Wordbinder's Folly

[Eliezer of Erudin]

Then...

Eliezer of Erudin paced quietly along the lakeshore on the Plane of Tranquility.  His robes were tattered from wear and battle during his recent sojourns to the outer planes, and despite the preternatural stillness of the place both his heart and mind were quite far from tranquil.  With a scowl and a curse his fingers danced from rote muscle memory and he opened the Gate back to the great library of New Taanan in the Place of Knowledge.

Eliezer stalked among the stacks, scanning the rows of books, oblivious to the other seekers of knowledge, bowling over any who dared to stand in his way.  More than once Librarians attempted to intercede, but quickly withered under his burning gaze and settled for doing their best to clear others from his path.  By the time he left the library with three weighty tomes of divination, the entire place was abuzz with speculation.  This was neither the first nor the last time that the residents of New Taanan would wonder if they had made a grave mistake in opening the gates of their city to the Norrathians, and if their complicity in allowing the siege and assault against the very gods themselves in their Planes of Power would end well.  While those who argued its necessity eventually won out, that begged the question that this scene at the library exemplified...  When men must challenge the gods, who can stay the hand of the god-slayers?  Those who had been chosen to battle the gods would be changed.  It was inevitable.  But the people of New Taanan assumed that they would simply persevere, as they always had.  Were it only to be so simple.

Back in his room at the Inn, Eliezer poured over the tomes of divinatory magics for three days and nights, taking neither food nor water, and with a skull his only company.  The empty eye sockets of the skull staring lifelessly at the Wizard.
After reading and re-reading the same passage a dozen times, Eliezer assumed the task to be hopeless, and swept the books from the desk where they clattered loudly on the floor, spilling a vial of ink and basket of quills in their wake.  Eliezer picked up the skull and stared at in for almost a full minute before his scowl faded and he tossed the skull onto the spartan cot and stood up, moving to the window, throwing open the shutters and taking a good, full breath of clean air.
"No.  I will not go down that road.  Repeating Miragul's mistakes would be the essence of insanity.  There must be another way."  Staring out over New Taanan's shops and homes Eliezer thought back upon the fateful campaign in the very Plane of Time itself that brought him here, to this moment.

After battling through the lower planes and then the upper tiers, battling the gods of good and evil alike, the armies of Norrath's heroes breached the Plane of Time itself.  Many valiant warriors and mages alike fell in battle to honorable death or debilitating injury.  Still others fled in cowardice.  Eliezer had turned back for neither reason.  He had simply uncovered a more pressing mission.

Eliezer had been part of a small band scouting the outer defenses when they were ambushed.  He would later learn that the Dark Augurs had foreseen their arrival and knew exactly where to lie in wait.  Vernard Quince, a seasoned Peacekeeper, was the only reason Eliezer would survive that day.  He was the only one who sensed that they had walked into a trap.   He roughly shoved Eliezer to the ground, and shouted an alarm.  Stunned, Eliezer was unable to even voice his surprise when the temporal curse of the Dark Augurs struck the Peacekeeper.  He could only watch in horror as this man whom he had fought beside against the very gods themselves quickly aged right before his eyes until naught remained of him except a fine dust upon the wind.

After that, Eliezer remembers very little, except the rage and fire.  He stood over the last of the Dark Augurs in a smoking crater.  The creatures were like a parody of man, with the seeming of a dried and desiccated corpse, but not undead.  Both of its arms had been burned to the bone, and it seemed to have neither fight nor magic left in it.  Before Eliezer could put it out of its misery with Ro's fire, the creature looked up at him... and laughed.

"Eliezer... of Erudin...  Once favored of the Burning Prince...  welcome...to your doom."

The creature's bravado incensed Eliezer, "You will lead the way to doom, monster.  I have heard such pronouncements from the lips of the gods themselves, and yet here I stand!"  His fist ignited in flame and he raised it to smite the wretch.

"Oh.. of that I have no doubt.  But what I have seen.  What I have foreseen...  That which is my true purpose, this is my gift and curse to you...  Know what it is that you have wrought!"  With that the creature's eyes turned black as coal, and Eliezer was suddenly struck with a vision...  A terrible vision of calamity and cataclysm!
The voice of the Dark Augur hissed at him, as if from a long distance, "Impudent fools!  Did you think this travesty of order would have no consequence?  That you could simply challenge the gods and there would be no repercussions?  Witness the cataclysm, and the destruction of all you hold dear!  Oh, it will not be today, nor tomorrow, and you will be long gone.  But the children of your sister, and their children and children's children...  will be vagrants and beggars!  Your beloved Odus will fall!  Everything you have fought for in your life shall come to ruin!  The gods will abandon Norrath, turn their backs upon you ungrateful wretches!  Did you honestly think you could prevail here?  That this all has not been foreordained!  You cannot escape your fate!  The Burning Prince abandons you now, as he did when you lay dying in the Hole!"

