Ledger of Destiny

The Ledger of Destiny was one of the four 'cornerstones of reality' representing the power to record all the events that had occurred in history no matter their significance to the reader.

## Ledger of Destiny

### Former Owners

The Scribe (Li), Numerous others who had gone by that title

## Creation

The Ledger of Destiny is one of those items that ventures onto the 'world breaking' level. While working out how Southern Cross could animate the characters she wrote about, I came up with the idea of an old silver pen that could rewrite reality. From there came the idea of a 'book' to go with the pen, as well as the complex set of rules that powered the artefact.

## History

The Ledger of Destiny's origin is largely unknown, but its source is known to pre-date humanity. It's first recorded discover was a primitive Cro-Magnon Sharman, who upon stumbling on a cave painted in amazing images in Kenya, brought his tribe to the location, with the group effectively becoming the first scribes. Eventually dispersing across Africa, Europe and Asia, the tribe made replicas of the cave, but only the original cavern carried the power to enhance the life of it's protector and automatically record details of history as it occurred.

Eventually the cave was rediscovered by the Egyptian Army under Rameses II, who on arrival killed the Shaman, who had been granted extreme longevity by the cavern, and who found stacks of papyrus with the details copied from the wall written down on them. One of the soldiers, who later became the second scribe, collected the sheets and took the back to the Library of Alexandria for storage where they would remain until the Roman conquest of Egypt, with the bloody cycle of murder and reclamation of the knowledge occurring once again, with groups such as the Visigoths. Moors, the Holy Roman Empire, Saracens and Venetians all acquiring the Ledger from the previous faction, each one appointing a scribe to protect the growing amount of information.

Sometime in the 1630s the ledger, now bound into a massive tome, was stolen by Chinese spies from the streets of plague infested Venice and taken east behind the Great Wall. From there the Ledger was lost until the Boxer Rebellion where British troops tried to secure the book, killing the Scribe guarding it and almost claiming it for themselves. Ultimately they were thwarted by a young catcher and seller of caged birds called Xi Li who took the Ledger. Carrying it high into the mountains of what is now modern day Bhutan. Li guarded the ledger for over a century until new thieves ascended the mountain looking to claim the book for themselves.

### **Rediscovery in Bhutan**

A new play for the ledger by the Wishing Demon and its human allies would occur in 2014, with the former hoping to use the book to rewrite and even erase the limits of his power. As another of the 'cornerstones of reality' the Demon couldn't rewrite his history himself, and after failing to convince Li to edit the book, he hired Kenneth Zimmerman and Yuri Yakarov, to kill the Scribe and for one of them to become a more malleable conduit to the ledger. While the two mercenaries succeeded in killing Li, their efforts to claim the ledger were thwarted by Danika Sedova, who had been hired by the King of Bhutan to remove Yakarov from his country, and her assistant Jonathan Travers who would become the new Scribe.

Using his new powers Travers summoned help from the, at the time deceased Maya Grady, to help Sedova capture the Wishing Demon eventually chaining him in bonds of salt, although such measures were likely temporary at best, with the Demon still finding ways to mildly influence creative minds from his prison. Together the three would initiate Operation Pyre, a systematic removal of pages regarding the Wishing Demon, and their destruction although such a process was likely to take close to a thousand years to complete.

## Powers

The Ledger automatically recorded any and all history that occurred on Earth and possibly other worlds as well. Because it held so much information on only a finite amount of pages, the data was in constant flux, with one read through different to the next. The Ledger could be edited by the current scribe, which made controlling that individual paramount to a number of power hungry despots and leaders. One could avoid such altercations by removing a page regarding themselves, effectively separating them from reality until the entry was rewritten into the ledger by the Scribe, or the page was returned. Entries could be destroyed by burning the page with blessed fire, although doing so would erase any people and events written on the page from history.