Immaru the Deceiver

**Immaru the Deceiver,** or just **Immaru**, is a man who masqueraded as The Creator for nearly a thousand years, a period that would come to be called the Age of Deception.

## Before the Age of Deception

To call any information about Immaru "history" would be a gross overstatement of the available facts. Instead, everything about Immaru should be taken with a grain of salt, as most of what we think we know likely either originated with him or his enemies, making all of it unreliable.

In ancient times, Immaru was one of the Ascended, a group of beings who were favored by The Creator. Immaru was the first of the Ascended to traverse the Astral Sea. On the other side of the sea, Immaru and other Ascended who followed him there planted Great Trees, which allowed them to communicate with the people in the material plane.

The Ascended promised their followers in the material plane all sorts of wondrous things, and were as gods to them.

But Immaru was not satisfied with only those whom he lured to his teachings. He started a great civil war among the Ascended with the goal of becoming the only voice heard by the material plane, and their only god.

At first, Immaru was not winning, though he was holding his own. His greatest obstacle was Tiamat, another of the Ascended, who had created dragons. Tiamat's vicious creations were utterly devoted to her, and were virtually unbeatable on the field of battle.

But Immaru had a cunning plan: he would convince the dragons to join his cause, and use them to destroy the rest of his enemies, neutering Tiamat.

The plan succeeded. Using his guile and charisma, Immaru successfully converted many dragons to his armies. And as a killing blow, he armed his dragons with the Razors, weapons forged to destroy Great Trees and sever the connection between the planes of their Ascended and their followers in the material plane.

However, dragons, as part of their creation, could not harm Tiamat, even if they had wanted to. So when Immaru and his forces had cut down all the other Great Trees, two remained: Immaru's and Tiamat's. Immaru exiled Tiamat for all time, and executed any dragons that refused to follow him into the Age of Deception.

## Age of Deception

When Immaru's dragons struck down all but two of the Great Trees, his was the only voice to be heard by the people of the material plane. He told them he was The Creator, their one true god, and all others were merely Ascended. Thus began the Age of Deception.

To perpetuate his evil, Immaru introduced magic to the material plane through his Great Tree, slowly eroding the purity of every soul it touched. Around this abomination, Immaru directed his dragons to create a Glorious Empire, built on magic and lies.

Immaru reshaped the dragons to his own purposes, sterilizing them so they could not reproduce, and changed their very desires to mold them into stalwart defenders of his new empire. Initially, the five breeds of dragon -- Silver, Gold, Copper, Bronze, and Brass -- all served Immaru in the way he had hoped, each set as stewards of a nation of their own. But after several centuries, the Bronze and Brass dragons rebelled. They were quickly exterminated, leaving only three breeds of dragon.

For nearly a thousand years, the Glorious Empire reigned, and none were the wiser that Immaru was posing as The Creator, stopping the people of the material plane from hearing his truth, and keeping their souls from finding their way to The Creator after death.

## Downfall

In the end, no one can keep The Creator -- now called Axiom -- from his people.

After a thousand years of the darkest night, The Creator sent a vision to two prophets in the Glorious Empire in order to bring on a New Dawn.

Far apart, St. Roderick and St. Andrew were shown a vision of the frozen north, and followed the word of Axiom to the island of Pagos. There, they were to recruit the Four Knights, who would rally the dragons to rebel against Immaru the Deceiver, and eventually strike down the last of the Great Trees that prevented The Creator from reaching his followers.

Working together, St. Roderick, St. Andrew and the Four Knights convinced the dragons themselves to help them destroy Tiamat. The Four Knights faced the last of the Ascended in battle and slew her, then used Sychrasel -- one of the famed Razors -- to cut down Tiamat's Great Tree.

After defeating Tiamat, the Four Knights, only able to do so by the will of Axiom, crossed the Astral Sea, chasing Immaru to his lair. There, the quartet confronted the Deceiver, and made him account for his unforgivable sins before executing him, freeing the material plane from its unknown enslavement, and ridding it of the abomination of magic that Immaru had infected it with.

## Heretical Theories

It had been rumored by some heretical scholars who claimed to have viewed rare, early writings that eventually were included in the Book of Axiom, that it was the dragons -- not the Four Knights -- who instigated the rebellion against Immaru.

According to these heretical and discredited early versions of the holy writings, the remaining three breeds of dragons had meticulously planned for centuries to kill Immaru, and came to the conclusion that killing Tiamat -- and therefore, themselves -- was the only way to rid the world of Immaru's deception. These writings state that it was actually the *dragons* -- as opposed to the prophets St. Roderick and St. Andrew -- who sought out the Four Knights to help them with their task.

Yet another theory holds that the Bronze and Brass dragons were not exterminated at all, but instead faked their own extinction as the first phase in the centuries-long plan to destroy Immaru.