The truth is known (part 1)

You stand with the firepit of the watermill before you, watching the ancient crone Noan skitter from place to place, muttering to herself.

"Just stay a-right there, boy." She cackled to you a few moments earlier. "Noan be collecting her reagents."

Watching her grab a handful of brown, rotting leaves from one of the dusty ceramic pots and then catch a wriggling centipede, you start to have second thoughts about wanting to look into your past. Not out of some primal fear, but the very real fear of losing your lunch, and possibly last night's dinner as well.

It doesn't help any that Noan throws all these disgusting ingredients into a stained and cracked teacup and begins grinding them together into a paste. She takes a kettle hanging over the fire and pours the boiling water into the teacup, mixing it with the ground reagents of her potion.

"It be ready." Noan says, offering you the cracked teacup, filled to the brim with the briny solution. "Drink."

Sitting on their bedrolls a few hours later, in one of the rooms of the expansive basement, Tri'lanna and Ceinwyn linger away from the rest of the Elves, the ones who resist Vanarim's rule, barricaded within in the Mage's College to keep out the rioters and Vanarim's Elven supporters.

While friendly and courteous to any other the Elves who approach, Ceinwyn listens in rapt attention to her friend Tri'lanna.

"Before I tell you anything else, please understand that, all this time with you and Hans, I have only wanted to do the right thing. I never meant to hurt anyone, and I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to atone for it."

Tri'lanna takes a deep breath, and begins speaking again. "Like I told you before, Magic is power and the price for that power is life." The Elfgirl looks like she is about to laugh for a moment, "It's quite obvious when you think about it. The Akashic Records are also magical, so a sufficent sacrifice of life is all that is necessary.

"I wasn't there when it happened, but when I learned that Vanarim had sacrificed his first-born and only son, I stood by and did nothing about it. It was the remaining sorcerers, my other teachers, who stood up and defied him. When he emerged from the Akashic Records they realized the fatal flaw in their quest to find the Records.

"He was insane. All he could talk about was the Records and wanting to go back. To satisfy his lust for even more power, more magic, he wanted to subjugate all life on the isle, and that included the friends and family of many of the sorcerers who worked in the cadre with him. They had resolved to stop Vanarim from doing any more damage. Thus, The War against the Pretender was waged."

"The War against the Pretender?" Ceinwyn repeated, confused,

"It was more than a hundred years ago, so I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it. We Elves are blessed with a lifespan stretching hundreds of years, so a century is like a decade for you humans.

"Vanarim struck with legions of undead and demons, rolling out from the East with fire and fangs to attack all life on the isle. The sorcerers rallied together all the free-thinking races to stand against the Pretender. Somehow, Vanarim was struck down in a titanic battle of swords and sorcery. But he would simply. Not. Die. The powers in the Akashic Records appeared to give him immortality.

"As a last resort, my masters combined their strengths, separating Vanarim from his life essence and transferring it to a small gem."

Ceinwyn gasps when she realizes what Tri'lanna is implying. "The Shining Stone."

Tri'lanna nods.

"Separated from his life, Vanarim fell into a comatose state, and he was sealed up, far in the east, within his damned city. The Shining Stone could not be destroyed either though, no matter how we tried, so we hid it away too, believing the war was over.

"But we underestimated how great the power of the Akashic Records were. **** has no hold on those who transcend life, and in separating the Pretender from his life essence, the old sorcerers may have created the monster we face today.

"When Vanarim came back, he was no longer hindered by mortal weaknesses and there was no one left to oppose him any longer. All the other head sorcerers had passed away by that time or died in the first war. Which brings us to today, and all that's happened..."

Sitting cross-legged on a straw mat, you upend the teacup and swallow the bitter-tasting fluid. It tastes thick and oily, coating the back of your throat as it oozes its way down. The flavor reminds you of something between rotting goatmeat and maggots covered in stale sugar. You try not to retch the foul concoction up.

Gradually, a strange sensation crawls up your spine and towards the back of your skull, dulling your senses and making you drowsy. Your breathing slows, and the room starts to blur. You have to fight back a wave of nausea as everything seems to bend and contort.

"What be your eyes see?" Noan asks. "Mayhaps, you will find the answers you seek."

Shimmer.

Flames. Gutandor. Your home is blazing in a firestorm around you. You instinctively want to fight down the memory again but Noan's **** weakens your resistance, and you begin to see the horror with deeper clarity than ever before. It is as if you are reliving this hell a second time.

Out from the fire comes the lizardmen and the demons, striking at the fleeing villagers. You reach out to try and hold back one of them, but your hands pass right through like mist. You scream and yell at the villagers, the faces of your friends and family, warning them to run away, to hide, but your voice falls on deaf ears as many are caught and butchered savagely.

"The reason I never told Hans, about all of this..." Tri'lanna says.

Then you see yourself, and your heart clenches painfully. There is a panicked, bewildered look on his face, as if he isn't sure this is real and that, any moment now, he will wake up from this nightmare. Beside him is a beautiful, shapely girl with long blonde hair. Melena. Oh, sweet Melena. The last villager of Gutandor, dying right in front of you. You cannot bear to look anymore at the tragedy and turn away.

That's when you see someone in a cloak, the flames behind the figure painting it black and ominous.

"The reason why I kept it a secret and why I didn't want him to know most of all....."

When the past was the present and you were running for your life, you never noticed or gave the cloaked figure a second thought. But now, watching detached from the actual event, the person standing in the shadows is well known to you now. You would never be able to forget the shape of her body, her features, or her lavender hued eyes.

"...is because I was the one who led the demons to Gutandor."