By: Tallaen Posted on: July 18, 2005
It all began with the arrival of a stranger.
This, in Minia, was no unusual event. An overabundance of young travellers passed through the Pixie Village every month, some pleasant and helpful, most, careless and murderous.
This particular visitor was a hawk-nosed, dark-haired human, and he was older than most, which was unusual. Despite the fact that their first meeting took place when the stranger came seeking medicine for an ailing kobold, the shaman still distinguished an air of death and decay about him, more pregnant still than that of any barbarian who had come to slaughter before him.
The old shaman shuddered and was glad to see the errand done, and the disturbing guest gone. That relief was short-lived, for the stranger returned the following day, again seeking medicine for an invalid. Again, the shaman gave him a green phial, nameless fear clutching his throat, and letting him breathe only after the stranger was gone. And as the stranger returned again and again, the two feelings occurred in swifter and swifter succession, blending until relief alone prevailed.
The stranger made smart and pleasant conversation. He proved quite knowledgeable, too, in alchemy, though in the principles more so than in the healing arts. He did have a power that awed the shaman, that of inscribing mystical images on cards and using them to cure himself and others. Alone, the shaman tried to imitate this skill, but could not. Although the stranger helped him time and again with experiments and potions, he refused to explain this particular art, intimating only that its power was beyond the pixie's reach.
With his marvellous cards, the stranger performed another extraordinary feat: he erected a tower on an empty stretch of land, where the trail that passed the Libra Dungeon and the pygmy village ended. He called this the Ember Tower. The structure was feeble and crumbling, barely held together by magical forces, but he hired able-bodied pixies to help him repair it.
That was when the shaman became aware of the talk in the village. Until then, it had been merely a trickle, but suddenly, the rumours gushed fast and furious. The other pixies spoke of the stranger's cards, not with awe, but with fear, and one of the images was said to force pixies to act out his commands. That, said some, was how he still recruited workers from the Village, despite the other, darker rumours, that the stranger had been seen in the company of strange beasts, deformed ones that came from swirling portals, out of a world of terrors.
The shaman could no longer bring himself to believe that someone so wise and so helpful, a true friend, would harbour dark powers. He knew, though, that the Village elders were poised to banish the stranger and that only fear held them back from doing so. And he knew himself tainted by association, for befriending and defending him.
The shaman had two young apprentices at the time. The younger of the two was conscientious and cheerful, and would make the Village a solid healer one day (though, if he was neither particularly bright, nor too gifted in crafting new elixirs, that was hardly to be held against him). The elder was sullen and brusque, with a keen mind for alchemy, though not for much else.
It was the stranger who first pointed out how the younger apprentice sidled up to the Village elders, ingratiating himself, flaunting his youth and energy to show up his aged and weakening mentor. The shaman was dismayed when he realised the truth of what the stranger said, that he was on the brink of being shoved aside for the dim young sycophant. ‘At my age,' thought the shaman, ‘after my long years of service to this village, don't I deserve their trust?'
It kept him awake at night. His thoughts endlessly turned back to the fact that he had not a single friend, not among the people of the village, not in his treacherous younger apprentice, not in his remorseless older one, who would doubtless take advantage of the situation if he noticed. The strange human alone still spoke with him in confidence and helped him with his work. And the stranger did not disappoint: before long, he offered the shaman a position working as an alchemist in the Ember Tower, creating a wonderful room and a well-equipped laboratory just for him.
Where, only two years past, the shaman would have been devastated at the thought of leaving his home and moving into the dark, enclosed place, he felt rewarded - nay, entitled - to take such a position. He had spent his life in service, and received nothing in return. Now, as his human friend said, he was free to exercise the powers of his mind in the pursuit of knowledge, which was its own reward, after all. That twit of a young apprentice could take over the work of healing the ungrateful villagers, while the older one fumed.
