<div class="floatright"><strong>Elias Balthazar</strong> (http://)<br/>(https://i.imgur.com/sZckKrZ.jpg)<br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Info</div><div class="spoiler_body"><strong>HP:</strong> 22/22<br/><strong>AC:</strong> 11<br/><strong>Effects:</strong> n/a<br/><strong>IC post counter:</strong> 1<br/></div></div></div><em>There had been pain before, right?</em><br/><br/>It was an errant thought in the darkness, no, not darkness... Nothingness. Darkness required light to be present. This endless, infinite void of nothingness. Almost beyond perception, there were the blue flecks of memories and soul stuff. Reaching out to one mote brought the joy of a birthday party with friends. Another mote prickled with the uncertainty of a new school, a new country, even. Many more fragments writhed in anguish at being bullied, and pestered and rejected. There were some that were good memories, but they were fragments among what fragments there were here. The last, largest crystal coalesced into an eye,<br/><br/>The Eye (https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/vsbattles/images/d/d4/Eld.png/revision/latest?cb=20161028145644).<br/><br/><em>OUR BARGAIN IS STRUCK.</em><br/><br/>There was pain now. Unbelievable pain. The empty vessel that had floated for aeons was now injected with the searing energies of life and the stuff of souls. Every being in the multiverse was created by this process, but simply forgot it upon awakening to awareness. Not so for this vessel, for along with a new life was the curse of knowledge. There was no conceived rhyme or reason, nor order to the shards of knowledge inundating this new mind. There was no foundation to build upon higher concepts and values, just a raw pouring of consciousness, like being forced to drink the entirety of a waterfall nonstop. There was no respite from this torture. It was too much understand, too much to comprehend, too much to bare. The vessel pleaded and begged for it to stop, but there was nothing to beg to. The only option left was to endure. To endure the unending pain of inception, creation, and birth. The vessel screamed in pain until its throat was hoarse and bloody, and ripped it vocal chords to tattered sinew, but the act of screaming was its only perceived release of pain.<br/><br/>The vessel burned across the cosmos and past a bright yellow sun, past a few orbiting bodies until it was caught by a blue green orb. As the vessel fell, the pain of creation subsided and the jumbled mass of knowledge coalesced and ordered itself. The vessel looked upon the verdant lands and could recall peoples, places, and politics. He understood the forces at work in the world, and the histories that drove its peoples. The vessel understood that he was he, in a fleeting moment between organizing and compartmentalizing his being and self. Gravity caught the vessel, and pulled him down to the surface, but before he touched the upper layers of the breath of the world, he dissolved with the energies of magic pulling him...<br/><br/>*****<br/><br/>... into the throne room of the Dark Fortress. Elias Balthezar hit the hard obsidian floor and tumbled to the ground in a heap. The echoes of creation still frying his nerves, he rolled onto his back and with a deep inhalation he took his first breath and yelled in triumph,<strong>"I AM ALIVE!"</strong>and cackled with the joyous knowing of living.<br/><br/>It was many minutes before Elias had the strength and wherewithal to stand and take in his surroundings. The being of great power that, to Elias' eyes, looked like a miniature sun, floated upon its throne. The woman beside him was easy on the eyes, but looked no less lethal. There were servants and guards in the shadows and recesses of the throne room that Elias could feel, out of the way, but ever present to attend to their Lord of Darkness. All this time, and Elias was the second to arrive, behind a giant red mountain of a man.<em>Oh, perfect. Welcome to the new world, same as the old world...</em><br/><br/>"We weren't his first choice, that much is certain, Ja'rok. Lord Chargoth must be running out of options if he chose this gambit to summon us..."<em>Ja'rok? How did I know his name?</em>