The Rapture Begins

A dramatization of the events immediately leading up to the War for the Eye and its fallout
Part 1
"This sucks."
Benevolence threw her enchanting tools across the room with mild disgust, catching them with a telekinesis spell before they hit the ground; they were fragile, after all.
Her half of the Oculus Infinium sat before her, staring blankly back at her, vexingly. Despite nearly two years of meticulous research, crafting, and enchanting, the damned thing still wasn't quite there. Almost. But the final component was still just tauntingly out of reach.
The longer she stared, the more frustrated she became.
How many friends and colleagues have we lost for this? How many more will die at the hands of cruelty and apathy while we sit here fumbling at this?
And yet there it sat, unblinking and uncaring; effectively worthless. Years of turmoil, sacrifice, research, and effort gone in to what was currently a very ornate paper weight.
The Oculus' true purpose, to transcend the sum of its parts and harness the raw power of the magical Weave itself, was still just out of grasp.
In theory; The two pieces would be powerful artifacts in their own right, but when the two halves of the Oculus were joined, the combined artifact would allow its users to warp and harness ambient magic into a miniaturized Foci like the ones that powered the Antecean's Nexus. Tapping into this would allow whomever wielded the Eye to "see" through reality itself and affect it as they saw fit.
That was the goal. That was the purpose of all those years of hardship and toil. Cataclysm may have been dead, but he had said himself, "I did nothing to cause this chaos. All I did was give you mortals a little nudge, and you couldn't wait to get your hands bloody".
The heart and whims of men could not be trusted. They needed direction, guidance; to be cleansed. Benevolence had seen it herself many times over. If not for Tovenaar and Brynn, she would have lost her faith in humanity years ago. With a completed Oculus, she and Tovenaar could rework the world as they saw fit.
Make it better.
Except the damned things wouldn't fuse. Something about the enchantment just wouldn't stick. They had tried everything. The theory was there, it just refused to reflect in practice.
Benevolence sighed. One more try.
She picked up the crystal arcane enchanter once more and placed it against the Oculus. She inhaled deeply through her nose and closed her eyes. She began to mutter words of arcane power. Her voice was soft, but the words bounced and echoed off the walls. The light around her dimmed and the Oculus began to glow with radiant light. Mystic runes began etching themselves into the ridges of the inner eye forming a chain.
And then a searing flash of light. The crystal dropped from Benevolence's hand and shattered as the runes on the Oculus faded as quickly as they had come.
"Dammit!"
She hurled the Oculus across the room. She winced and waited for the impact, but it didn't come.
"Hey now, you might have hurt someone."
Tovenaar stood in the doorway with a look of smug amusement, as always. His hair hanging messily in his face in that way Benevolence hated that she loved.
"I've tried everything," she said as she slumped down onto the ground.
"Really? You try sitting on it and clucking like a chicken yet?"
"I hate you."
"I love you too," Tovenaar grinned and strode over to Benevolence, offering her his hand to help her up. She begrudgingly accepted it.
"What if I told you… you haven't tried everything yet…" Tovenaar's expression turned suddenly somber. His face darkened and he suddenly seemed so much older and weary.
"I'm not about to try throwing a fireball at it to 'see what happens' again," Benevolence chimed.
Tovenaar chuckled and the fog lifted from his face for just a moment. "No not that…just… just watch for a second."
He reached into his satchel and retrieved his half of the Oculus Infinium. He set it down on the floor next to Benevolence's half and gingerly placed his finger tips on it.
He closed his eyes and began whispering arcane words, barely audible. The air grew degrees colder and the color of the torchlight faded to near grayscale. Black tendrils of magic seeped forth from Tovenaar's extended hand and infused themselves into the Eye. The magic worked its way into the inner eye like before, but this time, the runes were solid. They began to glow and pulsate. Benevolence couldn't take her eyes off of it.
After a terse moment, Tovenaar stopped chanting, but left his eyes shut. Color and temperature returned to the room, but most interestingly, the runes remained on the Eye. The enchantment had worked.
