Date: Twentieth of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)

Location: The top of Lady SiDiabolo’s Tower, Sapphire Bay, The Jeweled Republics

Lady Ilelahne SiDiabolo stared out across the water at the shores of Armageddon Reef. It had been eight hundred and ten years since that fateful day. She could still recall it clearly; see the blinding brightness raining down from the sky, feel the shaking of the earth and the crash of the tsunami against the shore as an empire was destroyed. Today, trees grew through overturned cobblestones and vines tore apart the ruins of masonry walls. Grass and flowers grew in blast craters were hundreds of warriors had been rendered to naught more than dust and shadows in instants.

The answers Ilelahne needed were somewhere amidst the ruins. Down in the cellars and blast shelters, in the sewers and bunkers, there lurked a repository of information. Family genealogies, histories of noble bloodlines, formal attestations of birth and parentage. Ilelahne knew who she was, but not what she was. Or more accurately, what she had been. Ilelahne had used her magic to re-make her body to suit her desires over the centuries, but there was still a glaring gap in her childhood. She recalled the people whom she had called mother and father, but they looked nothing like she had. They smelled and spoke differently, moved ever so slightly strangely, always had that certain bit of otherness that left Ilelahne to wonder if she was the child of their blood as well as their hearts.

Ordinarily, it wouldn’t matter at all. Ilelahne was happy with the body that she had created for herself, far more so then the body that she had been born with. But in this one instance, it mattered a great deal. Ilelahne had to revert to her birth-form and begin her transformation anew to remove something that she had overlooked before. Ilelahne had bound herself to the place of her childhood to leverage her magical strength and forge ahead with her transformation. Now that same bond held her in one geographic area over a thousand years later. She knew it had been a small folly to hire on local hands when she went fishing, but it hadn’t mattered for nearly a century.

Until one wharf-child had bothered to learn the songs. Had managed to survive the Westmarch War and the annihilation of the Ironbark Mercenary Band. Had become a spell-blade by training and a Noble by deeds. Had forged his small corner of the Altheim Kingdom into the single most prosperous economic, industrial, and innovation powerhouse on the material plane.

It hadn’t mattered until Aris Cretu mattered.

Now power-hungry fools sought to steal from her tower and pilfer ‘forgotten’ lore. All the fools had to do was use their brains and bother to think about why their spells function, what they were doing on a fundamental level, and they would learn so much more abut magic. Enough to create their own spells. Enough to, with the right preparation, achieve anything that they desired… or perish as reality itself rejected their demands. The Wish spell is known to be unforgiving of mistakes.

Ilelahne heard the footsteps approaching her perch at the top of her tower and immediately placed the thump-clack… thump-clack… of a metal foot inside a leather boot.

“You came back.”

“I have indeed returned Lady SiDiabolo. As I said that I would.”

“Your brass is showing. Any luck figuring out the eye on your trip?”

“That issue has been resolved, as well as the other damage I originally sought to repair.”

“Mmh. I can tell that you are approaching the Second Tier then.”

“Second Tier?”

“Second Tier of Adventurers, or Adventuring, depending on whom you ask. All Adventurers, with Class or without, start in the First Tier: problems up to the national level. The Guild runs on these, matching Adventurer to jobs too small or delicate for state or royal action, and helping square pegs avoid getting hammered into round holes. The Second Tier of Adventurers deal with international and multi-national incidents.”

“Hmm, I can see the difference there. But surely there must be more then two tiers? I cannot help but think that there are issues larger then even multinational. I mean… right?”

“Third and Fourth Tier, yes. Planar and Interplanar. The invention of the steam engine, and its spread is definitely an event on the scale of the Third Tier, but no single adventurer can claim credit for it. As for the Fourth Tier… We who remember, individuals and institutions alike, pray that there is never another Fourth Tier Adventurer ever again.”

“What? Why?”

“The last time a Fourth Tier Adventurer was seen was eight hundred and ten years, five months, and twenty days ago.”

“Oh? Oh.”

Ilelahne nodded out at Armageddon Reef, “that is the scale of devastation they leave in their wake. Six million mortal dead in three days, a peninsula turned into an island in a bay, three Gods just this side of oblivion, every other god injured, and enough magical fallout – disturbances in reality itself, for all intents and purposes – to cause the ‘birth’ of nine or ten distinct new races.”

“Nine or ten…? Oh, depending on how you count the unquiet dead you mean. Are there any undead towns or cities? I would think that the living races would abhor their existence.”

“There are no known undead settlements of any size but the deep, dangerous, and or distant places of this Plane are poorly explored.”

“I get the feeling that you are talking around a point.”

