Found On: Albilhom

The struggle of man against nature is as old as time, but the story behind this gnarled staff, more a cudgel than anything, is one of the most horrific stories I've heard of that conflict.


By the time I arrived, that entire wing had been completely overcome by nature, though it seemed contained to that wing alone. The court magus, I am not sure if he was the one from the story or not, had laid powerful wards over the building. I managed to undo them and entered the wilderness that had once been an opulent castle.

I found the supposed staff exactly where it had been years ago, but you could scarcely call it a staff any longer. It had grown larger, thicker, and resembled nothing so much as a great hooked club with the immense stones that had crowned the staff twisted into a hard bludgeon at the end of the club. Just touching it, you could feel the malevolence running through it, the ancient nature spirit trapped and clearly driven utterly insane since it was interred in the remnants of its own body.

I've put my own wards on it, carved into the wood to limit some of its influence on the outside world. There are several other wards drawn onto the wall where it hangs. I'm not sure if I should destroy it or not to be honest, but for the time being, I'm leaving it alone.

Found on: Camdyn

There are moments in our lives where we must step back and objectively consider how we managed to reach that point. Sitting in a boat, waiting for a damned dragon, of all things, to attack me, I can't help but come to the conclusion that something in my life went amiss. Badly.

I'd come to the plane of Camdyn to deliver a crate of weapons I'd been commissioned for, but while there, I heard the rumors of the legendary swords of Gamor. They were said to burn with a preternatural fire that could be extinguished by no worldly means, and admittedly, I had little in the way of plans, so I sought out the supposedly legendary smiths of the town. In the shadows of the volcano known as Mount Ghuilbin, I found them, but what I found was... less impressive than rumors suggest. Asking after the legend, I was deferred to the elder who was nearly half as tall as I was, which is actually an outstanding height for humans. He invited me to the docks and explained the legend.



They'd spent most of their riches repairing the village, hoping the dragons would leave them alone now that they'd taken the ore, and for the most part they were right. They made the occasional foray into the mountains to hunt one of the beasts when they ranged too close to their land, trying to teach them to keep to their volcano. They found the ore in the stomachs of the dead dragons, but it was too dangerous to carry with them, much less store in the village.

There was only one problem, and it explained the shabby conditions which I found the town in. There was one dragon unwilling to let matters lie. She attacked any boat that tried to fish out on Loch Leer, and what cattle they tried to raise would suffer the same fate. They had been shipping food in from neighboring villages, but it was merely a stop gap if they could not eventually finish off the beast.

Before I knew it, I was on their largest boat wondering how I managed to get there. They claimed I could solve their problems and gain my swords all in one swoop if I would just deal with the dragon. I'll be honest, I don't even remember how they convinced me to get on the boat, but I am not what one would call a strong swimmer, and yet, I was in a position to help them, though at least part of it was to help myself. All the same, I was distinctly unhappy and couldn't shake the feeling that I was being used. Sailing out past the far ruins of the aqueducts, I heard the first soft susurrus of wings.

The dragon was not much larger than I am, but as she came winging down, it took all of my concentration and a great deal of my annoyance at the circumstance to actually stand in the boat and prepare to meet her. Seeing something as large as she was spooked her fairly badly, and rather than attack immediately, she landed on the far side of the boat, and nearly capsized the damn thing and drowned us both. If I never fight on a boat again, never mind fighting another DRAGON on a damned boat, I will STILL say that it's been once too often for my entire life. Suffice to say, even though I managed to win and paddle back to town, it was not one of my finest moments.

The village, for their part was overjoyed and offered to forge me a weapon right then. I told them to pull the metal out of the stupid lizard's belly and I'd quit the village as soon as possible. They still insisted on throwing a feast to celebrate the dragon's death, and after all is said and done, I'm glad that they can fish again, but I still felt abused and taken advantage of.

Back in the vault, I managed to create a pair of scimitars from the metal harvested out of the dragon's gullet. The metal resonated with red mana, and that is the source of the metal's fire, which true to legend, once ignited could not be put out. It chewed through stone and metal alike... and then into my damned floor. It kept burning even under water, and even my quickest wards barely kept the flames contained. It wasn't until I tried using the counter of red mana that I managed to quell the fire. Overall, I still consider the weapons a success, even minus the worktable they bloody well ate...

They aren't my finest work, the metal is a mottled dark and red that is ugly no matter how much I polish it. The finish is always ruined every time the blades ignite anyways, but for sheer destructive power, there are few pieces I've forged that could surpass them. Luckily I had the foresight to forge the tang from an alloy that's heat resistant, otherwise they'd probably fall apart, though I could never get a cross-guard that worked as well. Still, the hilt wraps are enough to keep fire off the hand, so it's a moot point.

Found on: Camdyn

There are times, in the deepest hours of sleepless nights, when I am haunted by the thoughts I try to ignore. The inspiration for works that scare even me. In those dark times, I'm forced to consider where I stand on the thin line between genius and madness and how in the infinite reaches of Dominia, there are people and places that... blur that line too far.



I found him there.

The dwarven legend is centuries, eons old, but nevertheless I found him, as brilliant and insane as the the legends claim. He had done what he had set out to do as well. He had mastered death... in a fashion.

The Nameless, which is the only name he chose, claiming he couldn't remember his name anyways, had turned himself into something terrible. A lich. Freed of the burden of his mortality, he continued to work on his creations, not stopping there but constructing what seemed an entire city in which to work, without anything more than metal to keep him company. The entire thing was eerily familiar. I don't want to admit that, but... I can't deny it either, as much as I wish I could.

Despite his fearsome reputation, he was surprisingly genial, nay even eager to show his works. He could work without pause or tiring, mummified flesh never tiring and the things he had created in all that time deserve to be locked away with their creator. Everywhere, there were seals keeping his creations imprisoned within those walls, and I shudder to think of the things left unseen. Yet, as I walked the streets of his sunken city, brackish water seeping beneath the walls, I knew that even a week in his company would teach me more than a year of work upon my own.

I am not proud of what I did.

I stayed. For a few days, I listened to what he had to say. Even that brief exposure told me precisely how mad he had become, because I learned that in the days when he still breathed, the first work he had done upon coming to the swamps, was a labrys, hung ignored on a wall in his forge. That axe, named Void Edge, was the Nameless's soul. His phylactery.

It glowed a sepuchral light, the thick stylized effigy of his face staring out from atop the pole beneath the blades. Glyphs ran brilliantly along the cheeks of those heads, and I could feel magic running hot and wicked through the metal. It was a masterpiece, as awful a thing as it was, touched by death itself, but here it hung, lost in an ocean of madness. I took it.

I don't think he even knows it's missing.

I put it in my vault, because I can learn much from it, but I think I keep it as a reminder more than anything since I have yet to touch it again. We all begin wide-eyed, stepping into the ocean of knowledge, just pure inspiration. And then obsession steps in, and when you look up, you're a long way from shore. There are days when I look at it and think I should destroy it, to free that old soul from the prison of his insanity, but I can't bring myself to do it. I still think of what I could have learned if I had stayed longer, but I don't want to become a shadow of the Nameless. So, the Void Edge remains on my wall, to keep me from straying too far.