Chapter One: The Lure of the Heaven Spire

We who are the most devout are also the most wretched, for we must spend the entirety of our mortal life encompassed with the knowledge that the place of the mortal is not at the feet of their gods, but rather beneath the feet of their gods. It is for this reason that I, Nakam Alkat, am doubly cursed, for my mortal life is never-ending, yet never immortal.

With the understanding of that fate firmly committed, I hereby set forth what can be gleaned from my memories so that future worlds can perhaps learn from my own misunderstandings. It began over four thousand years ago in a land of beauty whose face was not just changed, but entirely obliterated due, in part, to my own arrogance.

This land was known as Kéaralor and it was, starting circa 2631 of what scholars now call the first age, the third spire kingdom. My story, though, began five years before this fateful year when, shortly after my 36th birthday, I was admitted into the cherished gûlaraí order. Being the youngest entrant into the gûlaraí in all of its recorded history, I received more than the usual attention from my peers. most of them at least twenty years my senior. Still, never could this attention be labeled as distrust or hate, though it would later become both. My duties with the gûlaraí quickly expanded from the menial research chores normally assigned to the lesser wizards to include fire-magic exploration (a long-time love of mine) and long-term mana resource experimentation. It was the latter of these two that led me to the heaven spire and, eventually, all the chaos that followed in my life. If a seminal event must be detailed, this must surely be it.

The heaven spire was, in its day, the greatest source of faith this world had seen. It measured three hundred feet from the ground to its tip and, if the legends are to be believed, another three hundred feet into the ground. Made from an unknown and unclassifiable mixture of the elements, this relic of the gods powered the strength of both a nation and its king. No force that was unworthy could face the king or his kingdom while the spire stood. Its majesty, though, can scarcely be summarized in an entire volume, let alone a paragraph, so I shall leave it be for now as it has little bearing on the remainder of my tale. Its magical properties, though, do.

When the mana flow in this world was first plotted by the mage Alaî before the calendar began, it became evident that the spire played a prominant role in that flow. Later, sometime around the seventeenth century, a mage named Gamber determined that the mana flow was not just attracted to the device, but was also intensified by its presence.

Little more was known of this until Dustin of the west shore produced the first detailed mana flow map in the twenty-third century. This map, unlike previous ones which showed merely the general web-like pattern of intensity, also showed flow direction and rates and established for the first time that the mana levels in the great valley area were significantly higher than the “upwind” regions such as Qualaraî and Vollarin. Still, such knowledge was little more than fuel for the spire kingdom's natural arrogance until the time of the twenty-seventh century when my own research was mixed with the likes of Dustin and Gamber.

Late in the year of 2630, having been in the order for four and one-half years, I became aware of the inklings of the procedure with which the spire intensified mana. Also at this time, I was suffering from the burning curiosity that had inflicted and doomed so many fools before my time: I wanted to touch the heaven spire.

As it says so clearly in the Tale of the Spire (Brúlan translation, year 2290):

Put simply, any contact with this great monument meant sure destruction for whosoever or whatsoever did the contacting. Folk tales exist to this day which have origins in the seminal religious texts of my time, most of which spent several vivid pages describing the grisly effects of the spire on both living and non-living matter. So utter was the devastation, cited these sources, that a man's soul would never even reach the portal to godsland if his body had been burned by the spire.

Never-the-less, fools such as I, in the fit of a spurious confidence reached their hand to the face of the great monument and, in a blinding brilliance that pains even the tightly shut eyes, disappears from the face of the world. My fate, as is obvious to any who would read this, was not so dramatic.

Exactly what happened that instant I cannot say, but what happened the instant later, I can. My body fell to the ground and I sensed what I thought to be my own death as my numb form struck the earth. When, a moment later, my limbs returned to their normal function, my mind raced at the possibilities. It took hours of motionless contemplation before I reached the conclusion that I had, in fact, not died.

This realization, as later events were to prove, was entirely untrue.