With tag muffling live, I'm going to reduce some of the CW tagging. If anything gets particularly lurid or provocative I'll still CW, of course. Let me know if there's a big preference for keeping them.
The Age of Amulets (4)
The Fourth Keeper - trIX the Bloodied - An All-Conquering Warlord
- Who are they? - trIX
trIX is the ninth child of the sixty-ninth generation of Family Ghant, or would be if they still held to that tradition. Finding little point in counting a generation on a dead past or to venerate an ignoble name, the naming convention evolved to match the family's reality. trIX, 'Tricks' to her friends and family, was reared on stories of her family's former glory, of a great Atheran history - she grew up dreaming of returning Athera (and her family, of course) to its noble state. Her teeth are filed in the Filarii style and there is a bounciness to her body language. She is oratorical, loyal, righteous, idealistic, and impetuous. trIX bought the Stack for a pittance in a Filarii oddity shop.
- Keeper Question - Describe their empire and the armies they rule it with. -
It would be more apt to describe trIX's empire as a revolutionary force. Drawing people together from across many causes, trIX promised the people a return to a softer past, to an Athera that had been their birthright. Her cause was sympathetic to many, both inside and out of the fallen kingdom. Though Perry's thirty-odd year reign had been a time of unparalleled stability for Athera, an iron fist slackens in death. Civil war and ruination dominated the seventy years since Perry's death. trIX's campaign drew interest from all sorts of people, from the philanthropic to the opportunistic.
- Keeper Question - How did you help them establish their mighty dominion? - Like many, trIX first used the Stack for entertainment. It didn't take her long to realize the predictive power of her Stack was beyond anything a simple meditative experiment could offer. Every Page drawn gave her intense, nauseating deja vu as events came to pass. Despite her natural affinity for reading the Pages, the prospect overwhelmed her, and trIX consulted the Stack sparingly. Nevertheless, the occasions where trIX did draw Pages were significant - it helped her to recruit powerful allies among the churches, execute the Siege of Pargonne with minimal casualties, and pre-empt an assassination attempt.
- How did the Keeper lose or relinquish the artefact? - trIX died without disclosing that she ever held the genuine Stack in the first place. It was buried along with her other personal effects.
Victories and Valour - Forgiveness
A great warrior was trapped in an impossibly tall tower by an evil sorcerer. Why did your Keeper owe them their life and how did you help free them?
Over the course of her ascendance, trIX met a great many people who helped her out along the way. One of them was a woman named Bea. Bea, through a vicious cunning and sadistic streak, helped trIX bring a troupe of unruly dissidents to heel and in doing so saved trIX's life.
trIX helped free her from the sorcerer - a rightly furious jilted former friend of Bea's - with the promise of power in a new Athera. As is so often the case with those who grasp at magical prowess, the lure of power was stronger than the lure of revenge. The sorcerer released Bea to trIX's command with little more than a sneer and a sealing spell.
Fate
Artefact Question - You were once used to cruelly change the fate of someone your Keeper was madly in love with. Describe the person they betrayed.
Everyone has loved someone they should not. It's an emotional trap so pedestrian that a truck of grief makes a purpleish-red smear of everyone's heart at some point.
trIX was no exception.
trIX loved someone deeply, more deeply than she ever had before.
Her name was Sench. She was a childhood friend of trIX, a Filarii merchant's daughter. They played in the orchard while their parents bartered, learned numbers together, and together set their eyes on a restoration of Athera. Where trIX's eyes sought restoration, Sench's sought rejuvenation. The sight of fallen Athera pained her in the way it pains historians. Her hair was soft copper - red for the most part, streaked with blue where stained by magical fire in youth. Her smile was fleeting but precious.
Their dreams for Athera grew hand in hand, their fingers interwoven at every step.
It wasn't that Sench was going to betray trIX or that she would find herself alienated from her lover's growing designs. Rather, trIX was faced with two missions - one that demanded a coldbloodedness that Sench didn't possess and the other a kindness she did. The Stack revealed that both missions were to fail if Sench wasn't sent like a lamb to the slaughter of cruelty.
trIX chose the future of Athera.
Sench was killed without so much as a whisper, the entire palatial grounds compressing into an ill-formed mass of indistinguishable materials. Nobody knows why negotiations collapsed with such violent magic, not even trIX - the wrinkles of Time have never given reason, they just are.
trIX never took another lover.
