Profiles in History: Bael'Zharon

Like so many tragic stories, it all begins with Geraine. Geraine, sickly prince, whom the Falatacot made undead, to earn a place for their people on Dericost. Geraine, the Firstborn, His Eternal Splendor, who gave the gift of undeath to all his noble friends. So it remained for centuries, while the undead took the place of the living in the courts of Dericost, hiding from public view, served by a chosen few who kept their secret, hoping one day to achieve undeath themselves. And the common people knew nothing about it.

Until the secret was found out, and the Yalaini and the Haebrous made common cause against Dericost, to extirpate the blasphemy of undeath from the Dericost nobility. They stormed Dericost; they cast down the puppet-king Sarvien from the Ice Throne; they burnt the undead in great fires and let their ashes scatter to the winds.

And they punished the common people, who had allowed undead to rule over them --- even though they had known nothing about it. Many were herded into great camps, to live on the margin while their conquerors took the land. And when the Black Rain began to fall, and the crops failed, the conquerors grudged to share their stores with the conquered, saying the disaster was their own fault for having permitted undead to rule them, and a fitting punishment for their crimes.

There was a man living in the village of Daralet, a peasant --- a farmer, perhaps --- named Ilservian Palacost. The name of his wife is not recorded (though your historian has her suspicions), but he had a son named Avoren, whom the chroniclers later called the Child of Daralet --- but a portrait of him endured up into Elysa's day, and he was no infant, but a youth approaching manhood, slender, with dark eyes. There was famine in the village, and Ilservian journeyed to the regional capital, begging the Yalaini governor to open the storehouses to the Dericost people, lest they die of starvation. But the governor refused him, and sent him away; and Avoren died.

What misery, what centuries-long tale of grief, was set in action by men who thought they were doing the right thing!

Ilservian swore an oath of vengeance upon the Yalaini, and he left Daralet with his friends. We know some of their names: Omadin, Ler Rhan, and Black Ferah, and Isin Dule. They went far away, no one knows where, searching for the power that would grant them their revenge. And somewhere, they found it: or it found them

The Kemeroi is, or are, legion, and the more we learn the more we realize that the concepts of singular and plural don't apply. But we must work within the confines of our own languages. A Kemeroi presented itself to Ilservian under the name of Jhirvall. It gave him the power he sought.

The first sign of what was impending was that children began disappearing from the village of Daralet, and from surrounding villages. Adults, too, vanished, preferring to serve the Darkness as Shadows than to venerate the Light of the conquering Yalain.

The Shadow forces attacked the Yalaini, and drove them back. Their armies were terrible to behold. Many still kept the shape of men, but were like shapes cut out of the fabric of the air, shapes of utter darkness, sometimes with the glint of red eyes. Others, more powerful, still resembled men from the waist up, but below they were like whirlwinds of black dust. There were even Shadow Children, small but deadly for their size, who when slain called on Ler Rhan the story-teller, or cried for their mothers. And in their midst walked the creature Ilservian Palacost had become: Bael'Zharon, he was called, the Slayer of Hope. He was twice the height of a man, manshaped in a long black robe, with claws for hands and the head of a great bull with great cruel horns. From his shoulders a pair of wings spread: translucent wings of shadow, tattered around the edges. His power was immense, and he delighted in throwing fireballs at his opponents, or throwing them up a thousand feet into the air and letting them fall to their deaths.

Atlan Realaidain devised new weaponry in his forges, swords and spears and magical implements of exceptional power, and led his armies against the Hopeslayer. No one returned except his squire, mad and dying.

The backs of the Yalaini were against the wall when a small group of mages, the Yalaini Council, gathered together to lay a trap for the Hopeslayer, an array of six crystals whose combined power would bind him and keep him out of the circles of the world. Among them were Maila, widow of Atlan and mother of Asheron, and her friend Adja, descendant of Falatacot sorceresses. Knowing that the power of the array would likely destroy all the mages who set it up, these ladies conspired to protect Asheron from death. Using an ancient Falatacot ritual, they sacrificed their own lives not only to save the life of Asheron, but to preserve it long beyond the normal lifespan of an Empyrean.

As the Council set up the array, Bael'Zharon was aware of it, and stormed across Dereth in an attempt to claim its power for his own. But when he touched it, it took him, with a release of energy that destroyed not only the Council (saving Asheron) and the Jailne Lyceum in which it stood, but laid waste the southwestern part of Dereth, later called the Obsidian Plains, which has since sunk beneath the waves.

Bael'Zharon was imprisoned in the crystal array, which immediately split apart into the six crystals that made it up. They flew to various parts of Dereth and buried themselves in the ground. The Yalaini were able to recover only one of the crystals, which they set deep in the crypts of the Ithaenc Cathedral.

There matters rested for a while. The Yalaini flourished and decayed, and the royal line of Realaidain ended in the usurpation of the cunning Haebrous Kellin II, and Asheron continued the study of planar magic, learning the art of casting portals to different parts of Auberean, and to the other worlds from which our ancestors later came. Then they opened one world too many, and the Olthoi came, and the last Yalaini fled to Dereth and were sent into portalspace by Asheron, who remained alone in his tower, seeking a means to destroy the Olthoi.

