Well, that seems like the best fit for what you're describing at least.
I'll trust your judgement in that.
Going back a bit to the Coin, I really was aiming to have a very evocative feel of it being a fairy tale, so I'm glad that you hit upon that. I do wonder how many tropes I used in it though.
An aside too, it's something that I wouldn't mind seeing someone else explore.
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
I don't know that I could call the tropes out by name, it just felt like a very traditional sounding story.
I mean the most obvious parallel would be Pinocchio, of course.
Something of a dieselpunk pinocchio was more or less what I was aiming for with it. It does make me sort of pseudo brainstorm what kind of world the Coin came from. Which is kind of an interesting thought exercise.
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
The darkmantle is certainly Moar Metal than your average article of clothing. Fortunately, I think I'm safe from its lure, since it doesn't sound like it would go with my Hawaiian shirts.
Love the little note at the end about the blood.
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"And remember, I'm pullin' for ya, 'cause we're all in this together." - Red Green
Oh yeah! I forgot to comment on that! The non-scholarly side of Maral. That was a great little touch there, and would be an interesting tale in its own right.
The darkmantle is certainly Moar Metal than your average article of clothing. Fortunately, I think I'm safe from its lure, since it doesn't sound like it would go with my Hawaiian shirts.
Love the little note at the end about the blood.
I dunno, I think the lovely gems made out of EYES would fetchingly set off whatever floral print you're wearing this summer. ... it would, admittedly, probably be hot as balls, what with it being leather and all black and everything. Let's see what other artifacts we have in your size...
Oh yeah! I forgot to comment on that! The non-scholarly side of Maral. That was a great little touch there, and would be an interesting tale in its own right.
Yeah, that ties in a lot with how I felt it was important to distinguish between the two voices. You guys mentioned it back on the Hands, and I said that it was just a case of changing gears, but I'm glad that you feel that they stand out from each other now.
And I tooooooootally have a plan for all about how she got the darkmantle off its last host. Clearly! I am not completely making this up at all, everything has a plan!...
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
Also referenced as: The Crown of Light, the Coronet of Victory, the Horned Halo This relic was damnably hard to trace, and it was Maral who realized the blasted thing appeared in more than one place. The oldest name it was given suggests an instrument, as seen in countless paintings of angel's blowing their trumpets, but the truth was that it was actually a helmet. A horned helmet.
In its earliest recorded appearance, the helm seemed to be nothing more than a symbol of authority, a ceremonial item that marked the leader of the angelic hosts of its homeworld. Some unknown cataclysm occurred and when next it appeared, it was in the possession of a church on a world where angels had become nothing more than myth. How it got there is a total mystery, as well as the final fate of its makers. It is on this new world that the true depth of its power began to show. It remained in the collection for centuries, an oddity that inspired legends and belief, but it was poorly understood. The ones who held it had no idea what it truly meant, and what they thought they learned from it was very misunderstood.
What comes next is a confused mess of incomplete records. Some threat arose, it is unclear of its nature, but in desperation the church turned to the artifact. The woman chosen for the task had no clue what she was being asked to do, as none in the church knew what power it may hold, but they were in terrible danger and their options were dwindling so swiftly that a desperate act was all that was left to them. Their martyr was transformed when they placed the item on her head, proving that the helmet was more than merely ceremonial, and she underwent apotheosis, reborn in fire and became an angel herself. She wiped out the threat and gave rise to a new angelic army to keep the kingdom secure.
However, the story does not end there. While peace reigned, discontent began to grow in the angelic ranks. The crime in the nation was seen as a sign of corruption in the leadership, and before long, a violent revolution tore the country apart. The archangel seized power and turned the kingdom into a totalitarian state. Under the blade of the angels, oppression ran rampant until revolution came again, toppling the angelic powers and tearing the kingdom apart for good. The Horns of the Archangel vanish then, only to appear once more elsewhere. We can only be thankful that the helmet seems to spend most of its time in dormancy.
(Raleris's account of the history above is extremely dire, but in my travels, I encountered stories that paint a totally different picture. Most histories in which the Horns appear ends with an angelic coup, but several of those were peaceful and led to prosperity in the subsequent years. I believe it is tied to under what circumstances the Horns are donned. If worn for peace, they lead to peace. If worn for War, then a harsher fate is bound to follow.
The results of the apotheosis may also be drawn to the bearer's disposition, the alignment of their magic and their identity which influences what ultimately becomes of the helmet's bearer. There are a lot of answers I don't have about the relic and until I can work out more about it, I'm placing it in the secure vault.
I... am very pensive at the similarities of this relic's abilities and the Rapture of Elysium. -Maral)
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
I like the horns. I really enjoy these sorts of severe take on angels (even though I'm not overly fond of MTG angels in general) and this sort of back story reveal is pretty appealing to me. The connection Maral makes between the object and the history of her home plane is pretty interesting, too.
And, of course, because it's just what I do, I have to note how interesting it is that Maral seems to be withholding information from Raleris.
Although, in this case, I don't think that's what going on. She just has newer info than his original version did. I just sort of like the implied, emerging working relationship between the two.
So you've got your Angelic artifact and your Demonic artifact. Nice.
I would be remiss if I didn't have a dragon artifact as well. Though you'll have to wait a bit longer for that one. It's further down the line.
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I wonder if the Cataclysm ages ago might have been part of our Year Zero incident...
Totally okay with that if you want to put it in.
... phrasing?
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
Also reference as: Time Breaker, the Night Disk What has passed cannot be undone. It is a law of nature, but to those with great power, even the laws of time and space seem mutable and desperation drives those with that kind of power to terrifying ends.
