroes of the crisis, naturally gaining a legendary reputation among the locals. Josef explained that the six of them were the best fighters he could muster for the mission – apparently making Sybil and Ben at least temporary outlanders as well.
Furnace and Aster laid out their plans: With Alamut already secured due to the Kokushi’s hegemony over the region, “Sultan Izahdera” had set his sights upon the nearby Yago clique. His random declaration of war prompted the other Kilranian states, normally in contempt with one another, to invoke an ancient accord of a military alliance forming amongst all the khanates of Kilran to destroy a shared threat to the continent, with Olnek more or less taking a leadership role. As the capital and economic center of Yago, Ramona was in the most immediate danger for an imperial assault, necessitating the presence of Furnace and his ragtag coalition there. One additional factor was at play: An extremely vital researcher affiliated with the Templars named Giuseppe Winslow had been abducted by the Kokushi under Izahdera’s orders for some sinister purpose, and his rescue was key lest the worst come to fruition.
The company, supported by a small band of Templar regulars, waited in the city for two days until the Kazimiri assault began. The invasion force consisted of a naval landing in the gulf of Corona accompanied by a division of elite Kiyametin warriors and Kokushi riders arriving through the Emperor’s Pass. Collaborating with the city’s defenders, Furnace and his allies held strong against the incursion, allowing no Imperials to penetrate the mighty walls of Ramona in spite of their advanced siege weaponry. The tide began to turn for the worse, however, once Izadera himself arrived on the battlefield accompanied by a dozen of his most promising acolytes. As the only companion versed in black magic, the responsibility fell upon Ben to hold off his former master, though due to his lack of practice in the previous months and his incomplete training he proved to be no match for the master sorcerer. Not even the full force of the outlanders could stand against him, necessitating a retreat to the Bastion in the east. The city of Ramona had fallen to Izahdera and his puppet empire.
In light of this crushing defeat, Ben decided his only chance of defeating Izahdera lied in completing his studies and achieving a mastery of black magick sufficient enough to at least contend with the master necromancer. The companions temporarily parted ways in preparation for the final battle; Furnace and the outlanders stayed in Kilran to counter further Kokushi incursions, Sybil headed for Akhtamar to search for ways to repel Izahdera’s control over the seers, Beryl investigated the movements of the captive Winslow, and Ben returned to Kalassa in search of further guidance from Baba Yaga.
===The Final Lesson===
Upon Ben’s fated return to Kalassa, he found no sign of Baba Yaga nor her dilapidated hut where last he found it in the depths of the Black Marsh, as if her humble shack had sprouted legs and ventured off in search of some other place to roost. However, near her former encampment he did find a small totem engraved in Baba’s style suggesting that he travel east to the city of Ashevale, where his spirit would be tested. Regretting another long voyage, he quickly secured the quickest ferry to Ashevale that he could find – which happened to be a rat-infested sloop transporting a ton of dead fish.
After a lengthy and unpleasant trek across the northern Aetherial, the young mage finally arrived on the Isle of Bidwell, the second-largest land mass of the Occan continent and an important center of commerce for the powerful Kingdom of Medriaas. Ashevale, the island province’s capital, was quite an ancient city believed by some to have been the original seat of the kingdom before Providence was built. Despite its age, the rustic city remained one of the most heavily tracked ports in the southeast, and an especially wealthy metropolitan political entity in its own right due to its importance to the crown as the site of the largest shipyards in the Occan realm, making it the unofficial base of operations for the legendary Southern Armada.
By Ben’s arrival, the proud city of Ashevale was as wealthy as it had ever been, but also on the cusp of a total political crisis due to incredible internal divisions. Bidwell had long sought independence from the crown due to its historic status as its own kingdom until its relatively recent annexation, and as world tension heightened, Providence tightened its grip over the island fearing that a revolt could put its colonial empire in jeopardy. Inspired by the Valencian syndicalists in the north, anarchism had taken root in Ashevale and its popularity among the urban masses seemed to grow by the week in response to deepening inequality between the workers and the aristocracy, coupled with increased Medriaan military presence on the island. Holliday’s initial instinct upon taking in the pre-revolutionary scene was to help fan the flames of the unrest and invite chaos to usher in peace, as had been his conviction for so long. However, upon fully digesting the extent of the bitter divisions between the separatists and loyalists in the city as well as the utter desperation of the growing industrial working class, he decided to dig in and look for the heart of the forthcoming revolution amid the masses before making his move.
Through his joining of the Republican Congress’ international corps, Ben heard rumors of powerful occultists operating within the separatist movement, with some welcoming their aid in the crisis and many fearing their presence would de-legitimize the entire revolution. By following a series of clues throughout the city apparently left for him, the mage eventually tracked these mysterious occultists down to an abandoned clocktower in the ash-choked Blau district.
Ben was familiar with the golden symbol lining their secret headquarters – the Dark Triad, with each point of the flipped equilateral triangle representing one of the great mortal sorcerers: Hades the Unseen, Zagreus the Black, and Hastur the Vindicator. The faint black star in its center, however, was unique to the organization whose base he had just discovered: the Children of Hades, a shadowy international cabal of black mages devoted to the “true” teachings of Aquila’s eponymous first sorcerer. He was welcomed to the umbral sanctuary by a bokor witch of considerable power named Sepp Dragomir. Though the cabal operated in small isolated cells across all Aquila and thus had no real hierarchies, Dragomir was considered the most enlightened of her brothers and sisters on the isle of Bidwell and thus the closest they had to a leader.
Sister Sepp recounted the origins of her order’s founding. Nearly 300,000 years ago in the latter epoch of the Vulturian era, the mortal now known only as Hades tricked the celestials into allowing him to gaze upon the secrets of the Heart of Coda, the source of their legendary power. He believed that, rather than serve the whims of the old gods, the mortals of Emanation deserved to take destiny into their own hands, and thus shared the secrets of the Heart – the Old Ways – with Aquila. Chief among these secrets was the art of Khaos, now known in Aquila as black magic; however, Hades believed Khaos was neither the Void nor inherently evil, but simply the purest expression of the concepts of change and energy: Not death, but the essence of Life, countered by the inherently repressive order of Light. He was eventually destroyed by the gods and condemned to an eternity of formless torment in the Void, but his teachings lived on through the Zivasenka or “living shadow,” a collection of his philosophical teachings collected by his surviving dark disciples.
Hades’ teachings faded into obscurity until Zagreus the Black, the Necromancer in the North, discovered the Zivasenka in 20,000 BD and built upon the first sorcerer’s doctrine, using the secrets of Khaos to invent the modern “dark arts” of necromancy and thaumaturgy and then using his new powers to declare himself King of Mendea in defiance of the Khagan. Though Zagreus was eventually defeated and his army of the dead scattered, many of his devout cultists survived and carefully spread their teachings across Aquila, planting the seeds of what would become the umbrella organization known as the Followers of the Old Ways. Finally, in 3857 the Nightmare Legion General Hastur leads a massive military revolt against the Empire and colonizes the southern isle of Kalga Bland, the ancient home of the sinister Inquisitorius. The rebels discovered the Zivasenka and hundreds of other lost tomes of power hidden there and sought to revive the lost art of Khaos magick and use its incredible power to destroy the crumbling Empire. Hastur the Vindicator, the first Child of Hades, was born.
Hastur and his acolytes eventually faded from memory as well after the master sorcerer led all of his devotees on a mass exodus to the Rift following a mysterious ritual which left the island one of Aquila’s many “wounds” in quintessence. Because of the legacy he left as the last great magus of the Dark Triad, and despite not formally founding the faction, the Vindicator is often recognized as the first Child of Hades. His tenets which built upon the philosophies of Hades and Zagreus before him were thus:
1. Black magic is a legitimate and vital tool to be respected and studied, not feared.
2. The oppression of the Old Ways by the world’s governments, as well as their numerous other crimes, is justification enough for their unconditional dismantling and replacement.
3. It is the responsibility of those naturally gifted with magicks to use their power to lead the masses in the inevitable charge against existing hierarchies.
The Children of Hades, following these tenets as law, have operated from the shadows ever since Hastur’s exodus. Sepp was convinced that it was Ben’s destiny to join the cabal, which he nearly did before she revealed that Dr. Laogai and Izahdera were themselves adherents of the cult. Ben believed the Childrens’ faith in them was mistaken, maintaining that they were simply tyrants who co-oped the ideology of Hastur for their own gain; Laogai wished to profit off the carnage the Black Hand reaped in Khotan and Izahdera dreamt of becoming Sultan of Kazimir. Sepp disagreed, believing their intentions were pure, and challenged Ben to seek enlightenment in the Western Wastes so he could see the truth. There, he would finally master the last tenet, the Soul, and prove himself a true black mage should he survive. Leaving Sepp and her cult to deal with Ashevale themselves, Ben quickly departed for the Deep Frontier.
