Friday Lore Post: A Brief History of the Sorcerer’s Leystone

Once, during a war that ended, began and then ended the world again, an army crossed a mighty river called the Eltha, a natural barrier depended upon by many for protection. Needing to build a bridge overnight so they could all cross, the army sent a squadron of soldiers across to begin the process. One of those young soldiers, once they’d crossed the river, picked up a small stone that reminded him of home and put it in a pouch on his belt during a break from work on the bridge, the construction of which allowed them to launch a series of sneak attacks against two armies camped out on the other side of the river, which changed the balance of power in the entire region for over a decade.

That boy soldier kept that stone in his pouch until the guardian of the door to hell ran him through in order to stop him and his friend from breaking the door open and allowing hell back into the world. After his death and the destruction of hell’s lock, the stone became the worldly anchor for the lock fragment that communed with the most foundational powers in the cosmos, drawing power from the eternal and unbreakable struggle between order and chaos, which became two strands of power later known together as sorcery.

At a summit a century later to decide the fate of the stones and arguably the world, the stone from the River Eltha was given to Sheheren Janaj He’Sseri, a death goddess whose opposition to the ongoing wars was well known, and whose varied alliances and loyalties were less so. Sheheren kept the stone for some centuries, attempting to discover how it was that it was anchored to the Web in the manner it was. She surmised incorrectly that the stone and its partners were fragments of the tower itself and all that remained of its power, and surmised correctly that in order to reconstruct the Web, the stones would need to be bound to users of the Web, which at that point were humans and nobody else. Because there were only a select few human magic users who retained access to the entire Web, Sheheren contacted the leaders of the two factions of remaining spiders, by this point known as angels and demons, for a meeting to discuss their options, as the reconstruction of the Web was critical for preventing higher demons from attacking the world.

At the meeting Sheheren had planned with Cameron and Raphael, her son Rawen appeared instead, attacking her. He was nearly killed in the altercation, especially after Cameron and Raphael showed up, accompanied by their armies, and escalated the situation somewhat. The arrival of a colony of dragons further escalated the disagreement, which ultimately created the cliffs now known as the Cliffs of Angels. Rawen escaped with the stone in the chaos, which Sheheren surmised was his real goal in attacking her so brazenly.

Rawen studied the stone himself for two centuries, certain that it in particular could help him return his soulmate him. Believing correctly that he would do something stupid and/or dangerous with the stone, Sheheren plotted to get it back, managing to steal it from him. He then stole it back from her, and the stone was passed between the two surviving members of Clan Janaj for some eleven hundred years before Rawen finally succeeding in giving it to a human sorcerer named Bjorn of Clan Wessen, who happened to be a reincarnation of Rawen’s soulmate. To Rawen’s minor dismay, Bjorn didn’t use the stone to return to his former self, but instead used it to unify several sorcerer clans under his power and create an army that would conquer most of the continent then called Jesper, which would later become Enjon. Emperor Bjorn ordered an invasion of the southern continent, triggering the first wave of Flame War invasion. Bjorn eventually died of old age and the stone was passed onto his son Bori, who was assassinated by his brother Borg, who was killed by Rawen, who only then discovered that the stone wasn’t in Borg’s possession because Sheheren had stolen it at Bjorn’s funeral.

It took Rawen another hundred years to track the stone down, and he had a confrontation with his mother that started at the top of N’kar’s Great Ziggurat and ended on the Mikk Islands’ Mount Tevaria, where the stone was accidentally thrown into the active volcano thanks to the interference of a human interloper named Bob, who claimed just to be passing through before disappearing. Assuming the stone destroyed, Sheheren and Rawen left.

The volcano waited about seventy years to erupt, throwing ash and various other debris into the sky, as volcanoes are known to do. Among the debris was the stone, which was actually quite indestructible, and which landed in the water and sank to the bottom of the ocean, and specifically to a field just outside the town of Tanameki Qetel in the demesne of Ten Unollol. It sat there for a very long time before a young merperson named Rowa found it and thought it was pretty, and put it in a necklace for their mother. The necklace was passed down in Rowa’s family for eight generations until it was sold by the family disappointment Agge in exchange for drug money, which he accidentally spent on prostitutes instead.

The stone was deemed ugly and removed from the necklace to be replaced with something nicer, and tossed into a field. There, it was found by an octopus, which put it in its nest before leaving said nest to mate. The stone was then eaten by a particularly stupid anglerfish who thought it was an egg. That anglerfish was then eaten by a large shark who was angry about having been deprived of a nice meal of octopus earlier that day. This shark, so distracted by its anger, was then eaten by a shark dragon, who wanted sustenance for a long journey across the ocean for mating purposes. The shark dragon then died after a fight with a hydra and its body sank to the bottom of the sea and was covered by debris, preserving it.

Three hundred and fifty years later, the shark dragon’s remains were shifted by a minor underwater earthquake, which had them and other debris washing up on an island called Exnar, where the locals were very impressed by them but also minor alarmed by them. They were also seen by a visitor to Exnar, a Dolovin lord named Timothy Draughten, who bought the remains and had them brought back to the city of Pelican Bay to be displayed in his manor. Many deemed this to be tacky, and Draughten’s granddaughter Tilly eventually donated the bones to the local sea monster museum in order to make the house seem classy in expectation of a royal visit.

In cleaning and organizing the bones for display, staff at the sea monster museum discovered the stone lodged inside a vertebra, and took it to be appraised, unsure of what kind of stone it was. The local stone expert, Nathan the Blue, was a member of Clan Gjoil, the sorcerer clan local to Pelican Bay, and discerned the stone’s ability to empower a sorcerer. Clan Gjoil held onto the stone for about fifty years before admitting they had it to the other sorcerer clans in Menechit, after which it was determined to be a leystone similar to others known to exist on the continent. For safety, the stone was to be given to a new clan every generation, and the clan in possession of the stone subject to inspections from other clans to make sure they weren’t misusing it.

This system worked just fine until, when the stone was under the protection of Clan Netzer, one of their members, Solomon, heeded the whisperings of a mad god and killed his whole clan save his immediate family, stealing the stone. He disappeared, resurfacing twenty years later as the Sorcerer King in Ech’kent, before being killed by his son Samson, who bound the stone to himself. The other sorcerer clans have been reluctant to attack Samson, who has ignored all their missives requesting peaceful discussion. Most recently, Samson of Clan Netzer was apparently killed in combat with a demon, and his body and the stone disappeared. Whether him coming back with it would be a good or bad thing for the world is up for debate.