Description
A small, nondescript arial is here. Jet black wings seem to absorb all light,
making for a most unnatural appearance. His white wingtips are adorned with
blood-red medallions, each trailing a small silver ribbon. Dark eyes offer a
hard stare from his avian features. His hawklike beak appears to have been
broken often and seems poised in a permanent sneer. The arial appears to be
clothed in whatever armors he happened upon, with no continuity from one
piece to another.
Role
Background
Added Mon Dec 20 17:05:19 2004 at level 11:
Long ago, a priest with the sacred text of the Sacraa led a band of followers
up into the mountains. Such was his Will, though the inspiration behind it
has long been lost in time. Some time after occurred a great cataclysm, and
along the slopes there were land-slips and swift thawings and sudden floods,
and one whole side of the crest slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off
our villages forever from the exploring feet of those who dwelt below.
Generation begat generation. There came a time when a child was born who was
twenty generations from the ancestor who had led his people into these
mountains. By this time, they had forgotten many things they had devised
many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came from became
mythical in color and uncertain, but their belief in the teachings of the
Sacraa remained unchanged. In all things they were strong and able, living
hardily where others could not survive.
Gazing out from the snowy peaks, the mountainsides fade into the clouds. The
people could not travel so far down the mountain as to reach the clouds, nor
would they do so if they could.Those who have fallen have never been seen
again. Yet there was still a peak that had not been tamed, one at the very
edge of their world. Few came to this mount, and yet one day an expedition
was planned. The little party worked their difficult and almost vertical way
up to the very foot of the last and greatest precipice, and how they built a
night shelter amidst the snow upon a little shelf of rock, and how presently
they found one had gone missing. They shouted, and there was no reply
shouted and whistled, and for the rest of that night they slept no more.
As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems impossible he
could have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward towards the unknown side
of the mountain - far below he had struck a steep slope of snow, and ploughed
his way down it in the midst of a snow avalanche. His track went straight to
the edge of a frightful precipice, and beyond that everything was hidden.
Far, far below, and hazy with distance, they could see the dark shapes of
spires through the mist. But they did not know what their eyes fell
upon. Unnerved by this disaster, they abandoned their attempt in the
afternoon, and the expedition leader was called away to his years of temple
service before he could make another attack. To this day the mountain lifts
an unconquered crest, and their old shelter crumbles unvisited amidst the
snows.
And the man who fell survived.
At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the midst
of a cloud of snow upon a snow slope even steeper than the one above. Down
this he was whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a bone broken in his
body - and then at last came to gentler slopes, and at last rolled out and lay
still, buried amidst a softening heap of the white masses that had
accompanied and saved him.
And so it came to pass that he entered the land called Thera.
His interactions with the peoples of Thera were fraught with incredulity,
then disappointment, and finally resentment. The land was so infested with
idolatry that his ability to see that their beliefs were falsifiable fairy
tales caused many Therans to assume that he was