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D A E N  /  T H E  U N R A V E L L E R  /  T R U T H S E E K E R

M Y T H O L O G Y

Lost Exerpt from "The Stuff Of Legend: Volume 2" 
 This exerpt was recovered by an expedition of students from Modal's School of Scholarly pursuits who were traveling up the eastern mountains to study the stout plant life that clings there. 
  Originally scribed by the Renowned scholar Amadaeus Brigs, this excerpt is thought to be the last piece Brigs ever wrote.

The Truthseeker:
Perhaps one of, if not the least well known legend of Ansus, The Truthseeker was a particularly difficult topic of study. Recommended to me by a strange man at a pub with a tall hat and brown-grey gloves of odd material, The Truthseeker was alluded to in a variety of placed. He was often described as a force of nature rather than a man. Direct information, however, was impossible to find. After spending countless nights awake with my nose firmly planted in between the pages of some journal or yet another volume of "Notable Names of History" (of which there were forty-two, upon the publishing of this informative piece. Although I have no doubt the number reaches somewhere in the hundreds at the time of your reading this) I find that The Truthseeker appears a total of zero times. 

So then, my dear reader, you may be wondering how it is that I came about this information at all. Well, I am firmly under the impression that the author of "Notable Names of History" (one Arthur Samine) is biased rapscallion who frankly smells of week old cheese. He finds it more scholarly to only pursue the most readily available information, and therefore I declare him to be not a scholar, but rather a mummer. I expect this informative piece to relegated to the back room of some dusty storehouse for such direct insult, and commend you highly for digging it out again! You shant be sorry for your search, however. Because as I have told you, I possess knowledge the general public does not! So then, on to the actual information!

Once again introduced: The Truthseeker. Known by both this name and also as "The Unraveller" (for good reason, as you will come to see) was a marvel which none other in my searches has been able to match. While there are indeed others with greater physical strength or spiritual prowess. The power of The Truthseeker was absolutely unique. For he was, at the time, the one and only disciple of the Minor Deity, Seavus, The god of truth.

Packing my sizeable collection of written knowledge for a trip into the far eastern mountains was quite the task in itself. So when I saw the sheer climb that awaited me, a gracious innkeeper charged me nearly all my limbs (a figure of speech, dear reader) to store my collections. Three days hike later, and twice nearly falling to my untimely doom at the hands of none other than the infamous gravity, I was presented with a small shrine nestled into the high reaches of a lone peak. There, bound to the raised dais by incomprehensible magics, sat a tattered book. Try as I might, I could not remove the tome (it was quite cold upon the peak, and I had no intention of setting up for a study, but that was what I was driven too). And now my dearest and most avid reader, I recount to you the words I extracted from the tome that nearly had my fingers frozen to my charcoal on half a dozen occasions.  

Page 1 of the Book of Truth:

Three pages thee, o' seeker, from this book you may choose.

What truths you seek shall not be found unless you have sought before. 

Choose wisely o' seeker.

Three pages? Surely there must have been hundreds, but I could choose only three. I was not prepared for the stress this brought upon me. Being such a avid seeker of knowledge, I spent days decoding what I could of this book. Trying to determine what would be stored where before I made my choice. My success was extremely limited. I decided to forge on, the first page I would choose would be twenty-five. I had no particular reason for this, but without a reference of how the knowledge might be ordered, I had to start somewhere. 

Page 25 of The Book of Truth: 

My dearest Disciple:
By black will you fall.
By white will you rise. 
Four times of four, you shall be your own guide. 

Upon your return, I shall grant you this
In order to strike, at first must you miss. 

And perhaps one more, for loyalty's sake.
To reclaim what you've found, you first must unmake.