Located a formidable distance from the coast of Ertdor, the Western Wastes was well named. Most contemporary maps didn’t bother depicting it at all, and those that did rarely drew more than a tiny fraction of its easternmost coast. Because of its unforgiving arctic desert conditions, there were no recorded settlements on the tundra continent and few if any historical examples of attempts at exploration. Reaching the boundaries of the Alshain in high Ashfalle, Ben’s arrival on the Wastes was impeded by a field of sea glaciers which consumed his sloop the moment he made landfall. With only a day’s rations and a harsh six-hour daylight cycle, the mage forged on, determined above all else to seize the power he coveted so.
Ben scoured the infinite desiccation of what the Zoshans called Aseem Niraasha for hours, and as night fell and the already bitter chill descended into a cruel freeze, he found not the slightest indication of life or even slight variance in geography. Fighting off frostbite and sleep deprivation from the insomnia which fell upon him over the voyage, doubt infected Holliday’s mind, fearing that he was not strong enough to survive the tundra or that Sepp had deliberately sent him to his death due to his defiance of Izahdera. His stride became more labored with every step as if he was pushing against a great force, and what few rations he had left dissolved into bitter ash in his mouth. First he cursed himself for his naivety, then the universe for its cruelty towards him even amid his attempts to fight for a cause other than his own ego. He swore vengeance as he collapsed on to the dry mud.
He awoke in a stupor, first assuming that he had died before an ethereal yet familiar voice shook him to his senses. In a sea of darkness, a cloaked man in a red-streaked bone mask approached him – a presence which he initially thought was a reflection of his past self until he recognized it as the original bearer of the mask, the sprit Therion. The spirit told him that he was not dead, rather teetering on the very edge of the abyss that was the Void; such was the curse, he mused, of all who risk tapping into the deep magicks of the universe for their own earthly goals. At Ben’s inquiry, Therion stated that whether he was “real” or not was a moot point, dismissing the existence of any objective material reality. Rather, it was his message which mattered: Whether he would stand bravely on the edge of the abyss or be consumed by it was in his own hands.
The presence led Ben into a plane he called “the Slip,” a parallel dimension which functioned as the tenuous and volatile boundary between the Void and Emanation. It was this strand of “reality” where Khaos and dark energy reigned supreme over light and quintessence, providing the building blocks from which life itself was made possible on Aquila. This dangerous realm of energy and shadow, a paradoxical corner of existence incomprehensible to the mortal mind, was the true Soul of the black mage, an all-powerful and all-apathetic entity unto itself, indifferent to the struggles of existence but able to grant those who respected it the ability to warp the quintessence of the overworld. Therion led Ben through this dark dimension of umbral fire where the broken things of Emanation resided, where luminous fires died and were then resurrected, and where otherworldly bundles of flesh and thought from unknowable worlds beyond Time enjoyed the bliss of the empty space between life and death. They came upon the gateway to the abyss itself, that great confluence of everything and nothing, which enraptured Ben with its horrifying beauty.
He professed to the Void that he sought its favor so he could have the power to save the world. It regarded him favorably and showed him a momentary vision of a potential future: Him wielding all the power in Emanation and having vanquished all of the world’s evil, sitting on a throne atop a mountain of skulls, haunted by the spirits of Sybil, Josef, and the Outlanders. Ben rejected this vision, believing that he was capable of harnessing the Void to undo Aquila’s injustices without being consumed by his own power. With this conviction, he felt part of his mortal spirit be excised from his body through his left eye, now permanently blinded to act as his conduit to the abyss. Having taken a part of the Void into himself, his bent spirit was thereafter tethered to the underworld, forever linked through his conviction to take the fate of the world into his capable hands. At the uncertain cost of sacrificing part of his mortality and entering a state of partial spiritual death, he had finally conquered the Soul. He found himself back where he collapsed at Aseem Niraasha, but in the corresponding region of the Slip. Following a thread of quintessence, he guided himself to the nearest exit to Aquila – an obsidian portal atop Almagest. As he returned to the mortal plane, he heard Therion’s voice one final time, faintly whispering the name “Nastrond.”
===Light and Shadow===
Ben quickly rendezvoused with the rest of the coalition at Ramona in preparation for the final battle. In his absence, the Kilran Alliance had grown strength with more cliques lending their military aid in response to the Kokushi raids, with which the four Outlanders greatly assisted. Sybil reported that Akhtamar had entered a state of martial law as the decisions of the Seers grew more erratic. Beryl had the most alarming news, having discovered that under Izahdera’s captivity Giuseppe Winslow had been forced to build him a devastating new weapon of unimaginable destruct potential, powered by a mysterious new element the researcher had discovered. After a successful test of the weapon left an entire village a lifeless husk, it appeared to be operational, forcing the coalition to quickly make their move lest Izahdera’s sinister plans reveal themselves in the worst way.
The Alliance agreed to aid their mission, trusting Furnace’s assurance that destroying the Kokushi would end the chaotic war with Kazimir. One thousand Kilranian hussars gathered in Ramona and then marched east towards Alamut, at the border of which their advance was halted by a combined force of Kokushi guerrillas and elite Kazimiri pikemen. Under the cover of the ensuing historic Battle of the Emperor’s Pass, the company - Furnace, Sybil, Beryl, Holliday, Ulysses, Amare, Ned, and Sam – quickly made for the city of Zalibar, sneaking past the occupying Kiyametin guards and infiltrating the dark temple.
Confronting the entire strike team on his own as a testament to his power, Izahdera beseeched the Outlanders to cast off their attachments to the old world and all of its institutions of oppression, and help him bring about a fairer world without man’s petty nations where mortalkind was united in solidarity. Though Ben shared his convictions and momentarily considered switching sides again, his doubt was cast away when Izahdera revealed his plan to use Giuseppe’s new weapon to plunge the entire world into umbral fire, destroying all of its unfair hierarchies at once so that a better Aquila may emerge from the ashes guided by his wisdom. Before the dark master could enact his plan by activating the device, Giuseppe escaped and jammed the machine, causing it to violently flicker as if likely to detonate at any moment.
The deciding battle of light and shadow ensued in the heart of the temple, with the company attempting to destroy the machine while Izahdera defended it with all of his ferocious strength. As the Battle of the Emperor’s Pass still raged in the east, all of the heroes’ strength was tested, pitting the battle-hardened Outlanders, the emboldened Templars, and the enlightened black mage against the dark master Izahdera. Though the sorcerer’s dreadful power was great, he eventually wavered, overwhelmed by the fellowship’s newfound might. In one last desperate assault, Izahdera attempted to rip the very souls out of his adversaries through Laogai’s masterful necromantic technique. Sybil thwarted him with her psionics, allowing Ben to use his new magicks to deflect the powerful spell back to its caster. Izahdera’s body collapsed to the ground, lifeless, though Ben sensed that his old master’s soul had escaped into the Slip to preserve his life essence. The crackling machine was now on the verge of meltdown, slowly corrupting the world around it and hissing with explosive potential. Josef leapt into the machine, destroying it and saving the city, but being absorbed into the Slip as a result of his sacrifice. Beryl cursed the other survivors, believing that the order’s consorting with evil was responsible for Furnance’s death and swearing that they would answer to the Templars for their crimes one day.
Giuseppe quickly emerged from hiding and addressed the company after Beryl stormed off. The researcher warned them that Izahdera had set in place a contingency plan in case his main scheme was stopped, instructing his cult to resurrect Heiroban’s spirit in Tempus to further weaken Kilran. The company parted ways, with the Outlanders heading east to thwart the second ritual whilst Ben and Sybil made for the city of Akhtamar in search of Izahdera’s lingering spirit. Before he departed, Giuseppe left the plans for the Slip weapon in Holliday’s trust, revealing that he had lived through Therion’s insurrection in Valencia and believed its leader would do the right thing and complete the revolution at any cost.
Akhtamar had descended into abject carnage following news that the Sultan had gone mad and murdered his entire cult of Seers. The Sublime Army of Light ceased to follow his orders, now supporting the crown-prince Astraeus IV as the legitimate emperor. Ben and Sybil steeled inside the besieged royal palace and confronted Sultan Daroga, possessed by Izahdera’s vengeful spirit after months of weakening the emperor’s resolve through astral projection. Sybil held her ground against the possessed sultan while Ben entered the astral plane, confronting the necromancer’s pure essence. Unaware of his former apprentice’s new mastery of the Soul, Izahdera’s spirit was finally defeated, shattered into millions of pieces and doomed to roam Urghast for eternity as recompense to the hungering Void. The sultan’s host rapidly decayed and turned to ash in the middle of the royal chambers; though they were spotted by Astraeus’ cavalry on their way out, the two battered mages managed to slip into the panicked crowd and make for safety in Almagest.
