Date: Twenty Fifth of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)
Location: Ebon Askavi Archives, Armageddon Reef, Sapphire Bay, The Jeweled Republics.
The Ebon Askavi Archives, also called the High Lord of Hell’s Throne (when people thought that he wasn’t listening, at least), was a brooding pile of chiseled basalt and magically-carved obsidian statues. Time had worn down its edges and blunted the light-sharp angles of the statues, resulting in an appearance not far from a five-story tall black mountain dripping with gleaming stone spikes. It was a place that was designed to look ominous and imposing to intimidate any who would seek to depose its master.
Job Arseoth stepped closer to the front facade and ran his hand over the stones. They looked sooty and scorched as if discolored by a great fire. His fingertips found at first smooth stone, then molten scars, then small craters where projectiles had impacted, like a stone into water. Brushing away soot, he found the back of a skull embedded into the stone at the bottom of a crater: shoved face-first into the still-molten stone as the flesh was flash-vaporized from the heat.
“What… what happened here?”
Lady SiDiabolo spat in the dirt, “an assassination attempt, and then the beginning of the end of Alexandria. The High Lord cared little about politics… until they were forced upon him. Then he played them with the utter ruthlessness and absolute power as was his wont. Note that there are none of the great meteor craters within a good two hundred paces of this place? This was the one location in the whole of Alexandria that he ‘missed’ when he turned it into Armageddon Reef.”
Job shook the soot from his fingertips as best he could, “so what do you expect to find inside? More evidence of others manipulating your life?”
“Exactly the opposite. My father was… not the best of fathers, too often distant or un-reachable, but I smell my mother’s hand in that. I have no reason to suspect that she ever wanted him dead, just… not involved.”
“Are we going to search the whole place or…?”
“We’ll likely need to. For all its imposing edifice, most of the space is dedicated to records keeping and administrative functions. As an effectively neutral party my father was responsible for keeping a copy of the bloodline records for all the noble families. This included his own family, of course, which means…”
“Your bloodlines, if any. Why not the place where the official records were stored?”
“Battle damage… and creative editing by nobles for their own advantage.”
“It was that sort of court?”
“it’s always that sort of court, regardless if the positions are inherited or elected. Anything and everything for a leg up in the ‘great game’.”
“Alright, let’s get searching then. Three days your think? Five?”
“No way of knowing until we begin.”
Lady SiDiabolo led the way into the Ebon Askavi Archives, Job trailing a respectful two paces behind, and they set to work looking for the most jealously-guarded secret in a place full of such things.
. . . - - - . . .
Date: Twenty Fifth of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)
Location: The SiDiabolo House, Armageddon Reef, Sapphire Bay, The Jeweled Republics.
She inventoried everything that she had manage to salvage from the catacombs and ruins. Much of it was time-worn and battered, but all of it was still functional. A battered blue dress hemmed with scorched holes was her only piece of clothing. She had managed to salvage a bag of holding, one of the messenger-style ones with a single strap, and filled it with what few practical things that she could find. Her two salvaged Tomes of Rituals, a few scraps of food, a bedroll, a tin mess kit, a pair of gladii shortswords, an unused bundle of arrows, a quiver, and a longbow. She paused with longbow halfway into the bag then took it back out again, along with the quiver and the gladii. She might need weapons in the near future and fumbling blindly in the bag would not do in a combat situation. She salvaged a coil of silk rope and used some of it to improvise a belt. It wasn’t as useful as proper sheathes for her gladii, but it let her hands free with the longbow, quiver, and bag over her back.
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She didn’t know why she had come back here, to the SiDiabolo House of all places. She had not been welcomed within its walls for some time, even before the end of the war. Now she could not feel a single scrap of magic about the place as she cautiously wandered its halls. The dust was disturbed, fire scorched the stone-flagged floors in several places, evidence of recent trespassers. She went to the one room she recalled the best, hoping and fearing what she might find within its confines.
She pushed the door open and gagged on the ash still floating in the air. Someone, or something, had turned the room and everything in it into a burned-out cavern. Aside from the ash on the bare stone of the walls, there was no remnant of anything she had hidden.