The Wheel of Night found its genesis at the hands of a fallen angel. She had been cast from her host centuries before, and in all that time, one simple thing had driven her to obsession. She wished for nothing more than to restore the grace she had lost. Not much is spoken of angelic artificers or their capacity as scholars, but she had once been one of the brightest. She spent the time following her fall searching for some way to undo the horrible mistakes she’d made. In the darkest corners of the Pit she’d been cast into, she worked, scrawling numbers and figures upon every surface of the cavern she dwelt in. Using divine equations and hellish geometry, she crafted a device that would offer her salvation at last. Centuries of work upon her arcane calculations finally bore results, and those took the shape of the Nocturne Wheel.
The device, according to every reckoning she could answer, offered her a chance to literally undo her time, to restore herself to an earlier state from before she was corrupted. With trembling hands, she lifted the machine and used it. Her dream was finally realized and the centuries melted from her… and the very artifact that allowed this corrupted her all over again. Aghast, she used it again, rewinding further, but the act itself was a perversion of all that is sacred. As the realization came upon her, her mind snapped and she drove herself further and further back, sure that if she could only restore herself just a little further back, she could attain her purity once more.
And she ceased to exist.
The Wheel fell where she had stood and there it rested undisturbed for an unknown time. No other resident of hell would touch it, somehow being too profane for even their depravity. But where there is great power, there will always be those foolish enough to wield it. It appears a necromancer gained possession of it, I don’t know how, and used the artifact to try to cheat death of its rightful possession as he grew older. There is some irony since the very thing that fuels the terrible energies of the Wheel is the force of life itself. It restored his youth, certainly, but at the cost of nearly everything that remained of his life. The device had been meant only for the hands of an immortal, someone with unlimited life to give.
There are sparse notes following its path across the cosmos, but whatever mysteries the machine might possess, I am not sure if they should be unraveled.
(I hate this thing. I can hear it clicking somewhere deep in my soul any time I touch it. I’ve taken to wearing thick gloves when I have to move it, otherwise I try to have nothing to do with it. The worst part is that it is far more aware than other relics I have encountered. It seems… for lack of a better word, curious. There are times when I feel like it’s staring at me and others when I think it is actually a shadowy figure dotted with pinpoints of light. When I turn to look, it’s never there. In times like these, I wonder what actually becomes of the life it drinks to fuel its mechanisms.
I have no idea what the internal mechanisms of the device look like, but considering the insane geometry that must have gone into it, I doubt I could possibly understand it. The outer casing is cast in silver, and the interior is filled with what I can only call shards of the night sky in the shadows of the twisting gears. It reminds me, vaguely, of Nyx, but there is something subtly different about it.
The one thing I have learned that was not in Raleris’s notes was that it does not just restore youth. It is capable of completely manipulating the time of an object. It can accelerate an object’s age as well as reverse it, reduce a living being into a skeleton in the span of a breath. -Maral)
So I thought to myself, "I'll have to invent something new in the next ten minutes. Perhaps some sort of death clock. mmYes..."
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
Thiiiis has some intriguing possibilities... I wonder what effect it would have on, say, an immortal, trapped, lich lord Planeswalker... or someone else whose lifespan had been magically made effectively infinite.
Thiiiis has some intriguing possibilities... I wonder what effect it would have on, say, an immortal, trapped, lich lord Planeswalker... or someone else whose lifespan had been magically made effectively infinite.
The lich would effectively have to feed people to it since... well, it runs on life and Liches aren't well known for having LIFE just laying around. In fairness, that was one thing I did consider while writing it.
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
What about, say, someone cursed in another way that rendered them functionally immortal?
In theory they could turn back time like a Cher concert. What side effect it might have once they get done using it, I couldn't say, but...
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
What about, say, someone cursed in another way that rendered them functionally immortal?
In theory they could turn back time like a Cher concert.
If the next artifact turns out to be "The Temporal Fishnets," we'll know where the idea came from.
EDIT - On the recent artifacts themselves, the horns are interesting, in part because I've always been a big fan of angels, for whatever reason. And I can think of a certain M:EM planeswalker who might possibly be very curious about an artifact that can turn you into an angel.
I assume that the Wheel's nasty properties are due to all the Globetrotter math used in its design and construction. Too much razzle-dazzle!
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"And remember, I'm pullin' for ya, 'cause we're all in this together." - Red Green
EDIT - On the recent artifacts themselves, the horns are interesting, in part because I've always been a big fan of angels, for whatever reason. And I can think of a certain M:EM planeswalker who might possibly be very curious about an artifact that can turn you into an angel.
If you're referencing Raef, it's the exact opposite that he's interested in. Plus Maral and he share a homeworld, so...
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I assume that the Wheel's nasty properties are due to all the Globetrotter math used in its design and construction. Too much razzle-dazzle!
Globetrotter math indeed. Though in fairness, anything you describe as "Hellish geometry" is probably not the best thing to toy with.
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At twilight's end, the shadow's crossed / a new world birthed, the elder lost. Yet on the morn we wake to find / that mem'ry left so far behind. To deafened ears we ask, unseen / "Which is life and which the dream?"
EDIT - On the recent artifacts themselves, the horns are interesting, in part because I've always been a big fan of angels, for whatever reason. And I can think of a certain M:EM planeswalker who might possibly be very curious about an artifact that can turn you into an angel.
If you're referencing Raef, it's the exact opposite that he's interested in.
Oh, I get that. But I would think that he'd be interested in the mechanics purely out of the hope that he might figure out a way to reverse the process.
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"And remember, I'm pullin' for ya, 'cause we're all in this together." - Red Green
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