Out of Character (OOC):
Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler
Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum
When Magpie arrives in the Shadow Sanctum that evening, Chimera has things ready. A fold-up table is placed in the center of the room, right below the bell. On that table is an old, worn chess board and its pieces. Chimera is seated on one side, toying idly with a dark wooden pawn that doesn’t match the rest of the set. Chesulloth is curled up at her feet, mandibles clicking and spindly legs twitching.
Distance is a negotiable concept here. The room itself, being the center of the Hallow, exerts a force of its own – an immense pressure on the lungs and the mind. It’s difficult to breathe or even think straight, and that’s before you start noticing the moving shapes in the walls, and the constant judgment lurking just behind you.
“Ever played this game?” Chimera gestures for her apprentice to take the other seat. Maggie has been in this room before, of course, but only for Oblations.
Magpie shakes her head, "I've never played Chess, but I've read about it." The child-mage takes a seat and starts learning.
Magpie constantly forgets to move, trying to describe what she has seen. "I've always had visions, even when I was rotten, this was just one that sounded like the tower to heaven you were talking about...."
Magpie takes white, Chimera black. She takes some time to be sure that Magpie knows how to play, taking as much time as she needs. Ultimately though, Magpies’ inexperience doesn’t matter; Chimera plays ruthlessly – and extremely poorly. Loss after loss. Piece after piece thrown futilely against her opponent’s defenses, often sacrificed for no gain at all, and at best only holding back an inevitable defeat.
“So, tell me about what you saw.” When Chimera's done, she asks Magpie for the vision again, in more depth this time, wringing every detail she can out of the spycraft training they’ve done. Despite her own careless moves, Chimera takes every loss like a blow as she listens intently. She lets herself feel it.
Because: that piece was Eos, lying gutted on the ground. This one was Jack, pledging himself to Death. Ritter, screaming as his leg is shattered at the knee, Magpie crying after the death of her dad. And then, letting Magpie’s vision of a silver road and the crossing tug at her memory, she reaches out for more faces, more names - the charges that she can’t recall but that they nevertheless failed to save, a long, long time ago, during the fall. Her daimon is cold to others now, of course; was she always that way? Or did pain change her?
But she and Maggie and Grace are more than just their losses. Magpie shares her vision first and details slowly emerge through the sharing of their consciousness.
***************
Everything is black except for the shimmering light of the path and the heat-glow of the supernal across a chasm of the void. On the shoreline two men watch the child and the angel. An angel who fell and has finally found a way home after countless eons of imprisonment on earth.
The a tower that is a path. A ladder of stairs into the sky. Crystalline metaphysical steps of white path across the darkness. A staircase to the gods.
They see the skyscrapers again and a pillar of light emanating from the top of one such building, one that towers above all others. Maggie will try to describe the city and the building but its very hard for her when she lacks the right descriptors and the light of the path is very distracting and all important.
It's not Atlantis or the city of some bygone era though, cars on the street, people bustling around. It's a real modern city. Los Angeles.
But the skyscraper this ladder extends from is a place of Vice. Pride is collected and stored here like fuel. Demonic faces stare out from stone statues. This place is built, and gathers power from the expression of that vice.
There are two men on the shore, watching the man in white, the angel and the boy as they ascend. Magpie does her best to describe the faces of the three men... Chimera recognizes them as Donato, Fulgore and their former Cabalmate Nox. And Donato's son holding the hand of the angel, the demon Agile.
***************
"You weren't evil even back then, just . . . compromised." Chimera says, moving a pawn into yet another bad position. "I don't know why you're seeing these things. It's not uncommon for mages to have weird dreams and visions, but I don't think I've heard of anything quite like this. They probably aren't nonsense; like you said, you're just lacking the context you need to make sense of them. Have these same people shown up in any other visions?"
"I've had other visions too. I once dreamed of a man who walked the planets into heaven and came back. But that didn't sound like a ladder or tower. I don’t know if my visions are real Chimera, sometimes they are just nonsense or lack the context to even know what I am seeing..."
"I need to see a vision of my own." Chimera says, completing her preparation for her spell. "It's been a long time coming but I figured something out. She would show compassion to Grace. She would agree and work together with her daimon the first time since Germany. "Will you help me?"
Magpie frowned, but nodded.
Here, in the heart of Chimera's domain, with the spirit she shaped and the apprentice she taught, Chimera asserts her own Truth – raw and caring and angry - without hesitation. She and Magpie are both giving something, and she asks Grace to give the same in return.
Their story.
