The Undying of the Light

Long before the kingdoms of Elleria and Malinar raised walls against one another, before dwarves hollowed cities into the Barazig Spires and elves built their towers along the eastern sea, Agdaron belonged to older things.

The gods came first as a family to a world of violent seas, mountains still heaving themselves from the earth, and Primordial Spirits that wore fire, stone, wind, and water as flesh. For a time they worked together, carving order from chaos and making a place where lesser beings might live. From that labor came the mortal races and, eventually, the first great mistake of the gods.

Althea, Goddess of Light, gave mortals magic.

What followed was an age beyond anything the people of modern Agdaron can reproduce. Towers rose by spellcraft; impossible machines crossed mountains and seas; mortal artificers worked beside priests and wizards to create wonders now mistaken for the work of gods. Yet the gift that raised mortals so high also taught them to look higher still. When mortal mages began seeking immortality and apotheosis, their experiments tore open the boundaries of the world. Things from beyond the ordered planes came through.

The Cataclysm that followed broke civilizations, slew gods, and left whole regions of Agdaron warped by uncontrolled magic. Althea spent the last of her strength sealing the Outsiders away and vanished with them, her True Name torn from reality. The surviving Prime Deities withdrew from direct interference in mortal affairs, leaving their worshippers to rebuild among ruins filled with relics from an age greater than their own.

A thousand years passed.

Six strangers in Elleris

Then, in the elven capital of Elleris, several strangers decided to run.

Princess Nerissa du Elleri slipped away from an arranged marriage intended to secure a fragile peace with neighboring Malinar. Dustin Maple, a Malinari deserter hiding behind the bar of a lower-district tavern, found soldiers from his old unit drinking within arm's reach. Belediin Stoneheart, last scion of a diminished dwarven house, was chasing rumors of the ancestral sword his family had lost generations before. Murdock Shaw, recently discharged from the Ellerian army, had begun to discover that peacetime suited him rather poorly. Halyas Glimm was simply leaving home to see what the world held for him, while Aedin, cleric of Aphiel, felt a divine pull toward people he had not yet met.

Their paths converged beneath the streets.

There, in the sprawling cisterns under Elleris, they found kobolds, prisoners, a frightened eladrin wizard named Findalye Nelenwe, and an old relic once carried by Aphiel before the mortal hero had ascended to godhood. They also found letters referring to abducted men, women, and children as product, experimental bodies being tested for use by someone known only as "our Lady."

The strangers left Elleris together.

They would eventually call themselves the Veil Piercers.

Gray coins, and a girl named Arielle

Their first trail led north through abandoned villages and the frozen borderlands between Elleria and the dwarven mountains. Strange gray coins had begun appearing among giants and other desperate creatures, each carrying a flicker of silver flame and the promise of aid from an unseen Benefactor. Hill Giants were promised freedom. Frostwugs, plagued by infertility, were promised children. The bargain changed according to the wound.

The party followed a series of disappearances into the Frozen Wastes and found a young dwarven girl named Arielle Coldaine at the center of it. Arielle was powerful, wounded, and somehow connected to Belediin's missing family sword. By the time the Veil Piercers reached the ruined keep of Caer Morghaen, a cabal of mages had already begun using her in a ritual meant to drag something lost back into the world.

They were seconds too late.

When Arielle opened her eyes, something ancient looked out through them.

The being called herself the fallen Goddess of Light.

The party knew her only as the Gray Lady.

They fought her first, imperfect incarnation and forced it down, but an archmage escaped with Arielle before the goddess could be separated from the child. Belediin recovered his ancestral sword from the keep. Its sheath went with Arielle.

The Veil Piercers had met the creature that would haunt the rest of their journey without understanding what she wanted, or why she looked upon them less with hatred than with a kind of wounded affection.

Barazar

From Caer Morghaen they traveled to the great dwarven Underkeep of Barazar, where Belediin returned home to find his family missing and the royal court behaving strangely. The party uncovered the cause only after nearly being killed by it: a Mind Flayer had crossed through a breach into the Astral Plane and seized control of King Aghat Umraz. The dwarves themselves had opened that breach while excavating something buried beneath the magical Spires, a crystalline relic they called a God's Heart or Divine Heart.

The Veil Piercers destroyed the Illithid and freed the king. Aedin, however, was lost somewhere in the depths beneath Barazar and never returned. Not dead, so far as anyone could prove. Simply gone.

The others emerged from Barazar with titles, land, and an airship. They had entered the mountain as capable adventurers and left it as recognized heroes.

Their timing could not have been worse.