After resting in the mountain fortress for two days, word reached the two that the united Kilranian army had defeated the last of the Kokushi entrenched in the Emperor’s Path, formally ending the brief but bloody war with a supernaturally influenced Kazimir. Ben made plans to study Giuseppe’s discovery and catch up with the Outlanders in the east, and though he encouraged Sybil to join him, she regretted to say that she had unfinished business in Anselm that she needed to attend to now that the Kokushi crisis was over – though she promised they would meet again for the next adventure. They parted with a kiss, leaving Ertdor and the nightmare of Izahdera behind them – for the time being.
===Dark Destinies===
Benthamic traveled with all due haste to the isle of Tempus, a modest city which sat between the continents of Audax and Kilran. Despite its somewhat precarious geographical position, the island state had managed to remain independent for several centuries in post-Imperial Aquila, serving as a neutral center of maritime commerce frequented by merchants from Sivistys, Occa, Audax, and Kilran. Unbeknownst to many, the city also maintained a sinister reputation as the site of Prince Heiroban’s death after the Kilran War; he used the island as his base of operations and retreated there after being mortally wounded by his brother in Apollyon. To distance themselves from the now shunned god, the city’s government had Heiroban’s body covertly transported and entombed in the depths of the Crag in northeastern Kilran unbeknownst to the native Karishans. Through his own machinations or by consorting with other as yet unrevealed cults, Izahdera had discovered the dead god’s immortal spirit yet lingered in Tempus, incorporeal and unable to affect the physical world, but nonetheless alive.
By the time Ben arrived on the island, it appeared that Heiroban’s resurrection ritual had already taken place, destroying much of the city and halting all commercial activity in its vital harbor. However, the Outlanders had beaten him there, saving the city from destruction and setting out to Karisha to protect Heiroban’s body a few days prior. Ben’s investigation of the alleged site of the ritual confirmed the involvement of the Kokushi – as well as the elusive Children of Hades. He discovered through the notes of Arcifex, the apparent ritual-master, that the cultists had learned how to perform the immense feat of necromancy required to revive a celestial by following the teachings of those whom he called the “old masters,” a lost sect of transcendent black mages who left some of their knowledge in a fortress called Morzog, far off the eastern coast of Siluria almost to the point of crossing over to Thule.
The island of Morzog was a desolated wasteland filled with volcanic ash and lakes of lava, clearly some act of arcane witchery. He immediately posited that, somehow, the dimensional barrier between Aquila and the Slip had been lifted there, corrupting the remote island’s quintessence and rendering it lifeless. His suspicions were confirmed upon his entry into the obsidian fortress, where he found Sepp and a handful of other sons and daughters of Hades. She assured him that she respected the outcome of his and Izahdera’s fateful confrontation and confessed to aiding in Heiroban’s resurrection; the secrets of the ritual had indeed been found there on the isle of Morzog along with a plethora of other lost chthonic knowledge, all preserved in the libraries of these mysterious old masters. The forgotten necromancers were the true inventors of the devastating Slip device (having originally tested it on the very same island, resulting in its corruption), with Giuseppe discovering and replicating their work. Ben suggested that they destroy all traces of the horrible weapon, but Sepp convinced him to preserve at least one miniature device so he may use it on a new threat to Aquila – the revived Mad King, whose spirit had inadvertently been roused by the ritual as well and and was now wreaking havoc in western Sivistys. Sepp helped Ben summon the Outlanders to Morzog before she and her fellow occultists set out on their quest to track down these old masters, encouraging Ben to follow them to Nastrond should he survive the Mad King’s rampage.
The Outlanders arrived at Morzog within the day, whereupon they regaled Ben with the tale of how they had defeated Herobrine only to be faced with the much more sinister Mad King, who was now racing towards the city of Gensokyo to capture and subjugate its powerful army. He offered the solution of the Slip device, believing it was their best weapon against the celestial, but his comrades insisted the sinister implement only be used as an absolute last resort lest its destructive power put the lives of the countless innocents of Gensokyo in danger. Agreeing to first attempt conventional methods, Ben and his allies quickly made for the west to stop the Mad King.
The party arrived in Gensokyo some few hours before the Mad King’s arrival, using the influence of their friends in the city’s upper echelons to rouse an emergency defense against the advancing army of undead Nightmare Legionnaires. The ensuing battle shook the city to its very core, with the countless hordes of invaders tearing down its great walls and even capturing the royal palace. As the Outlanders finally confronted the Mad King, they proved to be sorely outmatched, unable to keep up with the khagan’s unrivaled dark magicks. To throw off Ben’s shielding of the party against his onslaught of black magick assaults, the Mad King invaded Amare’s mind to reveal that the Outlanders had killed Furnace in the Slip. As he failed to mention that Izahdera’s device had driven his old friend mad, Ben felt deeply betrayed by his comrades, whom he was taken to believe had murdered his brother in arms in cold blood after he sacrificed himself to save them all from certain destruction. Still, he warded off the Mad King with all his might, setting aside his grievance for after the battle; as the deadly confrontation neared its end, however, the evil khagan held Ulysses in his grip and was moments away from slaying him until, panicked, Ben activated the Slip device. In the course of a few agonizing moments, virtually all of Gensokyo and its people were destroyed, sparing only the Outlanders, the Mad King, and precious few citizens who had hidden underground. Thousands upon thousands of innocents were obliterated in the blink of an eye, with their blood on Ben’s dazed hands.
==IV - Titanomachy's End==
===Witches of the Wyrd===
4806
Overwhelmed with guilt and anguish, Ben fled Gensokyo and returned to the del Toro estate in Dreiton. There, he retreated into seclusion for many months, throwing himself into his studies of forgotten arcane lore to escape the trauma of the events of Gensokyo. By the middle of 4806, the once destitute Grotto District had entered something of a renaissance. In the wake of the driving out of the Fourth Vertice separatists, the wider city expressed interest in developing the district by introducing commerce and industry to its dark, winding corridors. Though he lacked the official deed, the city authorities recognized Holliday as the proprietor of the del Toro estate, allowing him to remain in the dilapidated mansion.
He leveraged his remaining capital from his opera house and harbor clerk gigs to renovate the old property, cleaning up the house’s decades of overgrown verdancy and sweeping away the several layers of dust until it fit in rather inconspicuously with the revitalized Grotto. He, too, assimilated relatively well into the emerging Dreitonian colonial middle class, gaining the reputation of a somewhat charming, if reclusive, eccentric, well-liked and respected for his altruism. Word eventually reached him of the Mad King’s defeat and the subsequent disappearance of the Outlanders, reawakening his crushing guilt regarding the Gensoyko atrocity. Seeking a way to redeem himself, he became obsessed with finding some hidden method through which to set at peace the souls that he had claimed, and perhaps even wrestle them back from the Slip.
His desperate inquiries into the deepest necromancy availed him little apart from various conflicting accounts of a legendary sorcerer known only as Shadowsong, whose mastery of the beyond earned him the title of perhaps the greatest black mage in Aquilan history – though the lack of references to his character in the wider Old Ways canon of the Dark Triad cast some doubt upon these claims. The one consistent great feat ascribed to the legendary man was that of the felling of the dreadwyrm Diocretius during the Titan War, a cataclysmic event which completely warped the landscape of all Aquila. Having suitably scoured del Toro’s libraries on arcane knowledge, Ben decided to venture deep into the Wyrd to seek the counsel of the infamous Witches of the Wyrd. A name long cursed by the people of Dreiton due to their haunting of the innocents since before the arrival of Ren, he had theretofore avoided crossing their paths, believing them to either be frauds, legends, or murderers – all undesirable options. However, increasing reports of occult activities across Dreiton and indeed greater Aphelion had finally piqued his interest, and so he set out into the deep forest in search of any knowledge he could find.
His trek brought him to the forgotten bog of Eumenides, a name occasionally used by Aphelian scholars in reference to a small river in the continental interior where the Mad King drowned heretics and dissenters, cursing the place for all time. There he was greeted by the witch Morrigan, mother of the Norns – the true name of the Witches of the Wyrd. She permitted him entry into the sacred bog out of his respect for divining its location – no small feat according to local soothsayers – but only shared her knowledge of the mysterious Shadowsong after exacting a heavy toll from Ben. He surrendered all memory of his sister Bianca to the witch, and in turn she revealed the secret of the great warlock Shadowsong.