Eliezer reeled from the onslaught of the vision, and felt himself blown about as if in a hurricane.  It ended as abruptly as it began, and when his senses returned Eliezer quickly moved to shield himself from further attack and destroy the Dark Augur...  but it was already dead.  After helping the few surviving members of the party bandage their wounds and opened a gate for them to retreat through... Eliezer stood, alone in that desolate place, and pulled his dagger from its sheath...

[Eliezer of Erudin]

Now...

The blinding light and roaring sound faded after what seemed an eternity.  As his blurred vision cleared, Eliezer could see he was elsewhere...  A wooden wall was before him.  It was warm.  Did it work?  It must have worked...  but something had gone wrong...  he just could not remember what...  His mind was still a jumble of confused thoughts.  But still... if he was here... perhaps there was still time.  He must warn the High Council!  Eliezer concentrated, attempting to see with his mind's eye the Combine Spires of Toxxulia Forest, and step through the aether... and promptly fell to the floor.  His head pounded, and felt as if someone had driven an iron spike through his skull.  He voided the contents of his stomach, and his last idle thought before losing consciousness was that he didn't remember eating fish for breakfast...

When Eliezer awoke, the room was dark and the fireplace had burned out.  His head still throbbed and he ached all over.  He managed to roll over onto his back, displacing the semi-solid vomit puddle he lay in, and the window confirmed that it was night.  Rising unsteadily to his feet, Eliezer snapped his fingers, to call forth Ro's fire, but was met again only with what felt like a vice crushing his skull.  So he stumbled through the dark, eventually finding matches and candles, to light the room.  It was still too dark to see much of where he was. He was in a small cabin of some sort.  The floor was strewn with books and boxes.  Noting a washbasin in the corner he carefully picked his way through the debris to rinse the dried vomit from his face.

What he saw in the mirror by candlelight startled him, so much that he nearly fell backwards tripping over an overturned chair.  Shaking his head to try and clear the cobwebs, he re-approached the mirror and touched his face... nay, a stranger's face.  A stranger's strange face!  There was nothing in it he recognized...  well...  Except the eyes.  Those were his golden eyes.  Eliezer ran his fingers over the elongated skull...  that too seemed... familiar.  But his skin, it was oddly colored, with strange marks...  Then it came back to him in a rush...  The vision of the Dark Augur.  His people had been changed... evolved perhaps...  But this was all wrong, something was horribly amiss.  Without thinking about it, again Eliezer attempted to cast a spell, and was once again rewarded with what must surely have been a mallet to his forehead.  Stumbling backwards, he felt a bed frame, and though the mattress was stiff and stuffed with straw, Eliezer climbed atop it and promptly passed out.

[Eliezer of Erudin]

Then...

Eliezer had been working day and night in the basement of the Tower of High Sorcery in Erudin for more than a fortnight since his return from the Planes of Power.  He would see no one.  Pages brought him refreshments when required, and emptied his chamber pot twice daily.  He would leave lists of books that he required from the Great Library, and they would leave notes from Komaru which he left unopened in a pile.  He did not have time to waste.

He had pondered the curse of the Dark Augur at great length.  The insurmountable issue was simply one of time.  He would be long dead by the time the Cataclysm struck, and unable to prevent it.  He could not trust that the High Council would defend Odus properly.  That much was clear when he reported his findings to them.  They looked at him as if he were a madman.  A once-great Wizard who had been broken by the horrors of the war upon the gods.  No...  If the prophecy of the Dark Augur could be confounded, he would have to do it himself.  And this would require powerful magic.  New magic.  Something not yet tried before.  Something dangerous.  Eliezer stole a glance at the Augur's skull on his desk.  He kept it as a reminder that there were some lines one could not cross.  When he took the skull, from that dark and desolate hole, he had considered the possibility of utilizing the magic of the Heretics to force its lifeless jaws to tell him what he needed to know to stop this.  And later, when he realized that there simply was not enough time.  Time.  Time... it always came back to Time, that accursed Plane that unwrought all that he had fought for.  When he realized he did not have the time, he again considered Miragul's path...  a Lich could exist long enough to see this through...