It is said that the royalty among the Awakened City hid among the peoples of the newly fallen world, just as the priests, warriors, scholars and spies did, and oftentimes stepped down into a position of service among the nascent orders. But they could not truly disguise their true natures, the parts of them that were more than the common magi who now sought direction in a Sleeping world. Their souls were marked by the greater understanding of truth that revealed them as the true rulers of a lost Kingdom, and because of this truth, their souls were somehow different and retain memory, authority and connection to their past lives.
Over the years, as the kings and queens of Atlantis passed from the world, their souls would continue to cycle through the eternal Wheel of Incarnation, being born again and again in the fallen world. Not all incarnations Awakened, and those that did needed the help of the Watchtowers, as all mages’ souls do. But when the Highborn’s soul did Awaken, it was strong, and the hidden truths of the first Lords of the Spire resonated within their breasts.
Some mages are said have stronger connections to the past than others. While many mages may eventually be able to track their ancestry back to survivors of the Fall of Atlantis, few have direct remembrances of actual experiences just before, during or just after the Fall. Some Mages can capture snatches of memories of life in Atlantis or other events of their past history in the Fallen World. They may reflect reincarnation or memories of the fallen. Chimera was one of those few, Witness another.
Chimera draws Strength from the major Arcana of her Tarot deck to represent Grace, the totality of her soul's journey. The card symbolizes nature, soft power, purity, compassion, enduring despite setbacks.
And with that in mind, Chimera casts Past-Life Regression with the help of her apprentice, targeting Chimera as the subject of the spell. It should allow her experience events in one or more previous lives, experiencing the events if they were there. She the revelation of Magpie's vision of the Silver Ladder, her Chess Piece Soulstone and the game of chess itself as yantras and Chimera's own soul as an Atlantean Highborn as the final component. Chesulloth uses her Influence to strengthen the concept of Revelation as they finish casting the Spell. As the spell takes hold, Chimera calls upon her Daimon Grace through the Ancient Echoes she feels to catch a glimpse of Atlantis, of her first soul.
Her process was throwing as much of herself into this spell as she possibly can, asking Grace to help fill in the blanks of her first life for her (because she cannot consciously past life regression that far back herself), and using the related revelations in Magpie's story to jumpstart that. Looking for when they were still royalty in Atlantis – and the truth of what happened there. This is the first time she has ever showed compassion to Grace.
Suddenly there is no Grace or Chimera. They are one. They are the same person. Fragments of the past lives she's lived spiraling backwards in time.
Chimera reached back.
***************
And she remembered. She remembered aspects of Atlantis itself with hallucinatory-like intensity. the memories are far more symbolic than literal, which makes it a frustrating affair to attempt to visualize Atlantis as it was. And the nature of her daimon is revealed.
There isn't one specific life or action that was truly pivotal in making Grace who she is. She is truly an accumulation of generations. The last three hundred lives she has had have worn away the soft bits and leaving the sharp edges, polished steel and rock-hard stability.
So much was fragmented and lost, but certain truths are evident. She’s been a wanderer, a traveler, a survivor. She was there at the very beginning, and she was royalty.
Chimera saw the crystalline city with outer walls of Adamantine and endless spires and ramparts covering an entire mountain. An Island but the city itself is essentially over the peak of this sloping mountain. She also sees herself on a floating continent in the clouds, sometimes in the stars looking down at the blue marble that was Earth.
The first life – a Queen – was a peerless healer, not just of bodies, but also of minds, souls, and more abstract divisions; she could cure a dysfunctional relationship or poisonous discourse as easily as a broken leg.
Her court was not just a throne room, but also her clinic. Grace still remembers it well; deep, brilliant blue and purple walls, curved inward like an embrace and lined with row upon row of intricately carved game pieces and dice – tokens of conquest. A verifiable menagerie flanked her throne, a brilliant riot of color and sound. Many spoke, and were fascinating conversationalists at that; nature was both more inventive and generous back then. These were animals who she had lacked the heart not to take in after treating their injuries, for most had nowhere else to go.
The room was held up by sturdy pillars of living trees and vines, magnificent in bloom. Most days, the place was packed with petitioners, human, animal, and things stranger than either; motes of light and starfire, sapient clusters of secrets, minds cocooned within animate metal shells, beasts who wore identities like masks and removed them just as easily. The price for her services was always a game, chosen by the patient.