Time
It will be another century before the Stack resurfaces in the hands of the Fifth Keeper.
Dust and Rust - Whether by frost, corrosion, or something stranger, a prominent setting or rune is damaged irreparably. How does the damage affect one of your properties?
A small demon took a whole ass bite out of the Stack.
Stupid and slavering and sharp, this demon was the minion of a sorcerer that trIX fought during the Siege of Pargonne. trIX wrestled fiercely with the demon, suffering great wounds during their skirmish. The demon took snapping bites out of trIX with narrow gharial jaws. One such bite closed in on the Stack, snapping through the Pages with trifling effort.
It is said that a rainbow confetti burst from the demon's mouth as it's jaws closed, resplendent and causing blindness in the fearful. The demon, too, exploded into confetti - sometimes, this demon is drawn at the heels of Cialo the Indebted, its narrow gharial mouth full of pins.
trIX succumbed to the wounds incurred in this battle many months later, as gangrenous infection set in. Cauterized from her realm, there was no healing for the wounds inflicted by the demon - trIX bled and bled and bled and then died. It was not dramatic, or heroic, or powerful - it was a wasting death, a death of dehydration and withering and slow erosion.
trIX deserved better.
Time waltzes on.
The Stack now has a bite taken out of it, a vertical slice no more edifying than the foreedge of the outer rim. It is otherwise unchanged.
Ongoing World Notes
Dramatis Personae
- Oktahn, the Merchant-Revolutionary - he/him - The first Keeper. Destined to fail, Oktahn's burning ideals of self-determination were quickly snuffed by an unyielding social inertia. While he was able to open the doors to magical academia to some, this drop of change was a mere drop in the bucket of blood his actions wrought.
- IX/LXI of Family Ghant, the Young Noble - they/them - The second Keeper. They used the power of the Stack to bring their siblings to political heel and pulled their lands into a golden age.
- Perry, The Bandit King - one/ones - The third Keeper. Grasping Athera by the throat, Perry rose to prominence first as an outlaw and then as the law. One succeeded where Oktahn failed, toppling Athera's social order before taking the nation in one's iron grip.
- trIX the Bloodied, the All-Conquering Warlord - she/they - The fourth Keeper. They sought to unify a shattered Athera and were struck down in their prime.
- Time - she/they/it - Time. A celebratory, mythological figure depicted most often in a ball gown with an expansive train. Associated with party favours, such as streamers, confetti, sparklers, etc.
- Cialo the Indebted - she/her - An archmage who is best known for creating the Stack by stealing cutouts of Time's skirt. She was cast into timeless debt for this theft, and now attends Time's gowns. She is often depicted with a demon at her heel, offering her pins from a bloody mouth.
World
- Athera - A culture/nation rooted in determinism and fate, where individuals are born, live, and die in the shadows of their family. They reject the concept of social mobility in entirety, and punishment for transgression is corporeal.
- Filarin - A culture/nation that shares a border with Athera.
- Parlth - An addictive street drug, readily available to even the most disenfranchised. It stains the whites of eyes pink-red with blood loosed from veins.
- Pox Psora - A plague prevalent among those living in poverty, Pox Psora. The primary symptom of the pox is the itch - an irrepressible, full body itching that sits below the subcutaneous layer. Those afflicted are driven to scratch themselves beyond raw, lacerating their skin over and over seeking relief. It can not be alleviated by means magical or mundane. Pox Psora has a 15% mortality and 95% morbidity rate. Mortality rate skyrockets to 40% if an afflicted party is allowed to scratch themselves unimpeded, typically as a result of opportunistic infections, blood loss, and/or dehydration. The full course of an infection runs over 10-13 days and reinfection is rare.
- The Turning - A historical event denoting the overthrow of the previous Atheran sociocultural order during Perry's time as Keeper - similar in consequence to the Russian Revolution.
Takeaways
Reflections
- Did the generational math for 210 years at +- 4 generations per century, saw that 69th generation was a totally viable, perhaps even unambitious, choice. Nice.
- I really struggled with this one! Combine some generalized January blues with not being particularly invested in the trope of rescuing legendary warriors from evil sorcerers because of debts and we've got a recipe for other hobbies to dig roots into my time. But enough dillying and certainly enough dallying. Half-assed that particular question with barely a third of my ass, and we're moving on.