She slumped to the ground in the middle of the room in despair. Her city, her temple, her hidden places: all was ash and ruin. Her gods had cast her from their light and left her to wander in the hope of redemption. The mantras that she had lived by, had re-shaped her body, mind, and soul in accordance with, crumbled like so much sand. As they blew away on winds of remorse, they left fragments for her to begin to rebuild about.
There, in the ashes of her hidden place of power, she began to reconstruct her being. Her magic faded to the merest scraps of what it had once been, dwindling to the fragments inherent to every high elf’s blood, replaced by the adamant determination of her mind. She turned inwards; focusing her mind upon her body and soul.
All was as sand and ash, flowing through mental fingers. Her body flexed and flowed as her will spiraled in self-recrimination. She let it spin down and settle into the grans flowing through her fingers, letting it blow away into psychic oblivion. The past was, constant and immobile. The future was a branching, unconquerable, unknowable storm of unlimited possibilities. All that she could control was the now, all that mattered was the now. She lived only in the now, experiencing that which was.
She let out a breath she didn't know that she had been holding, and old weights left with the stale air.
He body, after it had collapsed back into unity after her ritual, was still malleable. She had cast out the old anchors and changes that she had wrought, and needed to fill the holes that they had left. She poured her will into the gap, and felt her body change in obedience. Already light-weight, she made herself lighter for a brief moment, bouncing easily to her feet from a cross-legged position. A cycle of thought and a whispered mantra turned her skin form flesh to gleaming steel and back again. A different murmured phrase sent living runes of elemental endurance cascading across her skin. A third hones her senses to the razor's edge and lent an extra burst of speed to her pacing steps. A mental push found no other minds to push against, and an effort of will turned some of the resulting mental exhaustion into restored stamina.
She blinked and stared down at her hands.
“I... I am… Psion...?”
. . . - - - . . .
Date: Thirty First of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)
Location: The Ebon Askavi Archives, Armageddon Reef, Sapphire Bay, The Jeweled Republics.
Job Arseoth set the next in a seemingly endless line of dusty tomes on the table before Lady SiDiabolo.
“I’ve given up hope of there ever being a ‘last tome’ in this… black mountain. Five stories on the outside and anther six hidden below ground, and we still haven’t searched through a tenth of the tomes in this place.”
Lady SiDiabolo scrubbed dust from her hands and shook it from her hair, “we won’t have to. These records are all well-organized, but the catalog listing what is where is either destroyed… or only ever existed in my father’s mind. Each shelf, so far at least, has been the bloodline of a single family stretching back to just before the Silithid Empire began. As the Silithid Empire was matriarchal, not patriarchal, children are listed under their mother. The catch? I’m nowhere in the Zelmae family records.”
Job shook dust from his scales, “Didn’t your mother take your father’s last name?”
Lady SiDiabolo nodded, “unusual, yes, but it did happen. Why?”
“Would that mean you would be listed under your father, not your mother, in these archives?”
Lady SiDiabolo pushed the tome to one side, clasped her hands to her face, and placed her forehead on the tabletop.
“Yes, yes it would.”
Job tapped the cover of the tome he had brought, the one she had pushed to one side, “search over then. SiDiabolo bloodlines, tome one of one.”
Lady SiDiabolo eagerly snatched up the tome and leafed through the pages. Her fingers flicks and the pages few by until both settled upon a single entry. She cleared he throat and read aloud.
“ My father wrote 'the prospect of producing a child with Lady Zelmae is not improbable despite my advanced age, there are commonly available solutions to that. It is more a matter of the Soul that complicates things. Dormant in the SiDiabolo bloodline are a multitude of ancestries: Fey and Fiend, Celestial and Outsider, Dragon and humanoid of all sorts. Each is reflected upon the Soul and Body, though not all awaken within an individual. Given her own self-manipulation and trans-formative efforts however it is likely that a child of ours will suffer from, for lack of a better term, instability. We have proceeded anyway, given our desires, and I would watch closely to see what develops. Lady Zelmae and thrice-damned politics have managed to interfere however. The least and best I can do is to ensure that Ilelahne's soul remains her own. It, like she, Is a unique thing; too precious for this plane as it stands.' “
Job scratched the back of his head, “so what does that all mean?”
Lady SiDiabolo shrugged, “it means that my Soul is natural... and will be whatever I chose to make of it. I have what I need to proceed with the Ritual to free myself of my ties to this place.”