Tender-hearted, impish, and powerful, the Queen’s compassionate use of her skills put her in high demand. She was also fiercely competitive, constantly testing herself against her fellows in both sport and serious matters, though for the most part this was in good fun. There were unfortunate exceptions. A few saw her as childish. A few more found her dogged persistence irritating. She accepted any scorn with a smile; this was before the tiny speck of resentment in her heart grew into something ugly.
Back then, only one of her fellow nobles was really capable of ruffling her – the Strategist. A brilliant, genius, abysmally unmotivated man. The whole court hated him, had long ago given up on him gaining the motivation to do anything. He simply didn’t care, only sinking further into apathy the more he was pushed to care. To the Queen, this was of course an irresistible challenge.
A more one-sided rivalry has never existed. Every hunt, tournament, feast, and festival, the Queen issues this same King a personal challenge or three, weathering his indifference the Court’s growing irritation at her stubbornness. Every trick she has, she throws at him with a vengeance, and when those fail, she learns new and better tricks that don’t work. Gloating would be more tolerable than his utter lack of reaction to his own victories. Being beaten, she can stomach; a worthy opponent is so rare. But having to bear witness to this much squandered potential?
Out of sheer frustration, the Queen looks for an injury she might heal, a fracture in his psyche that would explain the apathy that traps and isolates him. But it’s worse than that; he could be so much more, do so much good, and he simply doesn’t want to. Long after she realizes that fact, she’s still acting the part of his rival.
It’s the only way she can see to be his friend. At that, she never stops trying. And she never succeeds.
As all the old game moves become played out and dull, the peace was beginning to fracture. Whispers of dissent, then a riot or two, weapons drawn at a celebratory feast, raised voices and infighting amongst her peers, the Strategist barricading inside his throne room. Anyone paying attention could smell the blood on the horizon. Even her usual cheer had soured. She commissioned a new game to drown her agitation in, whose name eludes her now, even as its memory does not.
A large board of monochrome black and white, tokens and dice carved from obsidian. The tokens represented armies of generic soldiers. Players ticked the number on them down for losses in battle, up when successfully raising more soldiers from residential zones or court. And the dice helped determine battle outcomes and chance based events. The win conditions were highly malleable, changeable on a whim, but the default condition was simple: a player won when they had routed all of the opponent’s units and armies, or when they held all throne rooms simultaneously.
Mixing up the game were the commander units, represented by uncannily real figurines that were detailed down to the hair. They shifted and breathed, looking up to the player for their orders. Each one was named for broad archetypes, and bore a not-coincidental resemblance to an Atlantean King or Queen.
The Chevalier, an unflinching woman on a dark horse who fought with a glistening adamantine sword nearly twice her height. She cut down soldiers like wheat and came back laughing. Somewhere along the line, her chivalrous code had twisted into something ugly.
The Orator wore vestments the color of wine and spoke with a voice laced with honey. He raised soldier units by the dozens. Troops led personally by him were enthralled, fighting with an almost alien strength and passion. He transformed ordinary men into something more than human.
The Warden, a woman who passed between darknesses, always watchful and wary. She saw things that others could not, and offered up her vigilance. While she shepherded an army, they became as silent and intangible as shadow.
The Curator had a stern slant to their brows and held worlds within the many pockets that lined their robes. They dabbled in knowledge he perhaps should have shut away, and their help was unpredictable, cataclysmic, game-changing, destroying or transforming entire sections of the board.
There were many other commanders in the game of course, the Healer and the Strategist among them.
And of course, the game was controversial. The resemblance between the commanders and Atlantis’ Kings and Queens was strong enough to be disquieting to many, especially in such a time of strife. The game earned her no friends. At night though, there were some who stole into her throne room to play it with her, and spoke of a great Ladder . . .
The nature of Atlantis was shifting, and she felt rather than saw the direction that Atlantean society was taking: stratification unto death. Just as a human emperor worries over the loyalty of his people and the possibility of an insurrection, the priest-lords of the Awakened City grew to fear any upset in the social order. One mage might lead a horde of the unenlightened without fear of corruption, for when a human knows he has no equals he need have no fear of being overthrown. But a mage among mages is one among equals, and only the wise can resist judging her wisdom and strength beside that of her brothers and sisters.
To those without such insight, sympathy with the Realms Supernal and facility with weaving the Tapestry became a measure of status. Those were the mages drawn to mortal power and politics, who began to direct ever more of their energy into the offices, losing their drive to seek out and understand the Supernal Mysteries. Atlantis was an ideal society, unfortunately, there was a flaw in the gem, one that lengthened and deepened over the generations. All of her power could not heal it.
