Echoes of Power, Part XIII: Death and Renewal
Even as the souls of Morvaethe’s captives wandered the lands, the ancient arcanist hatched a plan to restore his sanctum to working order.
After weeks of silence, the Curator emerged from a gateway conjured outside the Pleianes Complex and set about examining the amassed Seydan souls. This act attracted adventurers from every city-state spanning the continent, who arrived in time to hold a tense conversation with the elderly madman. Throughout the chat, Morvaethe made it clear that he sought to recover the souls of his captive exhibit, as their lack thereof made them ‘ugly to look upon’, and that it was no different from owning an expressionless painting or a statue without fine detail. Disgusted by this assertion, those amongst the Duirani immediately set about trying to find a way to deter the arcanist, who simply laughed and promised he would return in due time with the necessary tools to ‘reclaim his possessions’. Discouraged and defeated but not yet ready to concede, Sapience’s finest departed from the tiny corner of the Liruma with all haste in hopes of warning the realm at large of what was to come.
Two weeks later, the sorcerer returned with something that vaguely resembled a necromancer’s soul gem.
Morvaethe took the time to converse with those gathered as he set about utilising his newly wrought invention, his questions and responses barely audible above the din of screaming Seydan souls. Disturbed and furious by this desecration of their sanctity, Carotenuto Iron departed from the gathering and sought out a group of Duirani soldiers willing to join him in enacting a truly unthinkable plan. As he and a hundred wolfine marched ever closer to the temple of fallen Lleis, the adventurers who had stayed behind mourned their helplessness even as they spat venom towards this hated foe of the elder ages, who simply shrugged and laughed at the futility of their rage.
With only a few hundred Seydan souls left to recapture, the old wizard took more time to taunt and gloat – an act that would later be his undoing. His back turned, Morvaethe had no warning aside from the wild ululations of a Heartwood battlecry before a crowd of lupine swordsmen rushed towards him… and then beyond him, towards the remaining souls who stood in mournful helplessness. With fury to guide them, the warriors mounted an all-out charge that dispersed what remained of the wispy spirits, putting them firmly outside of Morvaethe’s reach.
Furious with this interference, the Curator’s face darkened like a swollen thundercloud. He swiftly made to depart back to his sanctum to restore what he could, though not before expressing his rage in a series of violent tantrums. Deeming some of the captive Vimunans as wasted eyesores due to a lack of soul, Morvaethe obliterated their physical forms to disperse them from the perfectly manicured beauty of his museum and screamed to the heavens in manic grief. Though the man culled dozens of Seyda from his exhibit, those adventurers attuned to the Underhalls felt the demise of three: a nameless reveller never again to experience a springtime festival, an anointed warrior-priest known as So’tel, the Autumn’s Tempest, and an elderly witch by the name of Tala Mossflower. Claiming that it was Sapience’s fault for their careless interference, the ancient nobleman informed the realm that the souls had been destroyed in their totality. He swiftly sequestered himself in his sanctum for several weeks and fussed ceaselessly over the soulbound gem in his clutches, the whole of his time and attention devoted to the restoration of Vimuna’s captured souls. A week later, still shaken by what they had done, the Heartwood gathered to mourn the destruction of hundreds of souls, convinced that Morvaethe’s expertise on the matter was ironclad.
Hours after the Heartwood had dispersed to sit in quiet gloom, the light of hope broke through their sorrow – or, more specifically, the griping of an old Seydan witch looking for her hut.
Flabbergasted by this turn of events, the Duirani mobilised posthaste and swept throughout the Aureliana in search of the old witch, unwilling to believe their ears until their eyes could agree on something thought impossible. It was Edhain de Verdigris who first found the little enchantress ambling about the southern end of the Aureliana’s new lake, and, in his excitement, he swept the ancient woman up into his embrace for sheer joy and relief. Confused but unwilling to anger a stranger who was clearly happy to see her, the elderly witch only managed to escape the hug when the rest of the Heartwood – and many other Sapient adventurers – had gathered to look upon her. A veritable avalanche of questions soon buried Tala Mossflower, who seemed to be gaining her bearings at an alarmingly fast pace.
The witch claimed that she had undergone a spirit journey – a separation of the body and soul, wherein she looked upon a Sapience changed in so many ways as to be nearly unrecognisable to her. According to her narrations, Tala had looked upon the temples of a new age: vast cities of stone where iron and pain ruled as tyrants, or else where fire and fury held as the eternal monarchs. She whispered of desecrated altars of steel, wherein praise was given to no god but the self, and of battlefields upon fields where none of nature’s beauty yet remained. The Seyda, awe in her hushed tone, went on to explain that she had beheld new, green places of ‘utmost life’, something that drew murmurs from the living amongst her growing audience. When the vision quest had ceased, Tala had sought to join the rest of her people before the temple of their beloved Goddess, where they could finally be together and free from their captor and from the terrible passage of time without decay.
Eventually, the wolfine had dispersed her – not killed her or destroyed her soul, as Sapience had feared, but simply sent her to stand before the Mirror as was the way of things. The witch seemed confused at this moment, as if she did not know the Soul Mirror, and had insisted that it might be some new landmark capable of subverting death, though her newfound companions were swift to explain the Mirror’s truths to her. Disquieted by this revelation and all the newness of the world, she admitted that she had not seen any of her fellow Seyda on her way through a Mirror that had initially refused to process her – and then, after gazing upon its silver-seamed sights, she had woken up in a ‘very uncomfortable cave that needs more furnishing’.
The old enchantress mourned the state of the world, and she seemed convinced that the Wars of Power yet raged to this day. She explained to the crowd that she had been a protector of Vimuna, a powerful deterrent to Yetrent and the Dark Empire. Tala even went so far as to insist upon the fantastic and mysterious sights she had beheld throughout the workings of sorcery through the fabled landmarks, leaving many to wonder what she could teach in the days to come. When pressed about the state of things within Morvaethe’s stasis, the elderly witch admitted that those captured were capable of perceiving the passage of time – a maddening thing that her mind had been inoculated against ages ago when she took up the practice of ritual magic. However, she admitted that many of her people would not possess such a gift and thus none of its protections, leaving Sapience’s finest to worry for the health and sanity of those still held in Morvaethe’s clutches.
As the elderly witch sat down in her new hut built by the hands of overjoyed Sentinels, an unlikely duo took wing once more after investigating a slumbering landmark…
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Summary: Morvaethe partially succeeded in reclaiming the souls of Seyda that had gathered outside fallen Lleis’ temple. Of those he could not regain, dispersed by a wolfine military gambit as they were, an elder Seydan witch known as Tala Mossflower found herself once more whole in body where she settled into the recently transformed Aureliana.
Penned by my hand on Tisday, the 12th of Ios, in the year 12 AC.
