EM.1.2 The Chosen of Cyric

Session Preface

  The ritual chamber radiates with the iridescent blue shimmer of pure arcane magic, so visceral you can sense the tremendous heat and warbling pressure in the room. Visible threads of the Weave, like translucent tendrils knot and unwind and knot again in flashing circles around the Guardian's Tear. The gem, pulsing like a frenzied heartbeat, shines blindingly bright, spinning within the circle of magic with a high-pitched hum and constant buzzing.   Beyond the ritual, six members of the Arcane Brotherhood stand chanting, contributing their magic to the final preparations for the ritual of Ascension. Within the circle, Draxhar, the Demon of a Thousand Faces, snarls towards you. His wings extend from his broad shoulders, resisting the ritual's push against his proximity. Sweat shimmers against his grey-blue skin, every muscle in his fiendish form taut and tense, fighting against the Weave's sheer force compressed into the Guardian's Tear.   "The Chosen Three, come to witness their failure! You will be the first to bow before Cyric, the Truth of Salvation!"  

Session Summary

  The Chosen Three confront Draxhar and the Arcane Brotherhood mages aiding in the ritual. The combined efforts of Tristain's divine strike, Parathrax's guardians (a depiction of the late Parathraaj in his prime, including a small token from their mother, a cloth bond depicting Bahamut), and Vorothruun's arcane mastery bring down the defenses protecting Draxhar and stall the ritual's progress. The berated by the raw magic of the Guardian's Tear nearly destroying the chamber and the relentless assault of Draxhar with axes, spells, and abyssal fury, the Chosen Three achieve a narrow victory, defeating the demon just as their own strength began to falter. In the final moments, Vorothruun distracts the demon while Tristain counters his last ditch effort to turn one of them against the others. With this opening, Parathrax smites the demon with a silver flash of Bahamut empowering his lethal strike.  