"How did you--" started Benevolence.
"Ask later, try now," said Tovenaar. He took Benevolence's hand in his.
"Repeat after me."
Benevolence tentatively touched her piece of the Eye and began muttering the same words of power Tovenaar had used.
The flames of the torches flared in their sconces. The room became like a sauna as Benevolence began chanting in earnest, her half of the artifact aglow with radiant energy. Magical runes burned themselves into the surface of the inner eye, stronger than they ever had before.
And then she stopped. All was still and silent save the flickering of the torches and the rushed breathing of Tovenaar and Benevolence. They looked down at their creation. Each half glowed with intense, magical energy. Tendrils of magic licked out from each half towards the other, as if grasping for one another.
With shaking hands, they picked up their fragments.
"Wait. Brynn will want to see this," said Benevolence.
"Oh, he's in the middle of a very intense tutoring session now. Asked not to be disturbed no matter what. Come on, let's try this!"
Tovenaar could barely contain his excitement. The culmination of all their years of research and sacrifice was literally in his grasp. Benevolence nodded her head slowly and picked up her half.
"Here's to guiding humanity down a better path" said Tovenaar solemnly.
"And to cleansing the world of those that would do it harm," added Benevolence.
They touched the Oculus halves together and time froze.
Color seemed to invert. It was the surface of the sun and the heart of a glacier all at once. In that moment, all was laid bare before Benevolence and Tovenaar. They saw the formation of time and space. They saw ancient elves battling gargantuan creatures while giants and dragons fought on primordial mountains. They saw the four elements branch off to their separate planes while kingdoms rose and fell in mere moments across vast swaths of the mortal coil. They saw the souls of all they had lost resting and at peace. They saw the hearts of the wicked burning in agony while the untold billions of souls on lands familiar and foreign waited to see what fate would unfurl for them.
It was magnificent. It was more splendid than anything the pretender gods on Illium Peak could possibly offer. But there was one thing that pulled Benevolence away from the glory of it all: Cataclysm. In that flash of omnipotence, she saw clear as day the spirit of anarchy sitting squarely in Tovenaar's heart.
So she pulled away. Benevolence broke the connection that lasted somehow both but a moment and an eternity. She stared at him, eyes wide with confusion, disgust, and hurt.
"How could you?"
"Beg your pardon?"
"You said you killed him. You said he was destroyed. Why is he with you?!" Benevolence could barely contain her fury.
Tovenaar took a moment to choose his words. "You have to understand…there is knowledge in this world that we will never have access to--"
"Where is he?!" bellowed Benevolence.
Tovenaar stood and put up his hands up. "He is my unwitting collaborator at best. I have him sealed away and forced him to--"
"He killed our friends! He killed Archmage Aerendyl! He slaughtered countless lives and nearly razed the entire continent to the ground and you just…have him lying around somewhere?"
"OK first of all, he's sealed under at least seven different wards of grandmaster level and--"
"You lied to me Tovenaar." Benevolence's gaze suddenly shifted from one of fiery anger to cold, unflinching malice.
Tovenaar hung his head. "I…knew you wouldn't approve".
Benevolence only continued to stare.
"But look! It paid off, didn't it? You saw what I saw, right? The Eye works! We can finally--"
"Get out."
"Beg your par--"
"Get. Out. And tell me where you're keeping Cataclysm so I can destroy him for good this time." She picked up her piece of the Eye and moved towards Tovenaar's, who quickly retracted it.
"What do you think you're doing?"
"I'm going to fix your mistake. Give me that. I'll need it."
"Not a chance. Cataclysm isn't hurting anyone in his position. The worst he can do is spill even more lost knowledge."
"Tovenaar, I'm serious. If you value anything I thought we stood for then you will help me destroy him."
"No."
"Then get out of my way, Tovenaar."
"You're not taking this for yourself. I've worked too hard and sacrificed too much for this." Tovenaar's eyes glowed with something Benevolence had never seen before: Greed? Hunger? Whatever it was, it was ugly.