Ilelahne shrugged, “There is no easy way to approach this issue. I must go to the depths of Armageddon Reef in search of something that may or mat not still exist. If I find it, I must stay there long enough to cast at least one instance of High Magic, a risky undertaking even without the magical fallout that still clings to that area. I cannot grantee the safety of those physically near me. I cannot even say, should things go wrong, that there will be an Armageddon Reef left after I am done.”

Job shook his head, “Lady SiDiabolo, what makes you think that I would not accompany you on this quest?”

“Simple sanity?”

“I owe you a debt, and I intent to attempt to repay it. A life for a life, as prosaic as that may sound.”

“You are mad.”

“Perhaps. But it changes nothing. You must go, and so I must go with you. It will be an experience that, I must say, promises to be utterly unique and worthy of adding to my Hoard. What sort of dragon-blood would I be If I didn’t seek to add to my hoard at every turn?”

“That assumes you get to live through the experience.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained! If you persist on thinking of this in terms of personal profit, I will get to add an utterly unique memory to my Hoard that no other mortal will have a chance of replicating. In terms of debts and oaths, I will be paying off my debt to you for rebuilding my limbs above and beyond what was required to such an enormous degree. And I Will be helping a friend in need, as she has helped me, if that is not to presumptuous of me.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“It is presumptuous, but not unwelcome.”

“So, to transportation then? I would think that we would need to hire a boat...”

. . . - - - . . .

Date: Twentieth of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)

Location: ???

She woke up. This was unusual, as she did not recall falling out of reverie and into true sleep. She tried to move her body and found that she could not: her limbs would not move, her eyes would not open, and yet the sensation of empowerment remained. Her mind lifted, turned, and perceived her own body as if looking down on it from the low roof of the long, narrow space she found herself in. What she saw terrified her: the pale oblong dome of a greater magic working enshrouded he body, protecting and entrapping it in its entirety. She knew this Ward, though she did not know she knew that she knew, and that it would forcibly reject any attempt to rejoin her mind with her body now that she had left the Ward’s protection.

She wanted to despair, but she also surged with hope. This, or something like it, was what she and the others had hoped for when they cast the Time Split spell and placed her body into stasis: a mind and spirit freed from mortal constraints without the damming status of undeath. The process had been rushed and they had been forced to improvise the ritual location with the end of the war raging all about them. Her husband had been unable to participate and her daughter, one of the ones who had inspired them to make the attempt, had been nowhere to be found.

Worry about the fate of her family ate at her very being, but she forced it aside. She could not worry now. In theory she had all the time left to the Material Plane, and perhaps a bit more, to do with as she desired. In practice, each moment in the unending stream of the now was impossibly precious. Time is, after all, the one resource that cannot be created; only spent or squandered.

She moved about her body, examining the small chamber that she found herself in. It was, as she had noticed before, a long, narrow space, with a low arched roof. It was just large enough for her body to lie in and no larger. There was no room for sitting or standing, no room even to turn over. He body was on its belly, arms stretched out in front of it. She noticed with some distaste that her clothing had become ripped and torn before Time Split had been cast, her elbows and knees had wept blood that was now frozen in timeless stasis, drops eternally poised to fall. She surmised that she had crawled into this space, whatever it was, and cast Time Split where she lay. The rubble blocking her body’s path forwards certainly seemed to support this notion, as did the glass-smooth circular bite taken out of the crawlspace behind her body.

She drifted out of the opening and emerged into a perfectly spherical void. Two arched opening opposite each other marked the entrances into a hallway. One was half-full of collapsed rubble, the other was scorched and battered by spellfire. She recognized the tell-tale spider-webbed impact craters of lightning bolts and the broad scorch marks of flame spells. Other crawlspaces led off of the void: the ones about on level with the floor of the hallway, and the widest horizontal plane of the void, were very short in length, no deeper then the width of a hand. The crawlspaces grew larger the higher up towards the roof of the hallway she went, her own right near the roof. The feet of her body were mere hairsbreadths away from the edge of the void.

Looking about at the glassy smoothness of the sides of the void, she could think of only one spell that would create such a perfect sphere of destruction: Sphere of Annihilation. But that spell usually produced only a two-foot diameter sphere and the void was sixteen feet in diameter. She stopped in place and pondered, thinking over the possibilities. Only one suggested itself to her: a death-curse, a caster deliberately using their own soul as fuel to over-charge a spell. Such a casting was, as the name implied, immediately and irrevocably fatal to the caster. It was a maneuver only ever used in the most desperate of circumstances, or by fanatics who gave no though to their own lives or afterlife.

She withdrew into the space where her body lay in its eternal stasis. What had happened after the Split Time had gone into effect? Had she in fact fallen from revere into true sleep, or had she been knocked unconscious? How long had she been out? What was left of her beloved Alexandria?

. . . - - - . . .