The true identity of the fabled wizard was a woman named Sotmr, who brought her knowledge from the far-off land of Thule and shared it with a precious chosen few. She was a dylwythen (literally “funeral master”) by trade, a highly revered occupation in Altimuunn society whose duty was to safely ferry the souls of the recently departed to the Aether, and additionally evoke the spirits of the ancestral dead to both defend and advise their descendants and their country. Her unique perspective of black magick radically reshaped the religion of the Old Ways in the eyes of those she deemed worthy of apprenticeship, and by her eleventh decade she had amassed an order of transcendent necromancers she called the Cal’ziqqa’bryn’zoth (“foreign daughters and sons of the wrathful spurned”). Their insignia was the famous Eye of Altima, also purportedly used by the elder dylwythen to represent their peering into the Beyond. The unsolved mystery of to what end she had brought the teachings of Thule to the Below spawned great tales portending to true nature, with many circles viewing her as the female or left-handed aspect of Hades the Unseen. She and her cult were brought to the brink of destruction by vindictive inquisitors sent by Makrozoia, and as her last and greatest act she prevented the dragon Diocretius from utterly annihilating Aquila in his fiery death by excising his wrathful spirit to the dead kingdom of Urghast.
Morrigan explained that she and her sisters were all that survived of the Cal and sought to honor Sotmr’s sacrifice by preserving the legacy of the extinct Aquilan dylwythen. At Ben’s inquiry, she confessed their her cult occasionally inflicted dark magicks upon the people of Aphelion, but only in defense of their ancestral home. She had once been an ally of the fabled Reunion Coven, a reclusive order of Aquila’s greatest wizards, but they cast her and her sisters out due to their employment of black magick. Though she insisted his efforts were in vain, Morrigan revealed the location of Reunion to Ben, who took an interest in mending the rift between the two cults so that they may fight as an oppressed whole. Before the mage’s departure, the witch taught him how to intern malevolent spirits within physical objects to bolster and defend his own vulnerable soul, acting as a sort of conduit through which to strengthen his connection to the void. She parted with a crude poppet of the long-deceased General Ren as a gift, a small trophy from her collection of perhaps hundreds of haunted dolls.
===Reunion===
Located deep within the Aetherial somewhere between the continents of Voshe and Aphelion, the mythic isle of Reunion has long been the center of many tales within the canon of the Old Ways. According to many of the accounts Ben had read from del Toro’s library, the island was the seat of Hythmitae, one of the first great kingdoms of man which predated Aetomemnon’s unification and ascension to god-king. The Hythmitine were early masters of the arcane, a society of shamans and warrior-scholars who worshiped the Eagle and based their primitive systems of finance and law upon their interpretations of his primal will. Their great celestial temples were reduced to rubble by Memnian King, whose followers believed him to be the mortal heir to the Eagle. A sect of their greatest shamans escaped the conquered city of Thel Olihim and to the tranquil paradise of what is now Reunion, led by the archmage Stormfather.
The Father’s new coven on the lost isle acted as a haven for mages across Aquila for millennia, sheltering thousands of exiles from Makrozoia’s empire until recent centuries when internal hostilities forced the masters to conceal their paradise from all except those who already knew where it was. Ben’s arrival thus came as some surprise to the haven’s custodians, whose master Prospero hesitantly permitted him entry after a trial of aptitude. The archmage provided a differing account of the mage Shadowsong, alleging that she had come to Reunion from a land alien to Aquila and introduced the Coven to true black magick for the first time in their history. During the fateful Titanomachy, by which time she had become the most formidable of her peers, she led Reunion in a final charge against the dreadwyrm Diocretius, casting the fallen titan out of the sky by leading a ritual to evoke the spirits of all the black mages before her – the greatest feat of necromancy in history. Her spell came at a tremendous cost, however, creating a cataclysmic wound in Aquila’s quintessence which wreaked permanent havoc upon the entire world in the dragon’s death. All this being contrary to Morrigan’s account that Shadowsong saved Aquila rather than destroyed it led Ben to suspect that the truth of the great mage’s actions had yet to be uncovered.
Prospero, however, insisted that the Norns were deceiving Ben and they indeed sought to subjugate Aphelion by repeating Sotmr’s ritual to resurrect and bind Diocretius to their will, elevating themselves beyond all nations. Ben inquired as to why the Reunion coven hadn’t intervened in this existential threat if these grim accusations were indeed true. The archmage defended his cult’s isolationist policies, believing the peoples of the island were beyond the quarrels of the outside world. Cursing the coven’s indifference to the troubles of the outside world, Ben left Reunion, vowing to Prospero he would return to sort out the island.
===Secrets from the North===
Seeking the truth regarding the desynchronization, Ben set out on a journey to the mysterious country of Altima, hoping to discover the origins of Sotmr’s powerful necromancy both to bolster his own knowledge and ready himself to thwart the Norns’ plan to revive the dreadwyrm in the event that Prospero’s accusations were true. On his sojourn northward, he made a stop at the town of Anselm seeking to enlist Sybil’s help, a proposition to which she agreed on account of her mounting gambling debts. The two mages then pressed on past the shadow of Mount Aetomemnon and through the badlands of Mendea on caracal-back, eventually arriving at the gates of Agesilaus, the country’s solemn major city and one of the northernmost settlements in Aquila proper. Internal strife owing to increasing tensions between the warlords had prompted the basket-case Mendean government to officially lock down their capital, barring Ben and Sybil’s entry. They were finally permitted to enter the city after they collected the bounty of an infamous local warrior named Guunfish, leader of the Belian Braves. After navigating their way through the treacherous city as unwelcome foreigner-types, they were able to secure passage to the far north by hiring the boat of a Hinterlander named Baldur, who frequented the dark waters of Surlada on fishing trips.
Baldur confirmed that there yet existed some sparse peoples north of Aquila proper aside from the Khotani, though he warned the mages that the land was harsh and its ancient natives even harsher. Aquilan cartographers had long been aware of the far northern continent of Thule, though similar to the Western Wastes of Outer Zetia, full expeditions to chart the strange land were basically unheard-of largely owing to the ravenous ice sheets which plagued the dark waters of Surlada. The Hinterlander dropped the travelers off on the frozen isle of Non La, the southernmost known reach of the Thulemaic landmass. At their guide’s suggestion, the two sought out and tamed a pair of great winter foxes, a mount occasionally employed by traveling Hinterlanders due to their hardiness and relatively friendly disposition towards sojourners from the south. They traveled through lower Thule’s harsh tundras for several hours, following the Golban River northeast until they finally came upon the hamlet of Dol Gulla marked by the distinctive blue banners of Olde Thule. The native spearmen immediately fell upon them, sedating them with neurotoxic arrows and taking them into custody.
The two mages awoke within the black gates of the city of Eskalon, the seat of Altima. They had been brought before the High Justicier Tomer, who accused them of illegally entering their realm and stealing two sacred winter foxes. Ben and Sybil explained that they had come to Altima in search of wisdom, seeking to learn the ancient magicks of the dylwythen so they may protect their homes. Tomer initially refused, stating that the last foreigner with whom they’d shared their magicks was a woman who stole the secrets of the funeral masters and heretically used their necromancy for her own gain, necessitating their banishment to the south (an account which only created more confusion regarding Sotmr’s origins). Sybil proposed that they be given a test to prove their worthiness, which Tomer begrudgingly accepted.
They were brought to the Chamber of Time, within which was a massive labyrinth cloaked in absolute darkness. Entering on opposite sides of the maze, they were instructed to make their way to the middle, relying only upon their wits and memory to guide them to their destination lest they be lost forever to the shadows. Just before he began to panic, a mysterious green floating eye – no doubt the Eye of Altima – appeared to Ben, guiding him through the labyrinth with its dull purple glow. Both arriving at the center, they discovered a massive spiral staircase leading deep underground, which similarly bathed them in pitch black the further down they descended. Ben found himself alone again, coming upon another massive chamber. The room had no floor save for a fragile obsidian platform leading from one side of the chamber to the other, below which was what appeared to be an endless spiral into the clutches of the hungry Void itself. Steeling himself, he slowly began to span the platform, which seemed to materialize piece by piece as he stepped. The obsidian nearly shattered, forcing him to stop and notice two visions materialize before him: One of himself wielding all the power in the world and the other of Sybil; both the figures then fell dead, forcing Ben to choose which one to revive. He nearly chose himself, but finally settled upon Sybil, believing it was nobler to save the woman he loved than his own vain image. The obsidian platform stabilized again, allowing Ben to traverse the expanse and reach the end of the Chamber where he met Sybil and Tomer. Both had somewhat facetiously refused to share what they had experienced within.
The Justicier agreed to instruct them in the ways of Thulemaic necromancy, satisfied that they had demonstrated the nobility of their spirits and thus could be trusted to wield the deep magicks. Tomer showed the mages how to enter a state which he called Enochian or “the Scry,” which powerful necromancers used to easily peer into the Slip in a sort of oneness with the physical world, as if both dimensions were somehow “overlayed” atop one another instead of existing on entirely separate planes. With Enochian, one could strengthen their existing connection to the Void and achieve a relative harmony with the dead, able to evoke the energies of spirits past, present, and perhaps even future for the greatest of sorcerers. Due to the extremely strenuous nature of the spell, the two students were shown how to fashion their own Eyes of Altima (“Xenoglots” in Thulemaic) so as to shield themselves from spiritual decay due to the Void’s corrosive effect. Tomer bid them farewell, asking for their word that they would keep their new knowledge a secret, and bring Sotmr to justice for her ancient crimes.
