Aftermath
The story of how I restored the Master is going to be a long one, and I'm still unsure how to tell it with so many names lost to me. It is also still quite clear in my mind, so I think I will wait about telling that story and instead move on to what happened afterwards.
So I woke up one day and did what I did every morning. I sleepily stumbled my way to a shower, I took five minutes to pull on my overly-complicated boots, I donned my gloves and gave them a cursory stretching tug, I hunted on hands and knees under my bed for some aura for my spells, I gave my sword a once-over and tightened the strap on my shield, and I cursed my sore feet as I made my way to the tavern for a drink. So there I was, sitting in the tavern with a sugary drink (or was it a hot one?), trying to ignore the assholes at another table laughing at some crude jest while I recalled the previous night's events. I had raised a host of time, an army of existence itself, bound it to twenty-some adventurers, and led All in a battle against a corrupted god. We won. Not only that, but the god was purified and resurrected, due only and entirely to what I had done, and was currently creating a new world to rule. That's a lot to have in your head as you wash away the mental cobwebs with fizzy sugar water. It was all a bit much, so I tried to put it out of my head as I grumbled that my cup didn’t have quite enough drink left in it.
That's how the next few mornings went, and the days and nights weren't remarkably different than other days and nights. Well, the days and nights when I wasn't having huge effects on the cosmos, that is. When I tried to think about what had happened, what I had done, I never got far. The enormity of it all kept it just out of reach. It's like it never really hit me, like it was somewhere between a memory and a dream, something less than fully real. If I thought about it too much I started to feel numb, and would look for something else to busy myself with, vaguely hoping that my memories wouldn't force the issue. Frankly, I'm glad that they never truly did in that life. I did find something pretty effective to busy myself with, though - the Great Enemy.
Far away from me, adventurers were in the final years of conflict against a terrible, terrible foe, a foe that was fated to win. They managed to change fate and win, and though I was only there in-person for the final battle (we won), I certainly had my role to fulfill. The circumstances of adventuring kept me from most opportunities to directly participate, so instead I did two things - I often sat in council with the adventurer who was more or less leading the endeavor, trying to keep his spirits high enough that his brooding and general mopy-ness didn't prevent him from doing what he had to do, but more importantly, I saw to Plan B. I saw to it that there was a place that could be evacuated to should the Great Enemy prevail. I saw to it that the Master's new realm was ready.
Even now I don't fully understand how I helped, but somehow I helped the Master build a world. He was still a god and I was still a mortal, but I was able to influence the work being done so that there would be a place, if an incomplete one, that people and things could be saved to if the adventurers failed. It was in the middle of these incredible acts of creation and rebirth that a idea came barging into my head. I wondered if after the conflict had concluded (assuming I survived), the Master could re-make me, since I was quite dissatisfied with life on my realm. He said no. As I was born a child of a realm, I would die a child of that realm.
Well, shit.
However, even though he said no, a plan occurred to me after the defeat of the Great Enemy. It wasn't a nice plan. It drew an awful lot from the who I had once been - it was manipulative and I would have to lie not just to my friends and allies, the people who trusted me, but I would also have to lie to myself. Somehow, my personal sense of ambition merged with the cunning I had developed as a person who I came to reject and with the hubris gained by having done the impossible. I was going to manipulate a god.
What might I gain? A new life on a world made manifest by a being who owed me his life and his legacy. What did that mean? I wasn't sure, but it would probably be a good thing. What did I risk? Death and a meaningless eternal afterlife, since the plan called for dispelling the magic that made me a lord of time. It sounds odd to say, but death wasn't the big risk to me - I had risked it for relatively unimportant things startlingly often, and frankly, I didn't want to live in the realm of my birth anymore. I never felt at home anywhere I went, and the more I traveled the more I came to suspect I never would find home. Also, the more I traveled the more I despaired at people. Goodness wasn't the natural state - a casual evil, born of sloth and apathy, was. There were many wonderful individuals, to be sure, but the world and fate were eternally stacked against us despite all our good works. There were no kingdoms worth serving... my work was done out of obligation to my principles, the greater good, and other abstract things, not out of duty to a people or a land or a liege, and never did I find any a one that moved me. Perhaps I was just an arrogant prick, but I tired of trying to live up to principles that people ridiculed. I tired of feeling alone and adrift. Too often I felt punished for trying to be a good man, and I wearied of a world that demeaned me. Most importantly, I refused to return to who I had been and become the sort of person that place was meant for. I might say that I had come too far for that, but the path I was one was an insistent one - if you were the type to set yourself upon it in the first place you were not the type to leave it, no matter the distance traveled upon it, even if you were regressing upon it. So no, death wasn't so much a risk as much as it was a less-favorable - but still acceptable - outcome. It was the meaningless afterlife that was the risk.