Date: Twentieth of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)

Location: Armageddon Reef, Sapphire Bay, The Jeweled Republics

Job Arseoth stretched his arms skywards and arched his back, letting his spine pop and crack disk by disk. The small rowboat that he and Lady SiDiabolo had used to cross to Armageddon Reef rocked gently as a particularly large wave raced up the beach to tickle its stern.

“it took a bit more effort then I though, but we got here in the end. Now what?”

“Grab your pack and drag that boat up to beach a bit more. We’ll have to leave it here for a while and I’d rather it not get washed back out to sea.”

Job slung his pack onto his back, grabbed the front of the rowboat, and hauled it up the beach.

“Should we try one of the caves in the cliff ahead, or scale it?”

Lady SiDiabolo shrugged, “there should be a set of stairs in the cliff face around here, or what’s left of them anyway. This used to be a noble’s estate, if my memory is correct, so any caves are unlikely to lead up to the surface near here. The former residents wouldn’t have wanted any secret ways onto their estate. Well, ones they did not build themselves at any rate.”

“Eight hundred years of time may have opened something up.”

“Possibly, but also possibly not. Worst case, we walk a half-mile south and there is a ‘breach’ in the cliff face, blast damage from a stray spell that caused a landslide. It’s a bit unstable, and possibly contaminated, so I don’t want to go that way if we can avoid it.”

“And once we get up the cliffs?”

“We go to where Alexandria used to be and see how things lie. I can think of several places where I might find the information that I’m looking for, but I don’t know how they fared during the ending days of the Seminal War or in the past eight hundred plus years.”

“You don’t sound to hopeful Lady SiDiabolo.”

“Because, in truth, I am not. I expect to find something. The question is rather weather I find enough… and how much it will hurt to recover this truth.”

“If you were the child of your parent’s hearts, does it matter if you were of their blood as well?”

“In some ways not at all, in others very much so. In that case it would depend if I was adopted or… created. And if the latter, how.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Before the Seminal War there were many spells to help infertile couples have children. Some were wholesome, intended to address sterility or performance problems. Others were creative, to assist with missing or damaged parts, or to ensure the safe conception of a child of mixed races: a half-dragon, for example. And there were other, ‘darker’ options available; ones that stole souls and conscripted unwilling flesh. With so many traces from so many races in my blood, I cannot be sure which, if any of them may have been used. I fear that is was of the later sort however.”

“There’s the stairs, let’s climb and talk at the same time. Why do you expect to find that such ‘dark’ spells were used?”

“Consider the titles that my father held: Aemon SiDiabolo - The Sadist, The Priest of the Hourglass, The High Lord of Shadows. They were more than merely honorary.”

“And on your mother’s side?”

“Sessa Zelmae SiDiabolo - High Arch-Mage of Alexandria, High Priestess of the Branded, Chosen of the Abyss. For a non-silithid to hold any of those titles ware almost unheard of. For a non-silithid to hold all three…”

“And just as steeped in ‘dark’ magic as her husband.”

“’Light’ and ‘dark’ magic is only a matter of perspective… and also of actions and justifications I suppose. By the general accepted moral compass of the modern times, much of what used to be commonplace would be repugnant, no matter how justifiable. The time before the Seminal War was one in which the Divines walked the earth on a regular basis, and their Domains had profound expects. The Life Domain for example encompassed both childbirth and savage ‘law of the jungle’ levels of competition - often in the same breath.”

“Mind that loose rock. Umph. So what you are saying is that magic before the Seminal War had less of a sense of… ethics, I guess? More ‘because we can’ then ‘because we should’?”

“More that the accepted definitions of ‘should’ were much broader back then. Plane-wide war tends to shake some things up a bit.”

Job and Lady SiDiabolo reached the top of the cliff and found themselves gazing past the ruined stump of a sprawling stone mansion at the aged remains of a blasted hellscape. Great stone structures reared skywards, but each and every one of them had been torn open, burned out, cut to pieces, blasted apart, and levered apart by centuries of wild growth. Even the stoutest of them, great off-white marble ziggurats, were visably split open like rotted eggs overflowing with grasses.

Job gulped at the scale of the buildings in from of him.

“How far away are we?”

“Six miles as the seagull flies, why?”

“Gods above and nine hells below, how big are those buildings?”

“The ziggurats you mean? That's the Temple of the Abyss. The largest of them was just over five hundred feet tall, and its three neighbors were all three hundred and fifty feet tall. Before the Seminal War anyway. I only see two of them however, and the third should still be visible...”

“Unless something completely leveled it.”

“Mmh. Possible. Several other landmarks of the Alexandrian skyline are missing. I don;t expect to find anything in that temple anyway. We need to find SiDiabolo House itself, the Ebon Askavi Archives, or the Zelmae family manor. One of those three places should either have what we need... or at least an idea of here we might go to find it.”