===The End of Shadowsong===
The two mages departed amicably from Thule with a new spiritual understanding; Ben's connection to the Void had further strengthened, learning the dark art of Enochian to more readily manipulate the Slip, whilst Sybil's mysticks and psionicks were increased in scope. They rendezvoused on Non La with Baldur, who ferried them back to Agesilaus for a fee. During their return voyage to Aquila proper, the schooner was attacked by a junk ship bearing the insignia of the Black Hand, Dr. Laogai's sinister terrorist faction. Holliday and his comrades defeated the ninja raiders after a harrowing battle and discovered a hand-written letter from Laogai on one of their persons, ordering the Hand to find Benthamic and deliver him to Kalzoku alive.
Pushing the looming threat of the Doctor to the side for the time being, Ben and Sybil made the week-long trek back to Aphelion, landing in Windforth and proceeding to the site of Diocretius' death in central Andaluz by caracal. They arrived at the great crater in the midst of the Norns' ritual, taking place within the remains of the dreadwyrm's ancient skull. Morrigan and her coven welcomed them as guests to the rite, asking them to join her in invoking Diocretius' dormant spirit. Pressed by Ben, the witch-master explained that she sought to bind the dead titan's soul to her will, granting her and her sisters the power required to bring Aphelion to heel for its injustices against the followers of the Old Ways. She dreamed of turning the entire continent into a haven of mages - a bastion against the oppressors of the old world. Holliday agreed with her plight but implored her to show restraint, believing that the dreadwyrm's essence would overpower her and bring ruin to all Aquila. The witch declared him a coward and challenged him to single combat, forcing his hand by ordering her sisters to capture Sybil and slaughter her should he refuse.
Morrigan's command of the dark arts was wide and insidious compared to the more flashy black magicks of Ben's previous adversary, Izahdera. Their terrifying battle was more akin to a passionate dance than a traditional contest of arms: Two relative equals elegantly weaving in and out of the Slip, never breaking their opponent's gaze, every spell and cantrip absolutely deliberate lest the slightest misstep spell an agonizing doom. Lacking a weapon other than his own wit and bare hands, Ben's attacks were quick and utilitarian - blasts of ethereal magenta flame, whips from summoned tendrils of hard shadow, flurries of razor-sharp blades materialized from the faint echoes of the dead. Contrarily, Morrigan's feathered staff commanded the aether in the room to horrifying effect, assailing her foe with streams of corrupted and volatile phantom energy, affording him not the briefest moment of respite in her maelstrom of pure concentrated Khaos. She howled at him with the anguished cries of the dead, assaulting him with the relentless wrath of the Beyond.
The young mage held fast against the witch's death scream, desperately protecting his spirit from being ravaged at the hands of the invoked dead. As his defense began to waver in the onslaught, he channeled the power of the Eye of Altima to throw up an evanescent barrier of light conjured from the churning flames of the Slip. Her death wail ceased, exhausted from her Void channeling and shocked at Ben's unlikely survival. Enraged, the witch-master commenced the ritual herself attempting to call down the dreadwyrm while Ben caught his breath. In response, Sybil expended her aether reserves to break free from her bonds and attack the defenseless Morrigan with her psionicks, interrupting her ritual. Ben recovered and sprinted towards the witch while she was dazed, tackling her to the bone-strewn ground.
After a violent crimson flash, Ben awoke in an enclosed scape of ancient brimstone, quickly identifying it as a black-walled pocket of the Slip. He deduced that he had arrived in a shadowy prison, discovering the dreadwyrm Diocretius' semi-corporeal avatar encumbered in the center by dilapidated-looking obsidian chains. Opposite the imprisoned titan was a cloaked figure deep in meditation and almost palpably emanating the oldest and most powerful mortal aether Ben had experienced. The figure revealed herself as none other than the archmage Sotmr Shadowsong, tamer of the dreadwyrm. She explained that she had felled Diocretius by undergoing a dangerous ritual shunned by the Reunion Coven as it required the sacrifice of 101 devoted followers. With their sacrifice, Sotmr successfully evoked the spirits of countless powerful black mages which had come before her, effectively becoming an avatar of Aquila's long lineage of sorcerers to grant her the power to banish the titan who threatened to destroy the entire world. Her ritual initially succeeded, opening up a tear in Aquila's quintessence which acted as an unstable gateway directly to the Void. Diocretius was nearly assimilated into the Void, though Sotmr quickly realized that the singularity functioned both ways, and the tear allowed a host of dreadful abominations to flood into Aquila. In one last desperate act, she used all her strength to forcefully tear both her and Diocretius' living spirits from their physical hosts and drag them into the quintessence wound. The resulting chaotic confluence caused the singularity to violently explode, sending volatile ripples of quintessence across Aquila and striking the dark son of Moros out of the shattered red sky.
Since then, Sotmr and Diocretius had been locked in a temporal prison between Emanation and the Void, with the powerful sorceress forced to contain the vengeful wyrm lest his rage allow him to break free and exact his revenge upon Aquila and beyond. With Morrigan's ritual partially completed, the balance had begun to shift, threatening to sunder the dragon titan's already fragile black chains. She implored him to learn from her successes and failures before asking him to bind what remained of her withered spirit to his own, granting him the strength he needed in order to permanently destroy Diocretius. He agreed, taking her legendary scythe-like staff and absorbing her weary soul into his own in an act of necromancy scarcely seen since the days of the sorcerers of eld. The dreadwyrm awakened in response, having absorbed Morrigan's own spirit after she unsuccessfully attempted to bind him. The black mage and the titan clashed, shaking the obsidian walls of the temporal prison with blinding flashes of red, green, and purple, with both of their connections to the Void magicks strengthened in the Slip. In the fierce battle which ensued, the mighty dreadwyrm roared and thrashed with pure vengeful energy to such an extent that he had neglected his own defense. Summoning all the strength the Slip would lend him, Ben repeated Sotmr's trick of evoking the spirits of all past black mages that would answer the call, rending the titan's celestial spirit to its great agony. In one final blow for the people of Aquila, the mage decapitated the dragon with Sotmr's staff, finally destroying his twisted form and causing his spirit to disperse into Urghast in millions of tiny fragments with little hope of ever reforming.
Ben awoke in the dragon's skull as if mere moments had passed in Emanation, seeing Sybil desperately hold her own against a horde of enraged witches. Though he was unable to take Sotmr's staff with him across the dimensional barrier, he came to her aid, shielding her from their hexes and reflecting their weaker blasts of umbral energy back at them. Having sufficiently scattered his attackers, Ben addressed the witches, informing them that he had slain Morrigan and insisting that they disperse or be annihilated by the greatest black mage of the era. After a few tense moments, the Norns begrudgingly retreated back towards the Wyrd, their new intentions unclear. 
With Morrigan and her coven defeated, Ben and Sybil considered their next moves. Ben declared his intentions to return once again to Reunion to argue his case to the archmages, hoping that the truth about Sotmr would prompt them to reconsider their stance on black magic. He insisted she join her, though while she agreed they made an exceptional team, she had other plans: Sybil intended to join the Norns, with the goal of reforming the coven to more benevolent purposes and perhaps becoming their new master. Though he was saddened at having his hopes dashed yet again, Ben understood her motivation and wished her the best of luck. Sybil returned the favor along with a less-than-platonic kiss, and the two parted ways for the third time.
==V - The Revenge of Hades==
===Mysteries of the Rift===
With the ancient threat in Aphelion quelled for the time being, Ben swore to learn from the life of Sotmr, both figuratively and literally carrying her legacy with him ere he went thereafter. Later in the year of Diocretius’ final defeat, the young mage set a course for the Aetherial once again, hoping that Prospero would be more receptive to his arguments having proven himself against the dreadwyrm. He was welcomed back to Reunion and commended for his victory, though he had little time for the coven’s pleasantries. He came to the archmage proposing that Reunion transition from an isolationist haven to a more active and militant organization of mages from all disciplines devoted to thwarting existential adversaries such as Diocretius. Prospero sympathized with Ben’s plight but again refused him, insisting that his ancient coven remain a place of scholarly study devoid of all politics. Holliday declared the archmage a coward blind to the inherent responsibility of those gifted with the Old Ways to protect and liberate the oppressed, and warned that they would be the architects of their own destruction.