When the first wizard’s war swelled on the horizon, she had informally allied with the designers of the Celestial Ladder. The noble Council was divided and proud. Many mages saw themselves as more capable leaders than the Council, their undeniable power feeding their hubris. Mages turned upon each other en masse for the first time, and the Orders collapsed upon themselves as the wise and the ambitious clashed. They called those loyal to the project power-hungry and cursed the integral architects of the forthcoming breach into the Supernal. She stood with those mages, she knew the good to come of overthrowing the old gods once and for all. For she had observed the nature of entropy; those she healed came back again and again, with fresh wounds and dysfunction to be set right. The status quo was not worth protecting, because it allowed no peace nor kindness to be permanent. She wanted a world where she wouldn’t be necessary.
Part of her motivation was less kind. Bitterness and petty spite had taken root and bloomed in her, her own form of hubris. She was tired of being bested by her peers, at her playful manner being taken to mean that she was no one to take seriously. Her new peers saw her worth - even as they wrought horrors on the world.
Ultimately, she realized she had been betrayed. That they had used and twisted her loyalty. The Exarchs claimed the thrones of heaven and she was forced to see that reality may be forever broken. She left the city before the final battle and switched sides. She exerted all her power to heal and protect the Exiles in the last day.
When the Fall came, the Queen was there, tending to her subjects. And when it ended, many of them were left utterly broken. As she so often had, she tried to save them, and for the first time, she found her ability to do so insufficient. Her magic squirmed in her grasp like a mutilated animal. With furious determination, she sought out the root of this harm and found the Abyss. But as she reached out to heal her enemy, the worst wound she had ever encountered, it saw her, and tore her apart.
The damage was so extensive that it persisted into the next dozen reincarnation cycles, but Grace was always there to help them mend, softly and patiently nudging them back towards their ideal self: the healer. There was not a single moment that changed that; it was the long grind of life after life, the pattern that kept reappearing. Because in the Fallen World, the daimon’s guidance - her encouragement of kindness, gentleness, trust, and mercy - kept killing them before they could reach their true potential.
Flickers of past lives pass through Chimera’s mind. A wandering pacifist who ended his own life, sick from betrayal by those he had trusted. A woman who braved the seas and spared the wrong enemy. A child prodigy whose sacrifice, in the end, meant nothing.
All of this suffering was watched with horror by a healer whose care brought more harm than salvation, a daimon failing at the only purpose she had ever known. It haunted her, and the slow realization, more than anything else, was what maddened Grace, molded her into something cruel, pragmatic, and vicious.
She became her own antithesis, trading a doctor’s scalpel for a knife; instead of healing others in their moments of weakness, she resolved to make sure that there would never be weakness to take advantage of. As someone whose role had made her intimately familiar with what vulnerability of all kinds looked like, she knew better than anyone where to sink in the knife to cut it out. She separated the wheat from the chaff. It was the only way to save them, and soon it was only survival.
Her incarnations changed as she did; hardened, warlike, more likely to demand or bully respect than to gently cultivate it. Lives flicker by again. A Scelstus pouring over his forbidden tomes, matching ugly means to ugly ends. A warrior with wary eyes and a jagged spear in her hands. A millionaire with noble aspirations and a nasty cruel streak, who would snap before he bent an inch.
And Chimera.
***************
Maggie was deeply unsettled. One minute she and Chimera were playing a game and then Chimera cast a spell incorporating everything in the room. Then she spaced out and starts acting delirious and confused, and saying things that don’t make any sense.
"Seven Islands, Ten Kings."
At a certain point, recollection lapses into unconsciousness and by then Chimera is too delirious to notice any difference. She dreams of chessboards, and hunger; Grace lurks in the shadows with a crown in her hands.
When she wakes up she’s on Anne’s couch, nursing the worse hangover of her life. Once she’s actually able to move, there’s a lot of explaining to do - to her terrified apprentice, who teleported her here after she passed out, and to Anne, who is angry with worry for both of them.
The shine of adamantine is burned onto her eyelids for days afterwards.
Once she recovered a little and came to her senses Chimera stared at the ceiling, reeling from the revelation. No. She had been a Loyalist, not an Exile. She had been worse than a Seer. Now he was a Queen without a Throne.
Was she also the Dethroned Queen?