I had upon my spirit the magic I described in an earlier entry. When I perished I would become a mighty being, a champion of existence and also of that which created existence. I would join the great council and be a force for the greatest good. Indeed, I was one of only two mortals to achieve such a thing, and I had achieved great, great honors. Not only had I defeated the corrupted Master, I was Time's Lament, the sword of time, and had done something time itself considered impossible. If I died without doing anything more, I would have a worthy afterlife to say the least. It was losing this that scared me. To have accomplished so much in life to simply wander aimlessly in a forest forever was a terrible thing to me. And so the risk was great, but I deemed it a worthwhile one. Besides, maybe I wouldn't die. Maybe I'd just have to find another magic to be cast upon me. Undead-slaying still sounded nice...
And so I set my plan into motion. The details are worth recording later, once I figure out new names for my old friends, but I can go ahead into it here. There was a trick I had learned once, a way to make yourself happy even in dark situations - smile. That's it. Make a smile, even if you don't feel like smiling, and eventually it becomes a self-sustaining thing. The simple act of smiling quickly forces happiness and you soon feel happiness to a degree rarely found naturally. It was a small step to take this technique in another direction, and it was by forcing sorrow upon myself that I would get what I wanted. You see, the magic I've mentioned was intimately tied to my connection to the Master, and the nature of my connection to the Master was of inspiration. I would have that magic severed under sorrowful circumstances, circumstances as far from inspiration as I could get, and that would compel the Master to act.
For several months I endeavored to make myself despair at life and be just a terrible grump. Eventually, I told many of my friends that I had decided that my time had ended, and that I would have my spiritual magics removed and wander west, seeking my death in the best of elven traditions. However, I would not proceed to a graveyard, but instead to utter non-existence. After all, my feelings about such things were well known. My friends and companions were not happy about my intention, but I told them to find comfort in that I had left such a legacy as I had and that I would die on my own terms. Indeed, such was a rare end, one worthy of at least somber celebration. Nobody mentioned that non-existence wasn't possible, though I cannot say if this was out of courtesy or ignorance, or if maybe people simply accepted that doing the impossible was just something I casually did. I would settle my affairs, first, and make sure others would take up the minor causes I had been working on, but once I had completed all of that I would head to the land of my temporal mentor to have the magics removed and immediately seek out the end of my fate.
And so I did. I traveled to a land I had only rarely visited and sought out my mentor. I have not mentioned him before, but he was another adventurer. He was a complicated man, and my friendship with him was a troubled one. However, he was the only mortal to achieve a place on the great council of time, at least until I came along. His place on the council was mighty, and, if fate progressed as it should, he would be the last such lord. We had even bound him together with the Master, that first lord, so that the first and the last would be, in a way, one. I met him first as an adventurer, having sought him out to learn more of time and the true nature of the world, and it was he, in the process of working together on matters of the corrupted Master, that cast those magics of spirits and of time upon me. He was a friend, and, in some ways I'm not eager to admit, a mentor, but in temporal matters he was indeed my master. If there was a man worthy of removing such magics from me under normal circumstances, it was him. However, by having him, with his connection to the Master, do it, it would greatly aid me in my gambit.
If he had known my stated intent, he didn't show it. He and I and others there adventured as we normally did. He knew that I had renounced my knighthood after the Great Enemy was defeated (something that I would do even aside from my plans), and spoke to me of joining his team and eventually his court, and we spoke of many other things, too. I had warned him that there was a difficult matter that I wanted to discuss with him, and on the second night there I asked him to remove those magics from me, and to not ask why but to simply trust that it must be done. He refused. Now, I had planned for this, and if he didn’t relent I was prepared to have a different magic cast upon me, one that would change my abilities such that I could remove it myself, but it would still best if he did it. There was something else I could say, something that would convince him, obligate him to remove it from me, but it was such a dark lie that I truly wanted to avoid saying it. A weapon of last resort, if you will, uttering the lie was one of the most trying things I had ever done. I had lied to my friends and manipulated them to cultivate sorrow within and around myself, but this was nearly going too far.
I told him of the battle with the Great Enemy. The Great Enemy had been inflicted with a vulnerability to magics that drew upon chaos. Chaotic energies, while distasteful, might not be seen as inherently bad here in the Shattered Realm and in other realms, especially if they can be put to good use, but in that realm of my birth such magics in fact harmed the world itself. You see, the nothingness outside of time and space had tried many avenues of attack in its eternal war against us, and its greatest success was within chaos. It had a sort of foothold there, corrupting chaos. And so, chaotic energy did things unintended even for chaos - it was because of the corruption that chaotic magic could produce necromancy. Now, bones could be animated though magic and be controlled just as any other material might - wood, iron, crystal, whatever, but actual necromancy, giving purpose to dead flesh through magics imitating spirit and animus, was profoundly unnatural and harmful. As magics drew upon chaos, chaos was strengthened in the world and so nothingness had greater capability to corrupt and unmake, and this more so than anything else is what we lords of existence fought against.