This page was, I soon found, a message to The Truthseeker, or, for the sake of not mixing up the "seeker" as the reader is called in The Book of Truth, I shall call the Truthseeker by the name I found on the next page I opened. Daen. I must say that I considered myself rather luck-struck to come across a second page referring to that which I was seeking. But then I thought of the riddle on the first page once more:
What truths you seek shall not be found unless you have sought before. 
Well, I had indeed sought knowledge of Daen before, when I searched the libraries of the east and west alike. So perhaps it was not luck, but rather the intervention of divinity. I thought briefly if I could perhaps trick this being, or magic, or whatever it was that was guiding my choices. But thought better of it rather quickly. After all, I was getting what I had come for, so why try my hand and throwing that askew? 
My next choice was fifty-eight.

Page 58 of The Book of Truth

O' seeker you fall with droplets of rain 
I now for thee, the tales of Daen:

For the convenience of my dear readers, I have deciphered the rather long winded rhyming tales that were then perilously crammed onto this single page. 

The miasma of Oaxum: Any reader of the aforementioned "Notable Names of History" knows of the famous battle between the (now fragmented) western nation of Roania and the (now extinct) Peoples of Neamia, who lived in villages that bordered the northern deserts nearly forty-thousand years ago. In an attempt to bring the Neamian peoples under the rule of the king of Roania (who's name has been lost to history) a culling was to be performed. The Roanian military was to scatter twelve villages to the wind as a threat of extinction to the Neamians. The culling was carried out with both swiftness and brutality. But instead of falling in line as the Roanian king had hoped, the Neamians retaliated fiercely. They were hunted and systematically slaughtered for their rebelliousness. But not before taking a sizeable chunk of the Roanian empire out with what was, for the next ten thousand years, referred to as the Miasma of Oaxum. The miasma was nearly fifty kilometers across, and how this plague of toxicity was created is unknown. But within the rhymes of The Book of Truth, I found how it was eventually dispersed. Daen, holding what is referred to in the book as the "seed of truth" dispersed the miasma to the winds of time. Dispelling the toxic wastelands that had been impassable for ten millenia in a matter of hours. 

The book does not mention what exaclty the "seed of truth" is. But it does refer to it as shiny and reflective. With this in mind I can make an assumption that it was some sort of gem.

The Strait of Imenis: It was quite surprising to me that I had never heard this tale before. It was always rumored that a great evil once blocked the strait of Imenis, preventing trade and information being passed across the sliver of land that separates the Gray Lake north of Kolantis. It was thought that the magic binding the creature there had eroded over time (the same was thought of the Miasma of Oaxum). The evil is described in the book as blacker than any starless night. Formless and thoughtless except for a veil of killing fury. None who attempted to ever cross the Strait survived. It is said that, using his great mind and guided personally by an aspect of Seavus (which, I might mention, is said by the book later as "my aspect". This leads me to the magnificent yet somehow troubling revelation that this book was created directly by the will of the lesser deity Seavus.) Daen outsmarted the creature, tricking it into revealing it's true nature as a magical construct formed by a blood magic ritual. He then pulled the threads of this exposed magic, guided by both the Seed of Truth and the Aspect of Saevus. The outpouring of malevolent energy that appearently escaped from the construct once it was destroyed nearly flayed Daen's mind, but he was saved by the Aspect of Saevus. Who, in order to save him, removed one of Daen's eyes and replaced it with the Seed of truth. 

The Mark of the Seeker: The third and final tale squeezed onto the page was by far the most interesting. While the others had shown Daen's prowess at defensive and cognitive abilities, they had not mentioned how he retaliated against offensive magicks. The mark of the seeker, as said by the book, was the tale of Daen's final hours. The writing here gets rather cryptic, but what I did manage to decrypt about the events was this. Daen, after communion with Saevus, was told a truth none other could bare. He was appearently told of a "starless night" as the book recalls it. What exactly this means, I cannot determine. His sanity was stretched to its limits by this truth. In order to regain control of his now fleeing mind, Saevus showed Daen how he could earn the "mark of the seeker". 