Chronicle: Mage 2: The Dethroned Queen
Venue: Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition
Chronicle Storyteller: Jerad Sayler
Assistant Storytellers: Hannah Nyland & Alex Van Belkum
A VISION OF THE FALL
As part of our ongoing
Chronicle: The Dethroned Queen, the mages Chimera (Hannah Nyland) and
Witness (Korri Smith) are the inheritors of a Lost Legacy. Both these
characters have a custom Merit called Atlantean Highborn. Basically their
daimons remember past lives all the way back to the Fall, their souls are
royalty and that comes with some benefits and drawbacks. Regardless if anyone
actually believes they were royalty in the Time Before, they do seem to have
some real spiritual aspects to whatever is special about their souls. Vague
memories of the Time Before are further amplified in clarity by the Ancient
Echoes and similar merits. The main thing is, where other souls take
short or long trips through their cycles, they always reincarnate, but with no
memory of who they were but for what their daimon feels fit to reveal to
them. You can read more about Atlantean Highborn Here.
So, in-game, we had our first real vision of the First City that actually provides relevant, personal and "factual" information. It was my first time as a Mage ST in over seven years were I gave something concrete on Atlantis, while it is still pretty vague. Since it's such an important milestone and provides my own opinion and take on a "true" vision of the fall, it seemed like something that had value and other people would be interested in it. It is very much an amalgam of many things; hopefully the seams aren't too visible.
So, in-game, we had our first real vision of the First City that actually provides relevant, personal and "factual" information. It was my first time as a Mage ST in over seven years were I gave something concrete on Atlantis, while it is still pretty vague. Since it's such an important milestone and provides my own opinion and take on a "true" vision of the fall, it seemed like something that had value and other people would be interested in it. It is very much an amalgam of many things; hopefully the seams aren't too visible.
We know that Atlantis is many things and there were many Atlantises across the multiverse. But this is canon as the True Awakened City in our game universe which I have named: The Untold Chronicles, The Dethroned Queen being our current Chronicle. The following are
fragments of what might be a true vision of the One Awakened Nation: Mu, Atlantis, Ur,
whatever you call it. The Time Before. The Age of Atlantis.
Additional Sources:
- Mage: The Awakening 1st
Edition corebook
- Mage: The Awakening 2nd Edition corebook
- Guardians of the Veil sourcebook
for MtA1.0
- The Silver Ladder sourcebook
for MtA1.0
- Tome of the Watchtowers sourcebook
for MtA1.0
- Banishers sourcebook for MtA1.0
- World of Darkness (nWoD): Second
Sight sourcebook
- World of Darkness (nWoD): Immortals sourcebook
 |
| Magpie |
Distance is a negotiable concept here. The room itself, being the center of the Hallow, exerts a force of its own – an immense pressure on the lungs and the mind. It’s difficult to breathe or even think straight, and that’s before you start noticing the moving shapes in the walls, and the constant judgment lurking just behind you.
“Ever played this game?” Chimera gestures for her apprentice to take the other seat. Maggie has been in this room before, of course, but only for Oblations.
Magpie shakes her head, "I've never played Chess, but I've read about it." The child-mage takes a seat and starts learning.
Magpie constantly forgets to move, trying to describe what she has seen. "I've always had visions, even when I was rotten, this was just one that sounded like the tower to heaven you were talking about...."
Magpie takes white, Chimera black. She takes some time to be sure that Magpie knows how to play, taking as much time as she needs. Ultimately though, Magpies’ inexperience doesn’t matter; Chimera plays ruthlessly – and extremely poorly. Loss after loss. Piece after piece thrown futilely against her opponent’s defenses, often sacrificed for no gain at all, and at best only holding back an inevitable defeat.
“So, tell me about what you saw.” When Chimera's done, she asks Magpie for the vision again, in more depth this time, wringing every detail she can out of the spycraft training they’ve done. Despite her own careless moves, Chimera takes every loss like a blow as she listens intently. She lets herself feel it.
Because: that piece was Eos, lying gutted on the ground. This one was Jack, pledging himself to Death. Ritter, screaming as his leg is shattered at the knee, Magpie crying after the death of her dad. And then, letting Magpie’s vision of a silver road and the crossing tug at her memory, she reaches out for more faces, more names - the charges that she can’t recall but that they nevertheless failed to save, a long, long time ago, during the fall. Her daimon is cold to others now, of course; was she always that way? Or did pain change her?
But she and Maggie and Grace are more than just their losses. Magpie shares her vision first and details slowly emerge through the sharing of their consciousness.
***************
The a tower that is a path. A ladder of stairs into the sky. Crystalline metaphysical steps of white path across the darkness. A staircase to the gods.
