Today, the peoples of Therasya live in the Thirteenth Spire, two hundred and ninety five years after the planting of the Seed.
It is, by the measure of most spires, a good time to be alive: the long dark is two centuries gone, and the world is rising again.
Spire 13 The Age After the Light
I have heard priests name it the Spire of Deliverance, kings gathered at the Alliance summit called it the Age of Renewal, but wiser men who distrust glorious titles know that this is merely time granted to us before the darkness gathers again.
Yet the Thirteenth Spire began when the unbearable light of the Lunar Pyramid finally dimmed.
For two and a half years, its radiance had known neither dusk nor mercy, casting its ceaseless light across Therasya and spilling over Cord’s Arm into the far reaches of the northern wastes. The armies of Othmog withered beneath it like insects cast into a furnace. Demon fortresses cracked, spawning trenches became graves of ash, and hosts that had tormented the Wall fled shrieking into caverns so deep that even Theril’s darkness could scarcely find them.
Men rejoiced when night returned, for they had forgotten the stars and grown fearful of a sky that never closed its burning eye, while beneath it their crops turned to dust. They named the scorched north conquered and the demons broken. Such is the admirable foolishness of mortals: we mistake the silence of an enemy for his death.
We mistake the silence of an enemy for his death.
When the light faded, Othmog crawled back to the surface. Beneath the blackened plains, the surviving fiends emerged from buried keeps, fought over ruined dominions, devoured the weak among their own kind and began, claw by claw, to reclaim the land that Asmodeus had taken from them.
The Ruins of the North Ride
The kingdoms inherited no victory, only the exhaustion left behind by one. The North Ride had carried the deceived Fey against Avaton, Lydoria and Andor, while Lucifer wore the face of the lost Feyan emperor Eryn and turned prophecy into a weapon. The southern realms were scarred, their armies thinned, their fields neglected and their old alliances broken.
It was Maat’s gift of Truth, borne through the Mirror restored by Iandor and those of us who stood beside him, that stripped the deceiver of his fair shape before Andor City and shattered the lie holding the Fey host together. In that same great turning, Astarte was drawn from the prison of sorrow that had held her since the ruin of the ancient Feyan age, and powers believed lost to the Spires once more touched the mortal world.
Yet revelation could not reconcile the people who had murdered one another beneath false banners. Andor fell into famine and noble treachery while Weymar Grace plotted against King Iandor. Elemendia descended into bloodshed when Daari Toth refused to surrender the authority granted by war. The Eternal children were once more hunted by unseen assassins, and the guilds whose oaths once bound their members in faith and brotherhood were broken. Thus the previous Spire’s lesson was carved deeply upon us: Truth may end a war, but it cannot undo the atrocities committed by men while serving a lie.
Truth may end a war, but it cannot undo the atrocities committed by men while serving a lie.
The Enemy from the Past
Worse followed from the battles beneath Kinetika. Ienelith’s assault upon the Lunar Pyramid damaged the ancient Dragolith prison and released Tharzul and Seraphel from an age that should have remained buried. Seraphel perished defending the Gnomes, but Tharzul the Vile endured, concealing the hunger of an ancient dragon beneath the names of Avrax and the Ancient.
While kingdoms argued over harvests, thrones and the blood-stained fruits of victory, Tharzul turned upon the Grimoires themselves. Evocation vanished from mortal hands, and Conjuration followed it into silence. Masters who had believed their arts eternal learned that even magic may perish.
I witnessed what his destruction had wrought: invocations perfected over centuries failing upon the lips of their masters, whole passages of arcane knowledge becoming meaningless marks upon the page, and magical constructs reduced to rubble.
Only after Agos, the Eternal of Magic, was freed from his imprisonment in a Nightmare demiplane could weapons be forged against that ancient enemy, and at Riverstar the surviving Grimoire holders gathered as bait beneath a rain of fire so that Tharzul might at last be brought down. Yet even that triumph did not immediately restore what had been consumed. Years would pass before the Grimoires returned even a portion of what had been lost.
The Redemption of the Blind Saint
Yet the Thirteenth Spire witnessed the return of two Eternals. Following Agos’s release, it saw a fallen angel choosing to illuminate the world once more. I did not witness the opening of the tomb, though I have spoken with the one who saw what emerged from it, and she recounted the tale with renewed faith in her eyes.
Phosiel, once Harmony’s Lightbringer, had endured the murder of his children, the cruelty of Asmodeus and the tearing of his eyes until grief hollowed all mercy from him. The Mirror of Truth exposed his true form and bared both his soul and the sorrow that had cast him from the heavens. He chose judgment and renounced his wrathful self called Lucifer, the one who wore the face of Eryn and rose as Phosiel again. The Fey stoned him, and Phosiel accepted every blow, surrendering his life willingly and breaking, through death, the fury that had chained him. His tale should have ended beneath the sands, sealed within a tomb. But when Varyn and his grave robbers violated that resting place, the Lightbringer rose again, not as Lucifer the deceiver, but as Phosiel the Redeemed, the Blind Saint.
The Groves of Forgotten Dreams
While mortals were still counting their wounds, Morgenydon turned his attention toward Starfall, where the drowned soil conceals older dangers beneath mud, restless dead and the ruins of angelic power. He is seeking the surviving spring of Lethe, whose waters once washed the memories of the dead and stripped from mortal souls the remnants of former dreams, to use the memories as mindless armies in his campaign against the Dream Plane guardians. Thus Barrowfen has become more than a cursed marsh. It is the concealed battlefield of the next war, which will be fought not for land or crown, but for the right of mortals to remember who they are when they awaken. Their enemy has waited through Spires, gathering sufficient power to turn forgotten dreams into weapons.
The Fragile Peace
So stands Therasya in the Thirteenth Spire. Andor endures under a king tested by dreams, betrayal and famine. Elemendia survives diminished and divided. The mortal realms rebuild behind laws older than their present wisdom, and beyond Cord’s Arm the demon lords gather what strength remains amid the ashes of their dominions.
Peace remains, certainly, but peace is forever fleeting and fragile. It is merely the brief hour in which walls are repaired, children are warned of monsters lurking in the dark, and Entropy’s spawn plot under Theril’s shadow.
Peace is forever fleeting and fragile.
“For in Ancestral, history does not repeat itself. It spirals.”
Eolon of Oemon · Loremaster