Re-instilled with passion but lacking allies, Ben swallowed his pride and came to accept his refusal to join Sepp and the Children of Hades as a mistake. He decided to finally seek his to-be brethren out and join them in the mysterious Rift – a strange and dark continent sacred to the religion of the Old Ways and said to predate Vulturia itself according to the lore he had thereto uncovered on the subject. Though he knew the Rift lay a formidable distance south of even Aphelion, he recognized that attempting to reach the lost landmass with only a-priori knowledge could result in his ruin. Thus he sought out the Starcallers in Almagest for guidance once more. The dark astrologians there provided Ben with a simple star-chart to lead the way to his quarry, and additionally instructed him in the art of reading Aquila’s natural ley lines of quintessence for his future divination efforts. Their master Kastor granted the young mage these boons free of charge, assuring him that they were his just desserts in exchange for his aiding in the imminent return of the “black star.”
Following Aquila’s psychic ley lines cross-referenced with Kastor’s star-chart, Ben made the harrowing trek to the dark continent, fending off countless mind flayers and other abominations on the way with only his strength of will to rely upon. He finally came upon a coastal village called Nastrond, a settlement which was in itself one of Aquila’s best kept secrets on the token of its very existence on the absolute fringes of the habitable world. Sparsely inhabited and imposing an atmosphere of cold industriousness, Nastrond was built upon ancient stones laid by a forgotten nation of outcasts who erected great castles of black rock to protect themselves both from the outside world and the scarcely understood, perhaps even unknowable, savage beasts native to their home. Fittingly, the hamlet grew naturally out of the dilapidated Castle Blackrock which served as its fortified core, storing the denizens’ entire stores of grain and weapons behind many layers of hardened obsidian. Holliday’s arrival in the quaint town was the stuff of much curiosity and suspicion, and only his honesty regarding his intentions to seek out his prospective comrades saved him from being put to the sword by paranoid guards. The town’s communal council confirmed that a small band of occultists had arrived on the black shores of the Rift some months prior and subsequently traveled deep into the wilderness, only occasionally visiting the safer walls of the northern castle to barter for medicinal supplies.
Restocking on supplies to gird himself for the journey, Ben crossed the Tannhauser Gate which separated Nastrond from the Dead Lands in search of the gorge of Gehenna, where Sepp and her ilk were last spotted. Stealthing his way through the nine spider kingdoms and spanning the Bridge of Tartarus, he soon entered a more peaceful stretch of canyon-laden moor, the accursed valley of Gehenna. Owing to the sparseness of native flora and indeed any signs of life at all, the serene village of Dunnwik was easily spotted, a stretch of simple adobe homes pockmarked with ruined towers not unlike those of Nastrond. Ben quickly met with Sepp and around two dozen other black-robed occult rebels upon his fateful arrival in Dunnwik. His reuniting with them was met with much celebration, reinvigorating their revolutionary passion after being struck with dismay after several months of little progress. Sepp revealed that she had led the exodus to the Rift in search of the famed Eye of Nydh’ogiir, a relic from the physical host of the eponymous primal force known only through legend. With the pilfering of an ancient star-chart from Ashevale, the witch tracked the Eye to the lost city of Celephais which had been buried miles below the surface of the Rift since time immemorial, ruled by a magocratic convocation who worshiped the chaos titan Nydh’ogiir. Early efforts by the Children to unearth the buried city were met with little success, but they quickly learned that the civilization had been virtually entirely preserved as if frozen in time. The parallels to his previous trials in Aphelion led Ben to suspect that Nydh’ogiir was indeed another dreadwyrm not unlike Diocretius – both corrupted progeny of the Ancient Fear who were twisted into monstrous creatures by their father’s rage. Sepp had designs of unearthing the legendary Eye and using the power of the dark titan to grant her order unparalleled skills in necromancy; though he warned them to tread carefully given Morrigan’s destruction, Ben saw wisdom in Sepp’s plan, believing the ritual could actually succeed with sufficient preparation.
Young Holliday’s wealth of knowledge gained from unearthing secrets from black mages of eld elevated him to something of a natural leadership position among the new Children, though Sepp maintained some authority over him, gaining the respect of the acolytes by leading them to their moment of victory. The order redoubled its activities, with Ben and some of the order’s finest battle mages Jojosamu, Astrid, and Mormo setting out to infiltrate the world’s nations in search of new allies while Sepp led her own cohort to investigate possible methods by which to unearth the lost city of Celephais and the all-powerful Eye of Nydh’ogiir within.
=== Waking Nightmares===
Ben and his three fellow scions of Hades agreed to divide their covert missions among themselves with each operative being responsible for one corner of the world: Jojosamu to his native Khotan, Astrid to Sivistys, Mormo to Occa, and Ben to Aphelion, all eventually rendezvousing to collectively survey the Kilran-Ertdor continent. Their directive in broad terms was to assess the status of Aquila’s nationstates in search of potential revolutionary conditions, as well as establish embryonic networks of contacts for future use, all in service to the revitalized Children of Hades. Having already established a formidable base of operations in Dreiton, Ben turned his focus upon northern Aphelion, where the reclusive Sultanate of Dashari reigned supreme. With next to little diplomatic contact with other governments married to an extremely conservative matriarchal society, the odds of significant social upheaval in the desert empire were slim to say the least – especially considering their vehement hatred for the Old Ways – though Holliday figured it prudent to at least see the sultanate for himself to better grasp its politics.
Due to the deeply chauvinistic foreign policy of the empire of sand, outside entry into its eponymous capital was highly restricted, requiring all visitors to have valid peddlers’ licenses or express consent from the Sultana herself. Unexcited at the prospect of another convoluted bamboozlement a la Sybil and his rouse to enter Hamamitsu, Ben decided the best way to infiltrate the city would be to simply walk through the front gates as a welcomed visitor on official business. He stocked his llama with several dozen samplings’ worth of honeycomb and an empty customer dossier and set off to the city of Alcyon, where his goods were quickly approved by trade officials there; virtually no Dashari had ever tasted a helping of authentic Valencian honey, and thus demand for orders within the city would be exceedingly high.
Now an official peddler of exotic goods, signified by a small gold coin inscribed with the Dashari phrase for “dignified wanderer,” Ben entered the city and was awed by its almost otherworldly sandstone architecture, the best example of which being none other than the opulent royal palace. He spent the afternoon doing as he was expected, handing out generous samples to curiosity-stricken passing pedestrians and taking names for promissory purchases. The gossip of the one-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired stranger whom they called “the skunk” and his delicious delicacies aroused the curiosity of another visitor to the city – Amare. Unsure of the status of their friendship following the events in Gensokyo, the two tensely but amicably discussed current events in a local tavern, with both of them suspiciously vague about their current affiliations and the cause for their visit to the sultanate. Ben was especially curious about the status of the Outlanders, whom Amare explained had gone their separate ways following the defeat of Makrozoia, rendering the fellowship temporarily defunct until such a time that its heroes were needed once more. Amare had come to Dashari as part of a sojourn across all Aquila to experience all the realm had to offer.
The Outlander soon clued Ben into a larger scheme afoot in the sultanate. Many of its minor holdings in the peripheries had been razed by unknown parties who then abducted the surviving citizens, never to be seen again. The relative prosperity of the capital allowed many of its richer denizens to continue on with their normal lives unabated, though rumors were abound that abductions were also being conducted in the city. While the sultana’s forces were working diligently to identity the perpetrators, their operations to that point had been met with little success, inspiring Amare to launch an investigation of his own to track down the mysterious raiders of the night. Ben agreed to join him, compelled to render what aid he could to the empire’s poorer rural serfs.
Their search brought them to the western dunes on the fringes of the sultanate’s formal borders. Signs of coordinated raids were readily apparent, with every village they visited accompanied by several sets of horse tracks. Curiously, while there were no signs of life, it seemed that not a single jewel or other traditionally valuable treasures had been pilfered, indicating the attackers had much more sinister motives than simple financial gain by ransom. They rode their giant camels quicklike to the town of Canjydas, one of the few minor settlements in the deep desert left unscathed, intending to catch the riders in the act. Their plan came to fruition two moons later when a small cadre of terrifyingly deformed warriors mounted upon skeleton horses laid siege to the fair town, springing the two to action in its defense. Though the sackers were few in number, the possessed such unnatural strength that they were more than a match for a group of Dashari soldiers, their threat further heightened by their impenetrable armor of Makrovian mail. The invaders’ hideous deformities only became more haunting upon closer inspection in the heat of combat, all of their faces appearing to have been crudely stitched together with the rotten skin of at least two other unfortunate victims. Ben’s magicks robbed them of their unholy mounts, allowing the deft Amare and the remaining soldiers to overrun the monstrosities whose rampages were only stopped by thorough decapitation. Word was quickly sent to the sultana that Canjydas had become the first town to repel the indefatigable Dark Horde.