They see the skyscrapers again and a pillar of light emanating from the top of one such building, one that towers above all others. Maggie will try to describe the city and the building but its very hard for her when she lacks the right descriptors and the light of the path is very distracting and all important.
 |
| Donato's Tower |
But the skyscraper this ladder extends from is a place of Vice. Pride is collected and stored here like fuel. Demonic faces stare out from stone statues. This place is built, and gathers power from the expression of that vice.
There are two men on the shore, watching the man in white, the angel and the boy as they ascend. Magpie does her best to describe the faces of the three men... Chimera recognizes them as Donato, Fulgore and their former Cabalmate Nox. And Donato's son holding the hand of the angel, the demon Agile.
***************
"You weren't evil even back then, just . . . compromised." Chimera says, moving a pawn into yet another bad position. "I don't know why you're seeing these things. It's not uncommon for mages to have weird dreams and visions, but I don't think I've heard of anything quite like this. They probably aren't nonsense; like you said, you're just lacking the context you need to make sense of them. Have these same people shown up in any other visions?"
"I've had other visions too. I once dreamed of a man who walked the planets into heaven and came back. But that didn't sound like a ladder or tower. I don’t know if my visions are real Chimera, sometimes they are just nonsense or lack the context to even know what I am seeing..."
"I need to see a vision of my own." Chimera says, completing her preparation for her spell. "It's been a long time coming but I figured something out. She would show compassion to Grace. She would agree and work together with her daimon the first time since Germany. "Will you help me?"
Magpie frowned, but nodded.
Here, in the heart of Chimera's domain, with the spirit she shaped and the apprentice she taught, Chimera asserts her own Truth – raw and caring and angry - without hesitation. She and Magpie are both giving something, and she asks Grace to give the same in return.
Their story.
It is said that the royalty among the Awakened City hid among the peoples of the newly fallen world, just as the priests, warriors, scholars and spies did, and oftentimes stepped down into a position of service among the nascent orders. But they could not truly disguise their true natures, the parts of them that were more than the common magi who now sought direction in a Sleeping world. Their souls were marked by the greater understanding of truth that revealed them as the true rulers of a lost Kingdom, and because of this truth, their souls were somehow different and retain memory, authority and connection to their past lives.
Over the years, as the kings and queens of Atlantis passed from the world, their souls would continue to cycle through the eternal Wheel of Incarnation, being born again and again in the fallen world. Not all incarnations Awakened, and those that did needed the help of the Watchtowers, as all mages’ souls do. But when the Highborn’s soul did Awaken, it was strong, and the hidden truths of the first Lords of the Spire resonated within their breasts.
Some mages are said have stronger connections to the past than others. While many mages may eventually be able to track their ancestry back to survivors of the Fall of Atlantis, few have direct remembrances of actual experiences just before, during or just after the Fall. Some Mages can capture snatches of memories of life in Atlantis or other events of their past history in the Fallen World. They may reflect reincarnation or memories of the fallen. Chimera was one of those few, Witness another.
 |
| Strength |
And with that in mind, Chimera casts Past-Life Regression with the help of her apprentice, targeting Chimera as the subject of the spell. It should allow her experience events in one or more previous lives, experiencing the events if they were there. She the revelation of Magpie's vision of the Silver Ladder, her Chess Piece Soulstone and the game of chess itself as yantras and Chimera's own soul as an Atlantean Highborn as the final component. Chesulloth uses her Influence to strengthen the concept of Revelation as they finish casting the Spell. As the spell takes hold, Chimera calls upon her Daimon Grace through the Ancient Echoes she feels to catch a glimpse of Atlantis, of her first soul.
Her process was throwing as much of herself into this spell as she possibly can, asking Grace to help fill in the blanks of her first life for her (because she cannot consciously past life regression that far back herself), and using the related revelations in Magpie's story to jumpstart that. Looking for when they were still royalty in Atlantis – and the truth of what happened there. This is the first time she has ever showed compassion to Grace.
Suddenly there is no Grace or Chimera. They are one. They are the same person. Fragments of the past lives she's lived spiraling backwards in time.
Chimera reached back.
***************
And she remembered. She remembered aspects of Atlantis itself with hallucinatory-like intensity. the memories are far more symbolic than literal, which makes it a frustrating affair to attempt to visualize Atlantis as it was. And the nature of her daimon is revealed.
There isn't one specific life or action that was truly pivotal in making Grace who she is. She is truly an accumulation of generations. The last three hundred lives she has had have worn away the soft bits and leaving the sharp edges, polished steel and rock-hard stability.
So much was fragmented and lost, but certain truths are evident. She’s been a wanderer, a traveler, a survivor. She was there at the very beginning, and she was royalty.