This would restore all his faculties and protect his mind from ever being flayed by truth again. The only other to ever earn the Mark of the seeker, says the book, was Saevus itself. How exactly a god could "earn" anything is beyond me, but by this merrit it is shown that in his final hours, Daen recieved a piece of divinity. He was by no means turned into a god. But with his obtainment of the mark of the seeker, Saevus could impart all the godly knowledge upon daen without fear of destroying his only desciple. Saevus' communion with Daen here is rushed. The book suggests that no time could be sparred, and the potential destruction of Daen's sanity had to be risked so that Saevus could impart dire knowledge on him that could appearently "prevent a starless night". 

Daen then traveled into the southern Sea, to an island that (as the books says it) "was wreathed in blackest night forevermore."
There are a variety of challenges that Daen faces there, several of which are more of the same magical constructs that nearly flayed his mind at the Strait of Imentis. He finds a temple of black stone perched atop the island's peak. There he manages to fight his way through the "robes of blackest night" and make it into the inner sanctum of the Black stone temple. Once within, he claims the Mark of the Seeker. Which apparently branded him with three connected circles under the seed of truth (his right eye). A trap was triggered once he claimed the mark, however, shutting him in darkness and sapping all life from him. The book ends the tales with this line.

In blackened black the seeker fell. 
left cold and hardened as a shell. 

But from my son the dark could not take
The breath of truth from his lips did escape.

I've spent most the day copying down these tales, and look forward to my third and final page on the morrow.

The excert ends here. The student expedition found his body at the base of a nearby cliff. Frozen and impaled on sharp rocks, several strange icicles emerging from his body that seemingly fell from the heavens like raindrops. 

A P P E A R A N C E

In history The Unraveller was often shown not as a man, but as a force of nature. He was often symbolized as time, as time was the greatest unraveller of all. In the very few items that describe his psysical appearance, he is tall with a lithe and athletic build. Raven black hair sits atop one striking emerald green eye, and one lightly pulsing amber gem. He wears layered robes and favors an asymmetric dress on most occasions. 

P E R S O N A L I T Y

Nothing yet, writing in BBCode is super annoying, so I'm writing elsewhere and importing, I'll keep you all updated.

A B I L I T I E S / E Q U I P M E N T

Daen is the blessed disciple of the God of Truth, Saevus. As the Truthseeker, he has the ability to unravel the most complex magics given time. His tools allow him to do this much more quickly. In many cases he can unravel offensive magic that is used against him before it can even touch him. The unravelling process is a pitting of consciousness. And every time Daen unravels he unravels his mind slowly as well. The seed of truth mitigates the unraveling of his mind, and allows him to do the process much more quickly, but the Mark of the Seeker halts the process entirely.

The Seed of Truth: Bestowed upon him by Saevus, the seed of truth allows Daen to unravel extremely complex magic very quickly. With the Seed he dispelled the Miasma of Oaxum (see mythology) in only a few hours. Similarily, he used the seed to unravel a very old and very powerful magical construct of malice created by a ring of blood mages hundreds of years ago. 

The Mark of the Seeker: Daen earned The Mark of the Seeker when he infiltrated a temple of the black. He took back what was stolen from the God of Truth. Within the inner sanctum he payed for the retrieval with his life. The Mark of the Seeker reformed Daen's mind when it was nearly torn apart after Saevus imparted the knowledge of the starless night on him. The Mark's primary power is that it prevents Daen's mind from being flayed by magic ever again. His mind cannot be broken by hearing the knowledge of the gods, however since his patron god has died, he can no longer communicate with any gods. Therefore the primary purpose of the mark is protecting his sanity during the unraveling process. He can unravel even the highest forms of magic now given the time, as he no longer has to fear he'll be torn apart.

The Pendant: Known by no other name and not mentioned in any tales of Daen, the Pendant is Daen's primary force of offensive magic. Although paltry in comparison to other offensive magical artifacts, the Pendant allows Daen to quickly create rune traps. They can vary in usage from gravity traps to fireball traps etc, they take a few moments to set and must be used in conjunction with one another to be most effective.

A G E  O F  L E G E N D 

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