<strong>Location:</strong>Upper Platform<br/><strong>Tagging:</strong>Chorgath, Others<br/><br/>"It is, yes, friend.  And a harbinger of much worse."<br/><br/>The Bodhisattva's stance shifts, her expression more somber.  "For those who are hearing the name for the first time, the Broken-Winged Crane is-- or was, I should say-- a treatise that has existed in one form or another since the end of the Primordial War, and a treatise that writes itself.  For thousands of years, sages have called it an indulgent power fantasy of the Demon World, promising a day when the Yozi would stretch forth from imprisonment, laughing and shouting and killing with joy as they did in the Time of Glory.  But now..."<br/><br/>She trails off for a long moment.  "But now," Anjushri says, starting, stopping.  "Now."   She swallows, increasingly frustrated.  "Now...<span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 8pt;">Adorjan take me, I know the words, but I can't <em>say</em> them.</span>"<br/><br/>Anjushri pauses, draws a breath, lets it go, visibly calming herself again.  "The superficial contents of the Broken-Winged Crane have changed over the centuries," she continues, serious business again, "but the tone and the message have never changed.  Not until a few years ago.  Not until the disappearance of Lilun.  I own two copies of the Crane and have read from three more.  Each of them now tells a new story-- a lament written in the past tense, a story that has been unfolding around us since then, and one that ends with the emergence of... of<em>something</em>.<br/><br/>"I refuse to allow this vision to come to pass."<br/><br/>"The texts tell of four cataclysms that will befall Creation before The End," the Bodhisattva continues, voice hardening.  "The first speaks of the Dead One Who Sheds His Skin and walks in the light of the Daystar, shredding the lands with artifice and legends that hail from before and beyond our time.  The second speaks of the Consumer of All Things, a Shapeless predator of predator of predators, who brings the host of all that it has eaten into Creation and unmakes everything that it steps upon.  The third, the Throneless King in Tatters and Silver, who undoes a thousand years of friendship with a single word and sets an entire swath of swath at its own throat.  Finally, the birth of the Engine of Extinction, made hollow of himself by his own treachery and forged in turn by the very weapons he forged.  South, West, East, and North.  One of the Deathlords, or perhaps an ascendant deathknight.  One of the raksha, a legend even among its own kind.  One of the Argent Witches, a survivor of the Usurpation.  And a fourth power, the likes of which I am still trying to discern..."