Date: Twentieth of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)

Location: The Altar of Souls, Armageddon Reef, Sapphire Bay, The Jeweled Republics.

She curled about the war-forms, martial and incomplete caster alike, examining them in minute detail. She promptly discarded the martial war-form due to its very completeness. It was a mere line-warrior form; the subservience bindings were already wrapped about the engram stone. She had had a hand in their designs and knew that they were neigh unbreakable from the ‘inside’.

She had no desire to be a slave to anyone or anything, so she ignored the martial warform in favor of the incomplete warcaster. The skeletal structures were largely complete, the engram stone was untrammeled by subservience bindings, and the warcaster was sufficiently female to suit her desires. She knew many of the details were customizable with time, willpower, and a bit of materiel. She looked it over again: it was skeletal at the moment, without muscle or skin to clad its bones. It was tall, just over six feet in height, and of a standard bipedal configuration: two arms, two legs, one head, and no tail. This was a bit unusual for Silithid warforms, but not unheard of. Most of the high-ranking casters has ascended in flesh at last once, taking on a physical aspect of The Three or The Abyss, and their warforms had been altered to match with serpentine tails, wings, multiple arms, and more.

She considered the scattered parts laying about the room. She had hoped for a staff module to use as a casting focus, but none were present. She shrugged that desire aside and set about using Mage Hands to carefully re-locate the warcaster skeleton onto the Anvil of Souls. It took more Mage Hands and more effort than she liked, by a wide margin, but she managed it in the end. She settled herself about the engram stone and focused her mind and essence upon the Ritual of Ascension as she recalled it.

It failed at once, leaving her to puzzle over why.

Sometime later, as she ‘talked’ the problem through to her future skull, she hit upon the why. The Ritual of Ascension sacrificed literal flesh to fuel its processes... and she didn't have any. She was, currently, nothing but soulstuff and willpower. She swirled about her would be bones, pondering her predicament in looping cycles. To get a body, she needed a body to get...

She slammed to a halt in the center of her would-be ribcage, just below the backbone and just above the engram stone. She had a body. True, it was divorced from the passage of time and desynchronized ever so slightly from reality. But that was no barrier. The essence of High Magic, when you stripped away all of the trappings and superstition: altering the weave of magic to impose your will upon reality. More subtly then that, it was bending reality so that what you Wished was became that which was as if you had never Wished it to be. Her body was presently there and needed to be here. It was still her body, so she had an inseparable connection to it. It was desynchronized form time and reality, which meant it was halfway between here and there: it was just that here and there were not currently defined. She dispersed her essence slightly, spreading out across her soon-to-be skeleton, and orienting the parts of herself where they ought to go in a metaphysical sense.

She reached out to the thread of the Weave about the warcaster skeleton, twisting and tugging at them until they became here. Then she reached out to her body's resting place in the catacombs and the threads that bound her flesh ever so tenuously to the place and severed them. Her body-that-was divorced itself from the physical. Devolving from four dimensions down into one it became a concept in her mind. She bent her willpower to the task and created a recursive mantra:

+ … I think, therefore I am, therefore I think, therefore I am, ... +

She took her one-dimensional concept of 'body' in its place of there within her mind-that-was-her-being and matched it to her soul-self body-that-is in its place between and her body-that-would-be in its place of here and linked them into a trinity. She was the body-that-was, the body-that-is, and the body-that-will-be all at once, and yet the three bodies were not the same body. A paradox that reality could not stand, a thing that could not be.

+ … I think, therefore I am, therefore I think, therefore I am, ... +

She fed her trinity of selves into the Ritual of Ascension, sacrificing the body-that-was to fuel the creation of the body-that-would-be to house the body-that-is. The weave of magic shifted. Reality re-arranged itself. Her sanity gave a soft *pop* as her trinity of selves collapsed in upon itself. Her consciousness fled as a bird before a firestorm as Reality itself denied her workings.

Exactly as she had planned.

She opened her eyes, feeling the weight of her eyelids as they slid upwards. For a single singing moment she felt the loving caress of Denedar, Merrsshulk, and Sslyeth along her bones, heard the whispers of past glories, felt the singing exaltation of the Abyss in her very real bones. Then the moment was gone, replaced by a crushing understanding that things were not as they had been. For her, no time had passed since the Fall of Alexandria. For reality, it had been... she realized that she had no idea how long it had been. The Three and The Abyss were not the same. Gods had been bled dry, laid low, and driven from the Material plane.