Chimera saw the crystalline city with outer walls of Adamantine and endless spires and ramparts covering an entire mountain. An Island but the city itself is essentially over the peak of this sloping mountain. She also sees herself on a floating continent in the clouds, sometimes in the stars looking down at the blue marble that was Earth.
The first life – a Queen – was a peerless healer, not just of bodies, but also of minds, souls, and more abstract divisions; she could cure a dysfunctional relationship or poisonous discourse as easily as a broken leg. Her court was not just a throne room, but also her clinic. Grace still remembers it well; deep, brilliant blue and purple walls, curved inward like an embrace and lined with row upon row of intricately carved game pieces and dice – tokens of conquest. A verifiable menagerie flanked her throne, a brilliant riot of color and sound. Many spoke, and were fascinating conversationalists at that; nature was both more inventive and generous back then. These were animals who she had lacked the heart not to take in after treating their injuries, for most had nowhere else to go.
The room was held up by sturdy pillars of living trees and vines, magnificent in bloom. Most days, the place was packed with petitioners, human, animal, and things stranger than either; motes of light and starfire, sapient clusters of secrets, minds cocooned within animate metal shells, beasts who wore identities like masks and removed them just as easily. The price for her services was always a game, chosen by the patient.
Tender-hearted, impish, and powerful, the Queen’s compassionate use of her skills put her in high demand. She was also fiercely competitive, constantly testing herself against her fellows in both sport and serious matters, though for the most part this was in good fun. There were unfortunate exceptions. A few saw her as childish. A few more found her dogged persistence irritating. She accepted any scorn with a smile; this was before the tiny speck of resentment in her heart grew into something ugly. Back then, only one of her fellow nobles was really capable of ruffling her – the Strategist. A brilliant, genius, abysmally unmotivated man. The whole court hated him, had long ago given up on him gaining the motivation to do anything. He simply didn’t care, only sinking further into apathy the more he was pushed to care. To the Queen, this was of course an irresistible challenge.
A more one-sided rivalry has never existed. Every hunt, tournament, feast, and festival, the Queen issues this same King a personal challenge or three, weathering his indifference the Court’s growing irritation at her stubbornness. Every trick she has, she throws at him with a vengeance, and when those fail, she learns new and better tricks that don’t work. Gloating would be more tolerable than his utter lack of reaction to his own victories. Being beaten, she can stomach; a worthy opponent is so rare. But having to bear witness to this much squandered potential?
Out of sheer frustration, the Queen looks for an injury she might heal, a fracture in his psyche that would explain the apathy that traps and isolates him. But it’s worse than that; he could be so much more, do so much good, and he simply doesn’t want to. Long after she realizes that fact, she’s still acting the part of his rival.
It’s the only way she can see to be his friend. At that, she never stops trying. And she never succeeds.
As all the old game moves become played out and dull, the peace was beginning to fracture. Whispers of dissent, then a riot or two, weapons drawn at a celebratory feast, raised voices and infighting amongst her peers, the Strategist barricading inside his throne room. Anyone paying attention could smell the blood on the horizon. Even her usual cheer had soured. She commissioned a new game to drown her agitation in, whose name eludes her now, even as its memory does not. A large board of monochrome black and white, tokens and dice carved from obsidian. The tokens represented armies of generic soldiers. Players ticked the number on them down for losses in battle, up when successfully raising more soldiers from residential zones or court. And the dice helped determine battle outcomes and chance based events. The win conditions were highly malleable, changeable on a whim, but the default condition was simple: a player won when they had routed all of the opponent’s units and armies, or when they held all throne rooms simultaneously.
Mixing up the game were the commander units, represented by uncannily real figurines that were detailed down to the hair. They shifted and breathed, looking up to the player for their orders. Each one was named for broad archetypes, and bore a not-coincidental resemblance to an Atlantean King or Queen.
The Chevalier, an unflinching woman on a dark horse who fought with a glistening adamantine sword nearly twice her height. She cut down soldiers like wheat and came back laughing. Somewhere along the line, her chivalrous code had twisted into something ugly.
The Warden, a woman who passed between darknesses, always watchful and wary. She saw things that others could not, and offered up her vigilance. While she shepherded an army, they became as silent and intangible as shadow.
The Curator had a stern slant to their brows and held worlds within the many pockets that lined their robes. They dabbled in knowledge he perhaps should have shut away, and their help was unpredictable, cataclysmic, game-changing, destroying or transforming entire sections of the board.
There were many other commanders in the game of course, the Healer and the Strategist among them.