Draxhar's Defeat, The Ritual's Completion

  Draxhar, Demon of a Thousand Faces falls, smoke rising from his body, a dark icor pooling across the floor. Though grimacing with pain, the fiend manages a smirk, a horrifying image on his sharp, angular face. “You fools.” he manages, before succumbing to his wounds.   Hovering above Draxhar, the Guardian’s Tear begins to tremble violently, then begins spinning, taking on the appearance of a prism of color swirling in the air. As it reaches a tremendous speed, a blur of color and light and pure magic bursting forth, the gem shatters with a deafening sound, like lightning tearing through your mind. Where the gem hovered in the air, you see a pure, dark void. The darkness spews forth chaotic bolts of black lightning and a menacing crimson glow along its edge. Outside, the skies darken and distant screams cry out. The void collapses in on itself with a thunderous boom, pushing you backwards. Where the gem once hovered is now only a tear in reality, a jagged scar of severed threads of the Weave, still crackling with arcane energy, as if a blade sliced through Existence itself.   A voice, maniacal and cold, one recognized from false visions and haunted dreams, as if from both within your person and beyond your self, speaks.   “Finally. The blood of the faithful, unwillingly spilled. The life of the Chosen, unwillingly taken. The final components of the paracausal rites. You self-proclaimed heroes nearly thwarted me and in doing so, would have doomed the realms. But now I rise once more and take my place as the sole defender of the universe. Free from the chains of the false gods. Free from Ao’s ignorance and cowardice. Free of the mortal coils and the bonds of divinity. I have Ascended and I am Cyric, the Salvation of Truth.”   The demonic corpse before you contorts, bones snapping into place, skin stitching over oozing wounds, muscles and veins slithering into place. Lifeless eyes catch flame like smoldering coals watching you with menace and ecstasy. His wings fully extend as he grows in stature, floating above you. The Draxhar you knew, feared, fought, and defeated is gone.   In his place, the figure is wreathed in illuminating shadow, his entire body a paradoxical iridescent void of shimmering darkness. Like a mirror reflecting the fullness of an empty frame. Like sheet music, showing the order and arrangement, but incapable of expressing the experience. Or like light catching the brushstrokes of a dark painting, stretched across the frame of reality.   Your mind is unable to render the full majesty of the vision before you, for you sense it in fewer dimensions than which it exists. You sense you experience the terror and beauty and truth and lies in part, for the whole of it would subdivide your mind into irrational fragments of insignificance.   “Now, if you will excuse me,” Cyric says, his voice a haunting two-tone pitch of his own and Draxhar’s in unison, “I must make preparations to save the world.” With the flick of his clawed hand, Cyric disappears.   In an instant, the jagged scar in reality where the Guardian’s Tear had once hovered extends, fracturing like thin ice above a rushing riverbed. The crackling sound reverberates in the ritual chamber, like a gong struck against your ears as existence is shredded by the sheer magical force of the now completed ritual. The distortions of reality spread like spider webs of raw chaos until they are stretched too thin and suddenly burst, each shattered portion of reality falling away like a broken mirror, reflecting the world as it once was and may never be again.   From the hole in reality, a blinding rapture of a thousand colors bursts, a prismatic explosion of pure light. The Weave, untangled and frayed, explodes into a million shards or razor-sharp threads, each a unique hue, gleaming in the darkness pierced with such unimaginably bright illumination. The fragments, like patchwork remnants of chromatic crystalline tapestries, snap apart, like sinew ripped from the bone. The threads whip and flail, striking out haphazardly, spreading outward, enveloping you.   Vorothruun, a tangled thread of the Weave snaps and coils around you, tightening around your neck like a noose. You gurgle out a cry, asphyxiating as your vision blurs, the world growing deafeningly quiet amidst the blinding light.   Parathrax, the next tangle of arcane magic, as thick as a tree trunk, pierces your armor like a javelin to the gut. Your ribs shatter from the force, your heart pierced and crushed. Your last exhale is a sudden gasp before numb finality settles over you, cold and still.   Tristain, a third rope of the Weave unfrays into individual strands, slicing across your flesh like a cruel whip. The sheer energy of the raw arcana melts the steel of your armor to your flesh, cauterizing the wounds. You lose consciousness as the unleashed Weave flays the flesh from your bones.   The radiating pulse of chromatic light swells as the Weave envelops you and all you can see, every last sense and thought reduced to its purest forms of Magic, Reality, and Time. Existence has been torn asunder. And the seams cannot hold the world together any longer. Everything fades to empty darkness.   In their final moments, each of the Chosen have a moment of their last fleeting thoughts. Vorothruun, amidst the defeat, feels a sense of ecstasy and anticipation, believing his about to be welcomed into Ragnalla's company in whatever is beyond the material world. Parathrax feels the weight of defeat more cripplingly, believing he did all that was asked of him, and questioning the point of it all if it was only going to end this way. Similarly, Tristain dying a second death, feels the loss of hope, his spirit breaking once and for all.  

The Aftermath

  You are unaware of the passage of time. Eventually, each of you come to. You find yourselves together, seated around a simple wooden table. Your clothes, armaments, and armor are restored, washed of the sweat and blood of battle. You do not feel the searing pain of the arcane energy nor the exhaustion of your harrowing confrontations.   The stone walls around you familiar as your senses come back into focus, the simple chandelier overhead and the candles at your table the only source of light, with windows shuttered along each wall. The tavern is quiet, the only sounds the crackling of embers in the hearth. From the kitchen, the succulent scent of a slow-roasted meat wafts into the hall, rich with herbs and spice.   The arched stone entrance ahead of you is carved with the names and sigils reminiscent of fallen friends and family members. You see your own crests carved into the very center. The door creaks open and a figure steps in.   A half-elf with dark, tan skin and black hair, longer than you remember, now pulled back into a bun, held with a thin dagger. A lute sits across his back. Over his vibrant tunic of green, yellow, and blue, he wears a purple shawl, embroidered with gold which shimmers in the low light. The figure holds firewood and kneels to place it by the hearth.   As he stands, Davan looks to each of you with a familiar fondness. And yet, there is something different, something new in his appearance. His eyes, you realize. Once a hazel, they now flicker with hints of each color of the spectrum, constantly shifting between each hue and shade. As he meets your gaze, you sense that he sees you fully as you are, as you were, and perhaps as you will be. As he looks to you, you feel yourself in the presence of not only your friend and companion, but someone and something far more ancient and primordial.   In the familiar voice of the bard and keeper of Stoneway Inn, Davan says, “We have much to discuss and you have much to do.” He sits, extended his hands to you, inviting the questions he expects swirl in your mind. “And with all that’s happened, I think it best you call me Thren.”  