+ You ssought knowledge, Maker-of-the-Branded, eyess wide sshut to where it might lead. You made the unwilling sserve in a fate worsse then death, wrought Hell upon the mortal plane, and sspoke with Our voicess when We were ssilent. We casst you forth from the rankss of Our priesthood until ssuch time ass you have redeemed yoursself in the eyess of your descendantss and Ourss. +

She recoiled at the Rebuke, terrified that the gods she had worships for all one hundred and fifty years of her life would cast her aside for all that she had... She faltered. Considering he choices in the light of shattered self-illusions showed her that what her Deities had spoken was in fact true. Power had corrupted, and the absolute power of her chosen Branded as the Great War had progressed had corrupted absolutely. She and they had denied the inevitable Fall for as long as they had been able and then denied it some more out of spite and hatred. She laughed, hearing her sing-song voice echo deadtones form the stone walls at the irony of their blind racist hatred towards all who were not silithid... with a non-silithid at the peak of their power-structure.

She drew her body up off the Altair of Souls and stared down at her hands. Flesh met her gaze, rippling with traces of metal as her will exerted itself. She stood at just over six feet in height, but with a thin, near-skeletal build at only a hundred and ten pounds. Her limbs were wrapped with whipcords of muscle, moving with all the grace and power she recalled from her body-that-had-been. Prestidigitation, the one Cantrip that all high elves of her time learned even before they could walk, conjured up a mirror and enough light to use it. Blue-black hair and wine-dark eyes stood in stark contrast to smooth, moon-pale skin. High cheekbones and a sharp nose dominated an otherwise plain face.

She drew down into herself, determined to master her body and mind before leaving the Altair of Souls. She was a high elf in flesh once again, heartbeats and years after she had last drawn breath, and yet so much had changed. She was a high-mage and a priestess no longer, those powers cut away with the Rebuke of her gods, left with naught but her will and the body that it had created.

She resolved that she would live forever in this body that she had Created, if that is what it took to earn her redemption.

. . . - - - . . .

Date: Twenty Third of May, year 810 Post Seminal War (810 PSW)

Location: The SiDiabolo House, Armageddon Reef, Sapphire Bay, The Jeweled Republics.

Ilelahne SiDiabolo stood in the doorway to her bedroom suite and pursed her lips in confusion. The entire rest of the SiDiabolo House was empty: devoid of furniture and rugs, devoid of dust and cobwebs, devoid of life. Her bedroom was precisely as she remembered it when she had last seen it. The cracked window looked out over the front lawn. the bed was in the same state of disarray down to the wrinkles in the sheets. The rug in the center of the room was askew from where Ilelahne had tripped and fallen in her flight. The closet hung open; Ilelahne’s ‘teenage’ clothes scattered on hangers. The only thing that she did not remember was a slim pendant hanging from the chandler in the center of the room. Ilelahne stalked over the examine it more closely, barely conscious of Job hanging back in the doorway.

“I don’t remember this…”

The pendant was a trio of snake fangs curled about each other to make a single larger fang. She reached out to touch it only to see it dissolve into dust.

“What…?”

Job swore softly, “whatever that was, it let off a ripple of magic when you touched it. Illusion magic.”

Ilelahne froze where she stood and looked about the room, seeing it as if for the first time.

The window was now clearly boarded over to protect a cracked pane of glass daubed with runes from the elements. The askew rug covered most of a magic circle. The posts of the bed dripped old silithid religious iconography.

“… in the nine Hells?”

“Uhm, Ma’am, all of those runes are dripping with magical residue. Illusion and Enchantment.”

“’Alter perceptions to alter beliefs.’ A common saying of my mother’s…”

Job gulped loudly, “Illusion to alter perceptions, Enchantment to alter beliefs.”

“I must have known on some level. Always trying to break free…”

“Who could have done this?”

“In this house and to me? Only my mother or my father. I need to know more, but I will not find answers here. The rest of The SiDiabolo house has been wiped clean of all traces of life; there will be no more evidence here. This is where I grew up, not where I was born.”

“Where to, ma’am?”