Eliezer shuddered, and put those thoughts aside.  Miragul's folly could not be repeated.  It had already been proven false.  As his old Master of Novices, Whes Naraya often said, the essence of insanity is attempting to cast the same spell over and over, and expecting different results.  No, this plan was sublime.  It would succeed.  Frankly, it was brilliant.

[Eliezer of Erudin]

Now...

Eliezer blinked his eyes open and sat bolt upright.  His head still pounded, although it was subsiding.  By the look of the light from the window, he had slept through midmorning.  Looking around the room he saw the floor was littered with books, and the floor itself was riddled in chalk runes and circles.  There was something familiar about those sigils...

"The spell!" Eliezer shouted, "his" own voice sounding strange to him, "By Ro's burning breath what has this fool wrought?"  Hauling himself out of the bed and onto unsteady legs, Eliezer began the tedious task of organizing the chaos in the room, cataloging the books and sigils, and understanding what had transpired.
By the time the light was beginning to fade into twilight, Eliezer had regained a fair chunk of his memory, and an understanding of what had happened.  This cabin... this body...  once belonged to Lexibald Wordbinder, a distant nephew, descended from his sister, Komaru.  This boy... nay, man Eliezer corrected himself as he gazed upon the face in the mirror, had fancied himself both a Wizard and a Librarian, in the familial tradition.  The first thing Eliezer had thought upon reading Lexibald's notes, was that the boy had an absolutely terrible command of Old Erudian.  After that it quickly became apparent that he had been largely self-taught, and his knowledge of Wizardry was less than that of even the youngest Aspirant of the Tower.

The Book itself, had been indeed guarded and kept safe by Komaru, and her children, and childrens' children.  Good Librarians to the last.  Good custodians.  But they didn't read it.  Didn't understand it.  Ye gods they simply hauled it around like dead weight maybe a hundred years too late!

[Eliezer of Erudin]

Then...

Komaru was crying.  Eliezer steeled himself against it.  It was inevitable at their parting, but he must sacrifice for the greater good.  He handed her The Book.  A weighty tome, sturdily bound and fastened with a brass lock, it was built to last.  Craftsmanship he had forgotten that he even had the capability of performing, when he had left the Bookbindery to take his place as a young Aspirant of the Tower, oh so many years ago.

Eliezer tried to console his sister, "Keep this book safe.  Keep it with the history of our people.  Remember and teach your children.  Do not let our legacy be for naught.  There will come a time when great tribulations begin.  It is then that this book must be used..."

"Come with us then, brother!  After all that has happened.  After Verion, and after Lemeth and Antoin... I cannot lose you as well!" Komaru hugged him close and pleaded.  Eliezer hugged her in return, and then pushed her to arms length, looking into her face.

"I am afraid that cannot be.  I have begun a path that must be followed, it is too late to step back.  I must go alone."

After the tears were spent, Eliezer stepped through the aether, and into the wilderness.  He had already prepared his camp.  He would live out his life as a hermit, with no company save for the grinning skull of the Dark Augur.  He had studied the divinatory magics closely, and he could not risk any further interactions or associations that might change the predicted course of events.

And so Eliezer waited, lonely and alone, until he grew old, and died, and the world had moved on...

Or did he?

It was dark, and cold.  Eliezer sat and meditated, as he did every day, waiting for the day...

Wait...  what was that?  A tingle, a smell in the air...  The chill of the temporal magics of Time itself.  The Call!  The clarions!  But wait... something was wrong.... Something was amiss and awry.... The threads were unraveled, raw, chaotic!  Eliezer reached out with his mind's eye and began to cast the Rite of Weaving....  Perhaps there was still time to repair the damage....  The clarion call became discordant... the weaving became more complex...  Eliezer was older now, and out of practice...  He gathered up a bunch of threads of mana and called for his Familiar to bind them...  but the Drake was gone...  Damnation!  He could see the skull of the Dark Augur grinning at him.  He redoubled his efforts, he switched the cadence of the spell to Al'Kabor's Third Convocation.  Time!  Damn the gods he needed more...

Time.

[Eliezer of Erudin]

Now...

It had been a week since Eliezer arrived in the body of Lexibald Wordbinder, and he had been over the formulae and spells hundreds of times.  He could think of no way to undo what had been wrought, and he had no ability to call upon his own magical might.  It had all been committed to preventing the spell from destroying them both.

Now Eliezer of Erudin found himself somewhere foreign and unfamiliar, and he had only his wits and "his" body to see him through.  But he did not despair, for he had learned from his fellow villagers that Qeynos remained a bastion of hope.  And if there was still hope left in this shattered world, then that meant one sure fact.

Where there was hope, he would find the legacy of his starspun companions, who's Saga was unending.