And of course, the game was controversial. The resemblance between the commanders and Atlantis’ Kings and Queens was strong enough to be disquieting to many, especially in such a time of strife. The game earned her no friends. At night though, there were some who stole into her throne room to play it with her, and spoke of a great Ladder . . .
To those without such insight, sympathy with the Realms Supernal and facility with weaving the Tapestry became a measure of status. Those were the mages drawn to mortal power and politics, who began to direct ever more of their energy into the offices, losing their drive to seek out and understand the Supernal Mysteries. Atlantis was an ideal society, unfortunately, there was a flaw in the gem, one that lengthened and deepened over the generations. All of her power could not heal it.
When the first wizard’s war swelled on the horizon, she had informally allied with the designers of the Celestial Ladder. The noble Council was divided and proud. Many mages saw themselves as more capable leaders than the Council, their undeniable power feeding their hubris. Mages turned upon each other en masse for the first time, and the Orders collapsed upon themselves as the wise and the ambitious clashed. They called those loyal to the project power-hungry and cursed the integral architects of the forthcoming breach into the Supernal. She stood with those mages, she knew the good to come of overthrowing the old gods once and for all. For she had observed the nature of entropy; those she healed came back again and again, with fresh wounds and dysfunction to be set right. The status quo was not worth protecting, because it allowed no peace nor kindness to be permanent. She wanted a world where she wouldn’t be necessary.
Part of her motivation was less kind. Bitterness and petty spite had taken root and bloomed in her, her own form of hubris. She was tired of being bested by her peers, at her playful manner being taken to mean that she was no one to take seriously. Her new peers saw her worth - even as they wrought horrors on the world.
Ultimately, she realized she had been betrayed. That they had used and twisted her loyalty. The Exarchs claimed the thrones of heaven and she was forced to see that reality may be forever broken. She left the city before the final battle and switched sides. She exerted all her power to heal and protect the Exiles in the last day.
When the Fall came, the Queen was there, tending to her subjects. And when it ended, many of them were left utterly broken. As she so often had, she tried to save them, and for the first time, she found her ability to do so insufficient. Her magic squirmed in her grasp like a mutilated animal. With furious determination, she sought out the root of this harm and found the Abyss. But as she reached out to heal her enemy, the worst wound she had ever encountered, it saw her, and tore her apart.
The damage was so extensive that it persisted into the next dozen reincarnation cycles, but Grace was always there to help them mend, softly and patiently nudging them back towards their ideal self: the healer. There was not a single moment that changed that; it was the long grind of life after life, the pattern that kept reappearing. Because in the Fallen World, the daimon’s guidance - her encouragement of kindness, gentleness, trust, and mercy - kept killing them before they could reach their true potential.
All of this suffering was watched with horror by a healer whose care brought more harm than salvation, a daimon failing at the only purpose she had ever known. It haunted her, and the slow realization, more than anything else, was what maddened Grace, molded her into something cruel, pragmatic, and vicious.
She became her own antithesis, trading a doctor’s scalpel for a knife; instead of healing others in their moments of weakness, she resolved to make sure that there would never be weakness to take advantage of. As someone whose role had made her intimately familiar with what vulnerability of all kinds looked like, she knew better than anyone where to sink in the knife to cut it out. She separated the wheat from the chaff. It was the only way to save them, and soon it was only survival.
Her incarnations changed as she did; hardened, warlike, more likely to demand or bully respect than to gently cultivate it. Lives flicker by again. A Scelstus pouring over his forbidden tomes, matching ugly means to ugly ends. A warrior with wary eyes and a jagged spear in her hands. A millionaire with noble aspirations and a nasty cruel streak, who would snap before he bent an inch.
And Chimera.
***************
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| Hygenia |
"Seven Islands, Ten Kings."
At a certain point, recollection lapses into unconsciousness and by then Chimera is too delirious to notice any difference. She dreams of chessboards, and hunger; Grace lurks in the shadows with a crown in her hands.
When she wakes up she’s on Anne’s couch, nursing the worse hangover of her life. Once she’s actually able to move, there’s a lot of explaining to do - to her terrified apprentice, who teleported her here after she passed out, and to Anne, who is angry with worry for both of them.
The shine of adamantine is burned onto her eyelids for days afterwards.
Once she recovered a little and came to her senses Chimera stared at the ceiling, reeling from the revelation. No. She had been a Loyalist, not an Exile. She had been worse than a Seer. Now he was a Queen without a Throne.
Was she also the Dethroned Queen?
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