The Unity Tournament

The neighboring kingdom of Malinar was preparing a Unity Tournament to celebrate the end of a twenty-year war with Elleria. The Veil Piercers entered as champions, only to discover that the peace concealed a state rotting from within. The Church of Malyr had spent years accumulating political authority while the king sickened behind palace walls.

Murdock, himself a paladin of Malyr, began to see the difference between the god he worshipped and the institution speaking in his name. Malyr was God of Battle and Might, certainly, but also of Justice and Defense; the church ruling Malinar seemed interested only in the first half of the creed.

The tournament barely had time to reach its later stages before the Church launched a coup.

Paladins filled the streets. Civilians who resisted were slaughtered. Dustin raced to his family estate and saved his father from execution. Nerissa and Murdock fought beside Crown Prince Rami. In the royal keep, the old king died with a sword through one of his attackers, surrounded by guards who had taken twice their number with them.

There Murdock learned that Malinar's royal family was his own. The dead king was his father. Rami was his half-brother. His missing sister Isabelle had been held hostage by the Church.

The man at the center of it was Direll Lazlow, celebrated hero of Malinar, leader of the paladins, murderer of Nerissa's mother, and one of the chief architects of the coup. The Veil Piercers found him in the catacombs beneath the city, where another ritual was already underway.

They killed him.

Then something answered the ritual.

The party escaped Malinar aboard a small airship just in time to see a physical manifestation bearing the power and visage of Malyr himself descend upon the capital.

The God of Battle destroyed the city.

For a world whose surviving gods had sworn not to interfere directly in mortal affairs, there could be no simple explanation.

There was only fire.

Dolonde

The surviving Veil Piercers fled south to Dolonde, capital of the Republic of Dolerith, where what first appeared to be a drug war revealed another branch of the Gray Lady's work.

A magical narcotic called R'Kane was being refined to increase the amount of power a mortal body could contain. At the center of the experiments was Police Chief Magnus Rex, a Vampire Lord who had spent years providing the Gray Lady with stronger vessels.

His twin brother, Voldariadon Rex, was considerably less pleased by this arrangement.

Voldariadon had once been a police officer himself. Now half of his body was little more than scarred flesh and exposed bone, the result of his own encounter with the rituals beneath Dolonde. He carried pistols, a violently practical sense of justice, and an abiding hatred of what his brother had become.

The investigation ended in the Old City, among the ruins of the civilization destroyed during the Cataclysm. There Magnus completed his ritual even as the party killed him.

Althea stepped through.

By then Arielle's stolen body had been forced into an unnatural maturity, stretched and strengthened to contain more of the goddess than it ever should have. The Gray Lady greeted the Veil Piercers almost fondly. She asked Belediin for his sword. She offered the party a place beside her.

They refused.

Althea raised a mountain beneath their feet.

She resurrected Magnus as a massive necrotic dragon and left the party to deal with him while she went about more important business.

Voldariadon died inside his brother's jaws. Xeriax the Brave, a warrior fate had briefly bound to Murdock, died in the same battle. Belediin survived, but not unchanged; somewhere in the violence upon that mountain, he contracted vampirism.

When the survivors fled Dolonde, Murdock did not follow them.

He had gathered the first followers of a New Church of Malyr, one founded upon the belief that strength existed in service to justice rather than conquest. He remained behind to build it.

The others escaped through the ancient Arc du Fey.

The Feywild

The Feywild received them with the sort of cruelty only beautiful places seem capable of managing.

A woman Findalye had seen as a young girl only days earlier was nearly sixty years old.

Time had passed differently here.

The party soon reunited with Katie, a woman Dustin had once pursued through Barazar after she stole a Divine Heart. Katie finally explained the truth: she was the last survivor of an order that had repeatedly altered history to prevent a future war among the gods. Again and again the world had ended. Again and again someone had gone back and changed enough to try once more.

There would be no more attempts.

This was the final timeline.

The Veil Piercers became embroiled in the politics of the seasonal Fey Courts, where Summer and Winter had calcified into an ancient stalemate. Their chief ally became Jovyre of Autumn, a princess the Summer Court had never known what to do with. Her elder sister Cirilla was everything Summer admired, a tall and radiant eladrin whose flaming hair made her look born from midsummer itself. Jovyre was half-eladrin and half-goblinoid, her body divided vertically between the two ancestries, her skin colored in fading reds and oranges like leaves at the end of summer. She was short, awkward, and spoke with a lisp born from two physiologies meeting badly across her face.

Summer had spent her life treating her as an imperfection.

The old order would come to regret that.