The Stoneway Inn

  The Chosen Three find themselves returned the Stoneway Inn by Thren, sibling to Ao and Ragnalla. He, in the appearance and demeanor of their longtime companion, Davan, explains o them the workings of the universe, his place in it, and how they have come to be here.   He explains first that everything they experienced happened and was real — they defeated Draxhar, the ritual was completed, and they were subsequently killed by the effects, but Thren pulled them out of time and restored their memories to the present moment, as He believes them to be the best chance to defeat Cyric. The tear in reality they witnessed has since folded the Shadowfell, thanks to Cyric's own soul being bound to that plane because of his imprisonment and his connection to Ragnalla (whereas Ao is most aligned with the Material Plane and Thren the Faewild). Thren goes on to describe how the Shadowfell folding in on the Material Plane has caused the worlds to converge and deteriorate, causing chaos and devastation across Faerun, to the point of the laws of physics faltering around them.   Vorothruun opens the barred door and steps outside to see for himself. Durindale remains a shell of the town they'd only left behind, where the central tower is half-destroyed, surrounding by snow drifting upwards. Vorothruun's library appears ransacked and burned, while Parathrax's stronghold is where it once stood, but tilted on its side and facing a different direction. The walls are overgrown with moss and ivy, half their original height, as if they had faded away and been left for centuries. Beyond the city walls, a constant thick storm of dust rolls past, obscuring their view. Overhead, a constant swarm of dark clouds loom, roiling without thunder nor lightning. Though it is bright as mid day in a greyscale light, the moon is full and visible beneath the clouds.   Seeing the destruction, Tristain inquires as to how much time has passed since their death. Thren finds this straightforward question difficult to answer, describing how He has typically kept time in a strictly linear fashion, but when Cyric Ascended, he had to "loosen his grip" on time so as to avoid detection and maintain the guise of Cyric's total success. As a result, time has become unraveled, modulating in different spaces at different rates, warping reality along with the overflow of Magic caused by the Guardian's Tear.   As Vorothruun returns to the table, Parathrax works to wrap his head around Thren's explanations. Thren goes into more detail, describing the cyclical process of the lamina. The lamina, he explains are the subsequent layers of universes that have existed as the great philosophical experiment of Existence has played out between Ao, Ragnalla, and Himself. Since the first instance of creation, Ao created Reality, Ragnalla filled it with Magic, and Thren gave it motion through Time. When the world reached a pivotal point of entropy and power, Ragnalla would wake from her slumber to consume the world, proving it unworthy of Existence, for it was not strong enough to earn its place among the Paracausal Three. In these final moments, Ao would inevitably rise to defend creation, sacrificing himself to buy it more time before its own entropy finally destroyed it in its own time. Because of Ao's paracausal nature, His sacrifice would in turn substantiate the next layer of existence, the next universe, or lamina. As Thren explains, the universe the Chosen Three know is the 44th of these layers of existence. When the meta-physical nature of these topics proves difficult for the Chosen Three to wrap their minds around, Thren uses the familiar triangular game of pins as a metaphor to limited success.   It is Cyric's Ascent, then, which has broken this cycle, Thren reveals. It is the first time since the first lamina He does not know what will happen, and this frightens the primordial being greatly. His working theory is that if Cyric defeats Ragnalla, He will, as Cyric believes, save the current lamina from being destroyed, at least until it eventually destroys itself. However, without Ragnalla, the cycle of lamina would fall apart, meaning this universe would be the last, earning itself more time at the expense of all other future existence.   Still trying to understand the present moment, Parathrax reaches out for Bahamut's presence. He finds nothing. With a heavy heart, Thren reveals that one of Cyric's first acts following Ascension was to murder the entire pantheon of gods, like a boot crushing ants. When Parathrax reaches for Bahamut's arcane blessing, he finds his magic still works, but it is now channeled through Thren.   As the conversation continues, Tristain what must be done next to stop Cyric. Thren explains that, if the Chosen Three are willing, He will imbue each of them with a shard of paracausality so they might contend with Cyric on near-equal footing. From there, they will lead those who remain into Cyric's domain, the Supreme Throne, and bring him down once and for all. If they manage to do so, Thren will then be free to restore the universe to a semblance of normality, though it will never be the same as it once was.   With that, he welcomes in the Heroes of Durindale to join them and sets the tables for a grand feast, perhaps the last meal before the final confrontation with Cyric.