Magical theory aside, there was nothing more antithetical to our work than using such magics. I told him that I had fought against the Great Enemy, and we both knew the Enemy's weakness and that I, as a powerful sorcerer, had great capacity for such magics, if I chose to cast my spells in that manner. I told him that I had not done so, but that I had considered it. He replied that even the greatest of people may have terrible thoughts occur to them, explaining that if they reject those possibilities because their intent is righteous, they remain on the side of right. He asked why I didn't use those magics, and I told him that the only reason I didn't is because someone else had already started using them - that the sole reason I didn't cast them was because I felt I didn't have to. It was a lie, but my mentor took it as truth, and so he despaired and said that he would remove the spiritual magics from me.
We arranged the ritual circle and I brought forth the materials needed, and we sat down to begin the casting. Sadly, the building this took place in was actually quite crowded, and we had little room and no privacy. Indeed, such things are rarely ideal, but this was especially rough; however, despite my desire for decorum and maintaining my dignity, the circumstances actually worked to my ultimate advantage. The actual magic used wasn't complicated, and it enough for my mentor to lean in close and whisper. As he said what he knew should be said he empowered his words with his magic and his authority, and when he had said all he wished to his spell was complete and his will made manifest, and my connection to the Master had been sundered with much sorrow.
It was during the ritual that my plans would culminate and that my performance had to be the most convincing. My mentor's words of failure, of a fallen champion, would've been difficult for even an over-hearing bystander to sit through, and here he was saying them to me, a proud and successful man who knew little failure. I wallowed in them. I put every bit of emotion I had into my receiving of them. Indeed, I like to think that my earlier life of performing, of channeling emotion into music both written and performed helped me here. I wept openly, if silently, and wore my heart on my face as my failures were proclaimed to the cosmos and to the greatest force for good, the group I endeavored so long to join, and my blessings, honors, and accomplishments were stripped from me. My mentor was not saying nice things, but it was my reaction that really sold it. Deep down, I was pleased that my plans were coming to fruition and that my part was well-played, but like a musician exulting at nailing a difficult and delicate passage, I didn’t dare show it.
And so it was done. I was now just a man. I was no longer a knight, no longer the bearer of a momentous fate - just an adventurer with a bunch of baggage. My two goals in life, station and a purposed afterlife, had once been achieved but by then one had been relinquished and the other taken. Well, at least that's how my mentor saw it. Furthermore, in this land my accomplishments were largely unknown and my power and capability not uncommon among adventurers. It was no surprise to him when I told him that I would depart the next morning for the West and for death. He suggested that, since I was an elf, I should just go sit on some mountain and think it over for a hundred years, and my reply was that I would consider it but was rather resolved. And so, the next morning I left.
I should note that on my way out I passed someone most unusual. Well, her errand was the notable thing. She asked me where I might find a particular adventurer. It happened to be my mentor that she was asking about, and I thought it just a coincidence. It's not uncommon for adventurers and especially nobles to receive deliveries, after all. I would have been most interested, however, in the contents of the chest she bore. Inside was a letter from the Master to my mentor, along with a jar of ashes. The letter said that he had indeed felt the connection get severed, and due to the tendrils of sorrow he chose to investigate. He came to that world several months in the future and found me far to the west. Let's see... how did part go?
"Ragged and bloodied was he, and his blade was rusting from accumulated and uncleaned blood, his eyes set upon the western sky, and his only thoughts set upon finding death. Troubled by the single-minded fury I did feel within his spirit we talked for a time, and I found within him a lost and frightened child, one too set in his mind to endure the harsh realities of the world." Something like that. Anyway, by that time what the Master saw was not as much of an act as I had hoped. My timing and route were exceptionally poor, and I had suffered through the most miserable winter I had ever experienced. Those months were the hardest I ever had... hungry, cold, and waiting for a fate that might never come. That fate did come, though, and he had destroyed me. The jar of ashes was my remains. Now, it might seem odd that the Master would send something back in time like that - that jar and its contents were paradoxical, and thus destabilized time and reality around it, a very strange thing for beings of time to send each other. The idea was that the Master wanted to ensure that my fate was sealed and charged my mentor with making sure it stayed that way, and that by possessing my remains my mentor would know if my future began to be in doubt. As it turned out, my mentor didn't need to do anything, and when the appointed day came the Master appeared before me.
And so I died. Next entry: I got better!
~A