These thoughts bore the shaman happily through the first month of his life in Ember Tower. Slowly, though, new fears crept up on the edges of his mind. The pixies still working in Ember Tower behaved oddly, and though at first he attributed this to their resentment over his defection, he eventually grew suspicious that they were no longer whole in mind. There was no dissent in Ember Tower, nor amusement, neither joy nor strife, nor emotion at all, but only a continual, dispirited work that reeked of unnatural influence.
What was worse still, some of the pixie workers were being trained in the art of fighting, assembling into a little army at the command of the Lord of Ember Tower. Now, the shaman was long past caring what happened to his former village-mates, but the thought of that army rankled in a shapeless way in his mind. And this army was strengthened by fierce hellcats that the Lord had summoned from an infernal plane.
Indeed, it was useless by then to pretend that some of the rumours, at least, had not been true. The friendly stranger had proven himself a dark and dangerous being after all, and the shaman now despised him for taking him away from his old life, even though he equally resented the Pixie Village and could not imagine returning there anymore.
The Lord of Ember Tower did make compacts with fearsome creatures from other planes, and he had twisted powers at his call. The shaman had learned not to quake at these displays, as the other foolish pixies had, but to study them and seek to understand the forces behind them. As his affinity towards these forces grew, he felt them permeating the Tower, shaping him, strengthening his body and instilling new notions in his mind.
So, one morning, as he woke up, he thanked these particular forces for the idea that had blossomed. As the only creature who had come to Ember Tower of his free will, he was second in command, assiduously obeyed by his fellow pixies, and in their master's confidence. If that master were to vanish, the mindless pixies of the Tower would continue to obey the second in command. At his disposal, he would have the stronghold of the Tower, the army of pixies and hellcats, the alchemical laboratories, and all the knowledge he had acquired at such a high price. Power within his grasp, he needed only eliminate the stranger that had stirred up trouble in the first place. And, as a trusted alchemist, that was no difficult task.
He proceeded cautiously. At once, he began working on a tasteless, odourless poison that would go undetected in the master's drink. As his assistant and accomplice, he enlisted the older of his former apprentices, who was sulking sullenly in the village, after the younger apprentice had been chosen shaman. And one day, unsuspected, he handed his master the deadly drink.
The human's face contorted into a rictus of pain and he collapsed, his body curled up like a dead spider's, onto the mosaic of an apple embedded in the floor. And the former shaman then stood as Lord of Ember Tower.
On the uppermost floor of the Tower stood a large, unfinished banquet hall. The new Lord ordered the tables cleared out and a golden throne put in, but as the slovenly pixies of the Tower could not make much gold, he settled for a throne of iron, comforting himself with thoughts of ruling with a fist of iron. He personally took a knife and, struggling with his weakened wings, flew up to the mural in the staircase of the Tower, and scraped off the human's portrait. Then, he ordered his army upon the Pixie Village. With the villagers' skins, he covered his throne room's floors, and with their heads, he lined his walls. He appointed his apprentice as alchemist, but had no direction to give him. Having settled his grudges, he could think of little else to do with his power.
So, one of the laboratories was abandoned, and the alchemist's room used for no greater purpose than to stir up the odd philtre or elixir. As objects were lost or broken, they went unreplaced. Instead, the pixie soldiers filled rooms up with trophies of their kills - skulls and finger bones and tatters of cloth. Even the Tower's gate fell into disrepair.
And inside the Tower, emanating from a ritual chamber by the throne room, stirred the stranger's mysterious forces, relentlessly warping the Tower's inhabitants beyond recognition. As they lived indoors, the pixies used their wings less and less, until these atrophied and disappeared entirely, under the pressure of the lingering magic. The wingless pixies' skin darkened and toughened; hair tufted where it never had before. Over generations, the villagers, whom they kept slaughtering when they could, no longer recognised them as their own, and new adventurers travelling through Minia spoke of them as ugly, shrivelled little imps.
And the Imp Lord yet sits on his throne of iron and tends to the embers of his hate.