The harrowed Ben and Amare remained in the settlement along with a fresh garrison from the capital in anticipation of a follow-up attack. The Horde arrived at the next dusk, exponentially more numerous and riding upon muscular war boars instead of feeble undead horses. However, they came not to bear arms but to bear a message from their commander: The 66th Cohort of the Nightmare Legion had awoken from their restless slumber, and their fearless General demanded blood. An ultimatum was offered: The Sultana was to surrender her queendom to the new Aquilan Empire of General Zorotalizkar and offer up half of her subjects as sacrifice to fuel the Horde, or every living thing in northern Aphelion would be obliterated. These demands sent the sultanate into a stupor; if their words were to be believed, the ravenous General Zoro (now known to them as Sutekh) had resurfaced after being presumed dead for countless centuries. Accounts of the 66th Cohort’s defeat by the Sultanate were relatively unambiguous, and though the account went that the General and his evil army had been “buried by the desert,” this was more or less interpreted as a turn of phrase in contemporary times. Amare was quite skeptical, though Ben was quick to confirm that that boar-riders bore a similar dark aura to that of the resurrected Makrozoia himself. While the army set about shoring up its borders against an impending full-scale invasion, the two Outlanders continued their trek into the desert in search of the purported sight of Sutekh’s death.
Located in the deepest reaches of the harsh desert interior, the Heart of Ruin, Amare and Ben came upon the ruins of Lymmuic’s Tomb, now known by locals as the Necropolis due to its sinister reputation as Sutekh’s haunted resting place. The base of the undying 66th Cohort was heavily patrolled by its half-dead mutant soldiers, dashing any already slim hopes of a bold frontal assault. The magus made a ritual sacrifice requiring a vial of his blood and a handful of Amare’s pickpocketed treasures, offering the gifts of flesh and vanity to Hades the Unseen for his shadowy boon. The spell was successful, allowing the two adventurers to enter the Necropolis as nigh-invisible shades, though they quickly realized that their enhanced adversaries could somewhat detect their scents and the sounds of their boots upon the ground. They moved with all due stealth through the winding halls of the sunken sand-laden labyrinth, freezing at the sight of any patrols so as to avoid triggering the hawkeyed senses. Reaching the core of the Necropolis, they discovered a massive chamber filled to the brim with armored men and women in Imperial colors who appeared to be frozen in absolute stasis, all of them possessing the telltale stitched faces of the Dark Horde. In adjacent halls, dozens of hungry war boars bearing similar scars were undergoing tempering by hesitant soldiers who may have been torn asunder by the beasts’ savage jaws in an instant. The frozen soldiers were strapped into gurneys and rolled away one-by-one to another massive chamber where they underwent the deadly revival process, with every soldier requiring the sacrifice of one living mortal’s life force. The prisoners, all of them Dashari, had been sedated by some concoction which rendered them completely docile and unable to disobey orders, allowing entire groups of them to be offered up to the masked man at the far side of the room – a dark master of the arcane whose sinister revival procedure seemed part occult and part alchemical. Amare slipped into one of the prisoner groups and slipped into the chamber armed with his daggers whilst acting sedated. Before he could be sliced apart by the ritual master, Amare revealed his weapons and sliced the alchemist’s throat open, breaking his magical thrall over the prisoners in the room. Coming to their senses, the liberated prisoners broke into a riot, sending the facility into a lockdown as clashes with the mutants began.
The Outlanders made for the grand sarcophagus room under the cover of the chaos. There, they encountered Sutekh’s terrible undead form: The General’s massive scarred torso affixed with an amalgamation of unnaturally long and muscular limbs harvested from perhaps dozens of gangrenous corpses. Atop his wretched countenance was a crude mockery of a mortal face, more resembling a writhing broken tree stump infested with mites than any living visage. He immediately attacked the intruders, engaging them alone and armed only with a jagged obsidian shield which was easily the size of an adult man. He was more than a match for both Ben and Amare, howling with the ferocity of a starved bear as he slowly overwhelmed his adversaries with unholy brute strength. Amare finally discovered the general’s vulnerability by slicing at the rotten seams which held his patches of skin together, spilling out buckets of crimson blood which writhed with tiny alien parasites. Ben finished him off by landing a searing lightning bolt directly at the monster’s chest, exposing its alchemical heart, the black mask of Sutekh, which shattered into pieces, instantly disintegrating him into null. As his fractured spirit faded back into the Void, Sutekh gave the adventurers one final ominous warning: His army was only the beginning of the Nightmare. His open grimoire on the far end of the room seemed to confirm that other dormant Cohorts were scattered across all of Aquila, threatening to awaken and wreak havoc at any moment. The documents were written in an amalgamation of several strange languages including Shibboleth, with the only other familiar text scribed in ancient Thornic. The ancient Thorne Enclave in Zosha had long faded from memory to most Aquilans, though as the only hint of the distant country’s presence outside its home in far outer Zetia, it seemed to be the best chance at deciphering the locations of the remaining Nightmare bases.
The fighting had calmed in the Necropolis as the outnumbered legionnaires were overrun by the angry prisoners and a squadron of recently arrived Dashari warriors. With the tomb and its dangerous contents seized by the sultanate once more, the fate of the still dormant soldiers within was uncertain. Ben set his sights toward Zosha in search of aid in translating the Legion’s plans in ancient Thornic, a tongue forgotten by even the greatest scholars in Aquila proper. He parted ways with Amare, who had other pressing concerns but vowed he would lend any aid he could in uncovering the remaining facilities should the need arise.
===Rise of the Sin-eaters===
Upon his arrival in the city of Corona to rest, Ben was immediately taken aback and forced to retreat to the shadows of the alleys to evade capture by the other new arrivals there. A squadron of mail-clad knights calling themselves the Sin-eaters had arrived not more than an hour ahead of him, bearing an inverted Templar flag as their standard. They were furiously scouring the streets of the city center demanding the surrender of known black mage Ben Holliday, proudly declaring that they were servants of Novrakosh come to rid the world of the remaining vestiges of the Old Ways on Aquila. Holliday was only able to beat a hasty retreat when a cadre of particularly angry Dashari warriors from the capital arrived to rid the empire of these interlopers, quickly inciting a chaotic clash in the city streets amongst millions of bystanders. He sent a frantic message to his nearest ally, Mormo in Occa, beseeching that she gather the others and rendezvous with him at the safe-house in Zalibar.
Hitching a ferry from a barge at the nearby town of Kydafyas, Ben traveled to Zalibar with due speed to regroup with the other Scions of Hades. They had designated the former Kokushi base, the Ziggurat of Dagon, as the order’s hideaway and operational center for the Kilran-Ertdor continent, at least until new points of access were established in more convenient regions. His comrades also confirmed concernedly similar encounters with these so-called Sin-eaters, some of their names also known to the knights as Holliday’s was. Elsewhere, Jojosamu reported that his home island of Emishi had been completely overrun by the Black Hand whose dark army now posed a serious threat to the entire Empire of Khotan; Astrid observed heightening class tensions in the ruins of Gensoyko as the nation of Tolstaag-Jotenburg was formed; Mormo brought disconcerting news that a hero of legend by the name of Triton had appeared in Medriaas and declared a crusade against the Old Ways and indeed the worship of any gods, this news combined with the surfacing of these dangerous Sin-eaters spelled grim tidings for the Children of Hades. Furthermore, word from Sepp and the others still based in the Rift indicated that they had successfully breached the outer walls of the sunken city of Celephais, but the massive fortress which by all estimations housed the powerful Eye of Nydh’ogiir possessed a magicked barrier so great that not even their greatest rituals could penetrate it, likely necessitating the acquisition of a relic enriched with unrivaled amounts of Aether to grant them access to the ancient knowledge within. Now desperately searching for answers to the mounting issues of attaining the Eye, stopping the awakening of hidden Nightmare cells across Aquila, and stopping the Sin-eaters, Ben conceded that they would need the wisdom of the Reunion sages to guide them to the answers.
The scions made the relatively quick trek to the island of Reunion in search of consul from their seers. However, upon their arrival at the hidden isle, they found not a bustling mage sanctuary replete with wizened scholars overseeing countless centuries of arcane knowledge, but little more than a blackened morass of razed towers, the entire island reduced to naught more than charred rubble. They detected no signs of life with closer inspection apart from a handful of hideous pyres adorned with the indistinguishable skeletons of the island’s former denizens. Within what little remained of Prospero’s temple of Solace, they discovered only the archmage impaled upon a foul stake.