He found it in our ancestors: the Humans, Tonk, and Lugians who came through his portals to Dereth and found that they could never return. The Humans fought free of the Olthoi that had enslaved them, and began to settle the land. There was no sign left of the Hopeslayer and his Shadows, except for a few hidden altars that allowed fighters to abandon Asheron's blessing and gain the ability to fight one another.

In the tenth year of their liberation, winter came early and froze the entire land solid. Explorers sent to investigate the strange phenomena never returned, until the expedition of Abrim found undead Dericost, the Gelidites, working strange magics upon a crystal buried in the depths of their caverns, which they called their Great Work and which they hoped would reduce the whole of Auberean to the kind of temperatures they found comfortable. But Abrim destroyed the crystal, and in the following months the snow melted. But new creatures were abroad: Crystal Fragments that seemed to be alive --- and Shadows. The array that held Bael'Zharon prisoner had begun to weaken.

In subsequent months, four more crystals were found and shattered by the curious Humans. Many forces, including the remnants of the Dericost nobility and the mysterious Virindi, assembled to try to prevent the crystals from being destroyed, but to no avail. As the array weakened, the image of the Hopeslayer began to appear on stormy nights, his tattered wings stretching across the sky with each lightning flash. Only the last crystal, the Shard of the Herald in the crypts of Ithaenc, remained. Some Humans, fearing what the breach of the last crystal might bring, tried to defend it; others attacked it. In the end, the Shadows themselves stormed the battle and achieved the destruction of the Shard --- and Bael'Zharon was freed.

For a month he walked Dereth. The sky over his head and the waters beneath turned red as blood. Some attempted to fight him, and were slain. Others, seeking power, swore allegiance to him. Then Asheron himself came forth and faced Bael'Zharon outside Cragstone, on the shores of Lake Blessed. Bael'Zharon taunted him, saying, "I slew your father; I ate his heart before his dying eyes!" but Asheron said, "I am sorry for what happened: sorry for what my people did to you and your family." Bael'Zharon attacked, but Asheron's defenses resisted him. Neither could vanquish the other. Across the face of Dereth they fought, from Cragstone to Plateau Village, far in the north, and then they disappeared.

An Emissary of Asheron appeared, asking the Humans to join together to defeat the Hopeslayer. The means of his defeat were threefold: they must find a fragment of the Singularity, guarded by the Virindi on the Obsidian Plains, a tremendous power source; the Heart of Shadow, a magical item forming a conduit between the dark world of Bael'Zharon's masters and our own, whose existence had been betrayed to Asheron by the Hopeslayer's general, Isin Dule; and finally, the skull of Ilservian's long-dead son, Avoren, infused with magical energies attuned to the Hopeslayer, able to drain his energies so that he could be defeated. The Humans found these objects and delivered them to Asheron, who was able by means of them to weaken Bael'Zharon and open the conduit to his hiding place.

The attackers poured in, through untold dangers, over living floors that ate away at their feet. They found Black Ferah, faithful to the end, ready to defend her Master against all comers; and they slew her. They found Bael'Zharon, raging atop the body of what had been Ilservian Palacost, and by their might and Asheron's they drove him from the circles of the world. As he vanished, he cried out against Isin Dule, who had betrayed him for our sake; and was gone; and there was a great hush over Dereth.

Again, for a while, matters rested. The united mortal races drove back all their enemies, and for a century Dereth was a beacon of peace. Four generations of Strathelars ruled over the Kingdom of New Aluvia.

Then there was a disturbance: the Inner Sea was drained of its waters, leaving fishes gasping on the sand, and something rose like a shower of darkness out of its dry bed. The Hopeslayer had broken his prison. He struck the lesser moon Rez'arel and shattered it into fragments, which to this day form a shining ring around Auberean, a rose-colored arc in the southern sky, and we call it the Hopeslayer's Scythe or Sword. On his descent he destroyed the town of Yaraq and raged over Dereth, cracking and blistering the hills and plains, laying the cities waste.

Asheron then, who had been living quietly alone in the Knorr Lyceum, returned to Dereth. His long years of study had taught him many ways of using the powerful mana energy that runs under the surface of Dereth. He brought these powers against Bael'Zharon, to destroy him.

But Geraine had stolen the menhirs that governed and regulated those forces, as has been told elsewhere. Asheron could not control the energies he released.

In that hour, Bael'Zharon died; the intangible envelope that had contained his wrath and despair was rent apart, and he ceased to be: so the greatest Loremasters have told us. The Virindi Imperator, standing by to see who would be the victor, was also destroyed. Asheron, consumed by his own energies, vanished --- though the Loremasters have steadfastly declined to tell us whether he is dead.

So ended the unhappy story of Ilservian Palacost, the peasant of Daralet, who lost his family to the pride of the Yalaini, and his friends and himself to his own desire for vengeance. The remnants of the Shadows follow Isin Dule now, who still grieves for his lost friend and for his own betrayal; they swear that they will never walk the knife-edge to follow Bael'Zharon.

Let us all swear, now, that we will never follow the proud-minded Yalaini conquerors, who as they thought to serve the Light, abandoned their fellow-beings to the Darkness. At the moment we are most confident, at the moment we are surest of ourselves, in the name of mercy, let us believe that we may be mistaken.