The party defeated Ezra the Unkind, Queen of Winter, restored the rulers of Summer, and helped break the seasonal stalemate that had held the Feywild for generations. Dustin died in the battle against Ezra and found his mother waiting beyond death, along with Melorah. He chose to return.

Belediin's vampirism was eventually cured. He also learned that his missing father had fallen through a Ruby Gate in the Astral Sea and become a Devil Prince in Hell, while his mother remained imprisoned there.

The Gray Lady's agents, meanwhile, had been digging beneath the Feywild.

They were searching for Corellon.

The Veil Piercers found his tomb first.

Deep within it, beyond ancient guardians and an absurdly theatrical lich, Findalye stood before the remains of the dead god from whose blood the eladrin had first arisen.

Dustin and Nerissa opened Corellon's ribcage.

Inside rested a crystal heart.

They took it.

What the Gray Lady wants

By then the party had finally pieced together what Althea intended.

The Gray Lady remembered the Cataclysm better than anyone alive.

She remembered the mortal mages who had reached for ascension and immortality with the gift she had placed in their hands. She remembered the Outsiders pouring through the wound they opened. She remembered her siblings dying. She remembered uncountable mortal lives extinguished.

And, trapped without a True Name for centuries afterward, she had reached a conclusion.

She would go back.

Not merely to stop the Cataclysm, but to the moment before it had become possible.

She would unmake her decision to give mortals magic.

Althea did not hate them.

That was the worst part.

She still loved them.

She was proud of the Veil Piercers and everything they had become. She admired their resilience, their cleverness, their strength. Yet to her they remained children playing with a gift that had already burned down the world once. If they objected to being saved from themselves, that was unfortunate.

Children often objected when wiser hands took dangerous things away.

Leviathan

The party left the Feywild carrying Corellon's Divine Heart and crossed the Astral Sea to Leviathan, a pirate civilization built upon the skull of a dead cosmic serpent.

There, an artifact they had carried since their first days beneath Elleris suddenly cracked.

The Amulet of Aphiel, once wielded by the god before his mortal ascension, went cold.

Across Leviathan, clerics collapsed.

When one of them awoke, she screamed that Aphiel was dead.

The surviving pantheon was beginning to fall.

The Ruby Gate

The Veil Piercers eventually returned to Barazar, built an Astral vessel of their own around a living branch of Yggdrasil recovered years earlier in Dolonde, and named it the Gray Lady's Peril.

Then they sailed back into the Astral Sea.

Their destination was the Ruby Gate, entrance to the Nine Hells.

For three months they hunted its location while raiding Illithid strongholds. During that search they discovered that the Mind Flayer beneath Barazar had been little more than the first loose thread of a much larger design.

The Illithid had fused an Elder Brain with the corpse of a Void Dragon and were driving the resulting abomination toward the Ruby Gate. Their objective lay in Nessus, the deepest layer of Hell, where Asmodeus kept a divine machine called the Retributive Soul Engine. In the hands of the Illithid, it could reshape the machinery of damnation itself.

Githyanki and Githzerai set aside an ancient hatred to fight beside the Veil Piercers. Pirates of Leviathan joined them. Red dragons tore across the Astral void as the Gray Lady's Peril raced after the Elder Brain Dragon, its decks carrying a newly built Divine Arcane Harpoon designed to bind the creature in radiant chains.

Ahead, the Ruby Gate burned like a wound in reality.

Beyond it waited Hell.

Nessus

The Nine Hells proved less unified than anyone expected.

Zariel and the Order of the Cleansing Flame were already at war with forces loyal to Asmodeus, attempting to reform a realm built around punishment without redemption. The Veil Piercers joined their siege through Avernus and descended by the River of Dismay into Dis.

There, the architecture of Hell became administration.

Dispater's city catalogued souls in ledgers, taxed passage between districts, and bound True Names into infernal records. Devils could kill you, certainly, but the more dangerous ones preferred signatures.

Somewhere still deeper lay the truth that had first brought the party toward the Hells at all.

The real Malyr was imprisoned in Nessus.

Whatever power had worn his face above Malinar, whatever had corrupted his church and driven its paladins toward conquest, had done so while the God of Battle remained chained beneath the realm of the Betrayer.

And at the bottom of that realm waited Asmodeus, eldest architect of the deception, ruler of the infernal machine, and the god who had once decided mortal life itself was a mistake.

The Veil Piercers are descending toward him now.

Behind them lies a world of broken kingdoms, dead gods, stolen Divine Hearts, and a Goddess of Light preparing to rewrite history out of love for the people trying desperately to stop her.

Ahead lies Nessus.

And the light is not dead yet.