Little time was afforded to them for the purposes of mourning and speculation before a cadre of garishly armored knights emerged from hiding, shouting crusader prayers as they fell upon the dazed mages. Sure enough, the paladins bore the bastardized Templar insignia of the Sin-eaters, holy warriors come to eliminate the entire heretic population of Reunion. Among them was none other than the “General of Peace” Beryl Aster, leader of the order’s radical defectors. She condemned Holliday as the cause of Furnace’s death and considered him and his allies in the Children of Hades to be Aquila’s greatest villains. The scions fought with all the conviction they could muster from the Beyond, harnessing their darkest magicks to defend against the ensuing onslaught. They found themselves extremely outmatched by the Zealot Knights, who in addition to their remarkable martial skill were in possession of some powerful blessing which granted them a holy shield against the mages’ witchery, rendering them virtually invincible to their magicks. The scions were narrowly saved by Jojosamu, who emptied all of his mist grenades at once to conjure a smokescreen thick enough to afford them a desperate retreat into the sanctuary’s deep and winding mines. They escaped through the island’s one Slip portal, cleaving one of the paladins in half as it closed on him. Defeated and unable to make contact with their distant allies, the scions made the risky choice to seek out the remaining true Templars in hope that common cause could be found between them in defeating the increasingly dangerous Sin-eaters. Ben only hoped that he still possessed at least a modicum of good will in the eyes of a former Templar ally, who to his memory traveled north following the Mad King’s death.
Ben, Mormo, Astrid, and Jojosamu traveled warily to the land of Olexia, the northernmost region of Sivistys known for its sparse inhabitance and high density of precious subaquilan metals. For many in Aquila, it was a particularly holy location; the Templars revered it as the site at which the Eagle descended from the heavens and blessed Aquila with light and life, as well as the supposed birthplace of his grandson Novrakosh (often shortened to simply Notch by Kilranians). Though the knights’ ancestral home and base of operations had always been Phoebus Rhea (High Kilranian for Sun Mother Temple), their famous mountain castle Garudamont deep in the Olexian mountains also evolved into a vital Templar stronghold, with the order’s clerics viewing its icy serenity as ideal for worship and education. It became the Templar bastion of the north, and the location at which all prospective knights were trained in combat and piety. Even the ruling Circle of Knowing often held their incredibly rare convocations atop Garudamont’s spire, said to pierce the sky itself. Ben had long desired to visit the fortress monastery to marvel at its wonder, though due to its custodians’ disdain for his ilk, the prospect seemed a nigh impossibility, making the circumstances of his travail there all the more ironic.
The scions’ expectations were subverted once again upon their arrival at lonely Garudamont. Though a fair number of wounded nights were seen haphazardly carrying medicine and construction tools, the monastery seemed to have met a similar fate to Reunion, with the spire’s entire upper half missing, presumably having climactically cracked and tumbled into the black ice-spiked ravines below in some epic battle. The Templars paid them little mind, all of them quite nobly focused solely upon tending to each other’s grievous wounds and clearing stone debris. They were finally met by none other than Ser Jeremiah Garland himself within the temple’s ruined central congregation chamber. He seemed to have taken a natural leadership role in the crisis, directing the relief efforts of the entire castle from his jury-rigged paper-strewn office in the convocation room. He was not pleased to see his old ally Ben, whom he’d long been suspicious towards due to his flippant dabbling in the dark arts – a suspicion which blossomed into outright resentment following the massacre at Gensokyo. He explained how Beryl and her followers assassinated most of the Circle of Knowing in a massive explosion and then razed the entire monastery, ordering her crusaders to execute any Templars who refused to join her revolt. Following Lord Furnace’s apparent death, she became disillusioned with the order, believing it had lost its way and become too soft – tolerating adherents of the Old Ways instead of executing them. The battle with the defectors left Garudamont in ruins and the Order in a state of disaster, with nearly all of its international leaders, save Giuseppe Winslow – who fled to Valencia with his research and designs – and a handful of others who had entered self-exile following the incident. Loathe to ally with such a personage as Holliday but seeing wisdom in making common cause to defeat the growing threat posed by the Sin-eaters, Garland agreed to aid the scions.
Garland shared grim news that the Sin-eaters had become aware of Makrozoia’s hidden facilities across Aquila and were attempting to discern their locations, same as the Children, for some unknown nefarious purpose. The General of Peace was particularly interested in one such facility above all others: The hidden tomb of the Mad King himself, where his original physical form was presumably interred by his sons Heiroban and Novrakosh. With the defector’s grand designs still uncertain, Ben and Jeremiah were of one mind in the conclusion that her looming threat had to be quelled before it spelled ruin for perhaps all of Aquila. The Templar revealed to them the location of what he strongly believed to be one of the facilities – a time-weathered crypt bearing the unmistakable accipitrimorphic insignia of the old empire’s inquisitorial order.
The scions quickly traveled to the abandoned town of Eichre, in the outskirts of which lay the crypt exactly as indicated by Garland. Preventing their entrance was a sealed antechamber whose walls began to contract upon their entry, the scions only escaping a slow and excruciating death by completing a puzzle which required them to correctly arrange Makrozoia’s name in its original High Kilranian runic script. They evaded a series of other sinister traps in their crawl to the center before finally reaching the black iron doors of the grand hypogeum, guarded by the facility’s fearsome mechanical sentinels, Kane and Habil. The brother and sister automatons had been the crowning achievement of the Aquilan Empire’s war engineers, who spent years designing the perfect twin golem warriors, immortalized as the “Ideal Protectors,” though evidently their ultimate fate in servitude to the Mad King resulted in the twins acting as guardians rather than warriors on the battlefield. The mechanical monsters defended the hypogeum with unparalleled synergy and zeal, their artificial minds specifically designed to work in perfect tandem so as to swiftly execute any enemies of the emperor. However, being programmed to engage with traditional warriors armed with pikes and swords, the scions enjoyed a tenuous but effective element of surprise over the twins, whose ancient joints were found to be especially vulnerable to Jojosamu’s martial arts. Sufficiently stunned by the shinobi’s punches and kicks, Kane and Habil were blasted to pieces by the black mages at the cost of several broken bones and shattered tendons.
Within the crypt’s dust-ridden main vault, the scions discovered Mordherag, an in-comprehensively ancient-looking scepter adorned with countless runic symbols so alien in appearance that they could have come from another world. Indeed, the murals artfully scrawled upon the hypogeum’s stone walls told an epic tale which all but confirmed this impression: A man in black thorned armor emerges from a heavenly tear in the sky, escaping another world that had shattered into pieces. He scours the world raising up three terrible wyrms who bear the unmistakable likenesses of Diocretius, Nydh’ogiir, and a third similar but unfamiliar dark titan. With their strength, he opens a great rift upon the world’s crust, boring as deep as its wrathful and fiery core. From the inferno cometh an eldritch horror which defies description, so horrible and formidable its form as if one were staring into the wild Void itself. The black clad man and his ritual are thwarted by a hero bearing the Eagle’s mark, who banishes him and his dark brethren back to the Beyond and thereby saves Aquila from calamity – doubtless a depiction of Makrozoia slaying the rogue titan Eztrakir, he mythical event used by the Mad King to justify the forming of the imperial Inquisitorius. There seemed to be at least a grain of truth of this legend long assumed to be the stuff of fable, as the relic Mordherag before them was the selfsame one wielded by Eztrakir to revive the dreadwyrms.
Ben considered these revelations as he and the scions departed the vault, which collapsed behind them after they retrieved Mordherag from its weighted pressure plate. If his interpretation was correct, not only was the titan Eztrakir very much real, but he had managed to uncover the true whereabouts of the Ancient Fear’s dormant spirit – interred not in the outer reaches of the Void, but in the mortal plane under the watchful eye of his mighty son Avromemnon of Aquila and later his grandson Makrozoia. He proposed to the other scions that Makrozoia feared his grandfather’s return because it would flood the world with vibrant aether, allowing the Old Ways to be wielded freely by the masses and thus putting his tyranny in jeopardy. That in mind, he wondered aloud if it would be prudent for the Children of Hades to follow in Eztrakir’s footsteps by evoking Moros themselves, fulfilling their two prime objectives of dismantling the world’s nations as well as allowing the Old Ways to return. While Mormo and Jojosamu were quite taken by this proposal, Astrid was reluctant, skeptical as to whether the unchaining of the Ancient Fear would be a boon for Aquila rather than a disaster. Putting aside the potential of taking the “unthinkable” option for the timing, Ben concocted a plan to emulate Eztrakir’s great feat of tempering his three brothers, believing such a ritual would allow them to enter Celephais and retrieve the Eye of Nydh’ogiir as their ultimate weapon against the otherwise immune Sin-eaters, whom all the scions agreed remained their greatest adversary. Instead of channeling the dreadwyrms, however, the Children would evoke the spirits of their most powerful forebears: The Dark Triad themselves.
===Answers===
TBA
=====Items=====
*Shadowsong - Chance for critical spells to activate Void Echo, instantly granting Creeping Void.
*del Toro's Grimoire - Allows 8 spells to be stored at once.
*Zoshan Sacrificial Dagger
*Onyx Ring of Chaos - Prevents Chaos from dropping to 0 (adds emergency +1 Chaos) once a day.
*Totem of Undying - Prevents HP from dropping to 0 (adds emergency +1 HP) once a day.
*Totem of Necromancy - Grants the Soul Squeeze power to enable Void Souls.
Category:Invidere