Chapter 2.5: Who Am I?

At some point in the night, Ardeth finally finds herself alone nodding off to sleep in their free room at the Unbroken Tusk. It's a peaceful, hard-earned sleep after a long day of kicking butt and taking names. But, it doesn't take long before Ardeth's mind is far away.

Suddenly, Ardeth finds themself in a body that they have not seen or felt before, at least you think. But somehow, the body feels intimately connected to her, it is familiar in a strange, inexplicable way. Long, sun-elven ears gracefully flow from the sides of their head and long, curly, orange hair falls to her shoulders. The body is intensely woven in magic, adorned in magic objects and the raw magical potential of an archmage, but there is also something missing: the ability to shift shape.

She?... you, find yourself in a long and dark hallway somewhere deep within a massive labyrinth of a structure. It's a weird, out-of-body experience: you are both living it first person and viewing it through the tiniest binoculars from a million miles away. Glorious marble floors stretches before and behind you as the click clacking echoes from your elegant shoes bounce off the walls. You speak a command word and suddenly you are footsteps are silent and the shadows cling to you.

A moment later, you hear shouts coming from some hallway behind you and torchlight begins to lighten the walls behind you. But you keep moving forward, for something you have been working towards for years, no decades of your ancient elven life is just merely a few more fancy, darkened elven hallways away. You have sacrificed wealth, power, relationships, everything, for this one shot to get this item for yourself. You know you are disappointing your friends, your family, but this is all you've ever wanted. You are determined and focused. You're going to get it.

For a moment they felt trapped. Stuck in form, unable to change. There was a sense of loss, but then the footsteps snap them out of it. They needed to keep going. They were so close, they could get distracted now.

The ..changling? No elf, throws a hand behind them, conjuring flames to slow their pursuers, before striding forward, magic which first quietened their footsteps now morphing to increase their speed. If people were behind them, no was the time to value speed, not stealth. They need to get their quickly. They were so close.

Streaming from your hands, a wall of flames engulfs the hallway behind you. Elven curses and yelps of shock, surprise, and anger ring through the halls as you continue to push forward, deeper down this labyrinth of elegant, underground hallways. After a few more twists and turns, you swear the gravity has shifted and the floor and ceiling have reversed themselves, but you cannot stop to investigate. Time feels funky down in these drow-crafted depths, did you see the guards a few seconds ago or has it been a few minutes now? Your mind can't decide.

Until finally, you reach the door, the door you've been searching for. You grasp the handle and sigh in relief, you've made it. You push open the door and in front of you lie beauty itself. Pinkish-purple crystal shards jut from every wall pointing towards the center of the rough-hewn cavern. Sourceless light glitters across every surface. The artifact rests in the center of the room, gently hovering in mid-air with an aura of power flowing from it, making you feel small just from its presence. The long, elegant, deadly, deep violet sword of untold power rests just before you. The Luxon's greatest boon, the Fate Sculptor.

Your mind races with all the things you could do with power like this, of all the things you could accomplish, of all the magical discoveries to be made, and the advantages it will give you over the competition: the other great flying cities in this Age of Arcanum. Your city... which you cannot seem to remember at the moment, stands so much to gain from this artifact, and at this moment it rests before you.

There's now nothing standing between you and your treasure, nothing between grabbing that artifact and teleporting back to... ugh, as you try to think of the name of the city, your mind begins to split again. But that is no deterrent.

A wave of a had shuts the door behind them, a wall of force falling across it to block any interference.

A few moments to bask in the beauty, the power, the potential, and then they start to reach out a hand only to pause. They mustn't get reckless. So close, they couldn't risk losing it by being foolish now.

They start to speak wards casting detection spells and other various measures to unsure there are no traps, no wards that would get in between them and the relic. Once they were satisfied that any dangers were not there or removed, then they reach out for their prize.

The power only draws stronger as you reach out and grasp the blade. The winds of time and fate blast through the room, throwing your long elven hair into a swirl as the relic imparts onto you an understanding of what it is. What you are holding in your hands now is the Luxon's first beacon, its first gift upon Exandria. Today, the Kryn Dynasty's holiest relics are its beacons, dodecahedron-shaped objects of unfathomable power that allow for the Dynasty's highest religious rite: consecution (reincarnation) among its highest and proudest members. The sword draws power directly from the Luxon, and gives the user the power to bend fate and the natural order of existence to their will.

In Exandria, souls are created at birth, then pass on to one of the many Outer Planes when they die. But a beacon catches souls bound to them before they leave the Prime Material Plane, then redistributes it to a random new body as a new baby is born anywhere within a kingdom-sized region close to the beacon, also preventing the creation of a new soul in the process. Among other powers, this sword was the first beacon, trapping the souls of those it slays to be redistributed into new bodies, to give them another chance.

With the guards now pounding on the door, one hand on the relic and one casting an ancient spell, your elven form vanishes from that deep cavern and arrives back in... the city. Your feet arrive in a magic circle imprinted in elegant runes on the roof of a tall, stone building. Here above the clouds in this magic, flying mountain of a city, the sunlight is painfully blinding and it takes a moment to adjust. You look down at the sword in your hands and just know... you made it.

Until suddenly the sky goes dark. You fear for a moment your teleportation failed and you are back in that dungeon, but no, you are still in the city, the sun has been blocked from the sky. The city flies above the clouds, this shouldn't be possible. Looking up, you see the most awe-inspiring and fear-inducing sight you have ever seen. The image of an actual god, a Betrayer God, one that has been sealed away in the depths of existence for centuries, now lording over the city flying hundreds of feet above the clouds of Exandria. One massive eye in the center of its face stares down into the city with pure hatred, surveying everything at once and deciding its demise. The god raises a spear the length of the moon and plunges it into the city's core. A wave of concussive force throws your body into the air, flung straight towards the side of a capsizing skyscraper. No wonder you can't remember the name of this place, you are actively watching it be erased from history by a god.

You hit the side of the building, and all existence stops as the sword shatters in your hands, shielding you from certain death, embedding some of its magic into you as its pieces fracture and burst and are flung in every direction like bullets.

Suddenly moving at light speed, you see people, places, and time itself flashing before your eyes as you live throughout the ages, as humans and elves, as orcs and goblins, as gnomes and dwarves, until finally you shoot up in bed, clutching the broken sword in one hand.