Benevolence fixed her golden eyes upon him, giving him one last chance to back down. He did not. Instead, his fingers started slowly tracing arcane sigils in the air as his lips muttered a word of power.
But before he could finish his spell, Benevolence's Eye fragment lit up with radiant light. She reached out swiftly and placed her hand on his chest. Without even muttering a spell, a powerful shockwave sent Tovenaar hurdling across the room with a deafening boom, leaving his fragment on the floor where he stood.
Benevolence lunged for the fragment, but a large spectral hand sprung into existence directly in front of her and pushed her back against the wall while Tovenaar regained his footing and went for his half of the Eye. Benevolence summoned her staff and a blinding flash of light evaporated the incorporeal hand. She wheeled about and shot a bolt of crackling lightning at Tovenaar, but the blast was simply absorbed by a vortex of black energy emanating from Tovenaar's half of the Oculus, which he held aloft in his hand.
With a wave of his hand and a quick arcane utterance, tendrils of necrotic energy lashed out at Benevolence. She barely had enough time to raise a shield of shimmering light before the tendrils were on top of her, shattering her barrier. But she only needed the moment. Channeling her innate magical nature, she forewent the usual components of spellcasting and immediately cast a paralyzing grip on Tovenaar, who froze in the middle of an incantation.
She swung her staff, and a dazzling streak of light cut across Tovenaar's chest, flinging him backwards and crashing into the floor. Benevolence stalked up to him, but before she could reach his Eye piece, three illusory duplicates of Tovenaar sprung up around him. He rolled away just as Benevolence's staff swung down, dissipating one of the illusions.
She swung again, hitting another illusion. Another swing, another illusion. She zeroed in on Tovenaar's true form, but in the time it took for her to eliminate his duplicates, he was able to prepare a new spell. He reached out with enervating energy, and Benevolence's eyesight went dark; her last sight being intense fanaticism in Tovenaar's eyes.
She stumbled blindly back into the wall. Tovenaar reached towards her piece of the Oculus, but before he could take it for his own, he felt a hand grip his shoulder from behind.
"What are you doing?!" cried a voice behind him.
Instinctively, he whirled about and grasped his assailants face and let necrotic energy wash from him into his victim.
It was too late when he realized that it was the horrified face of Brynn that he gripped in his hand, the vitality quickly draining out of his eyes.
Tovenaar quickly released his grasp, but it was too late. Brynn dropped to the ground with a definitive thud. Tovenaar looked on in horror while behind him, Benevolence's sight returned to her.
She screamed in horror at the sight of her one time collaborator and lover standing over the body of their dearest friend. Without hesitation, she sent a bolt of crackling blue lightning streaking at Tovenaar. With barely a moment to spare, Tovenaar blinked out of existence; the bolt of lightning scorching the stonewall behind him.
Benevolence dashed over to Brynn and collapsed at his side. She scooped him up in her arms and desperately felt for a pulse. That failing, she gently laid him down and put her hands on his chest as her palms lit up with healing energy. But it was for naught.
Brynn was dead.
Benevolence sat there and cradled Brynn for some time. Soon enough though, her fellow mages appeared in the room, having been drawn to the thunderous sound of their battle. Distantly, Benevolence heard one of them call for a medic, while others tried to figure out what exactly had happened here, but she tuned it all out.
It wasn't until a fellow tiefling knelt beside her that she returned to reality.
"Benevolence? Are you…alright?" the tiefling asked.
"Do not call me that." Benevolence looked up with righteous fury in her eyes.
The two last beacons of her hope in humanity had either betrayed her or were now dead. For her whole life, she had tried to be an exemplar of her people. To fight the stereotypes that plagued her everywhere she went. But the world had stretched her empathy to the point where it was barely recognizable. Time and again, the world had taken her charity and spat it back in her face and this was the final straw. The world did not deserve her pity. It did not deserve her care. She would no longer sacrifice any more of her spirit to being an envoy of benevolence to an uncaring world. Rather, she would simply do what she already planned to do with Tovenaar. She would cleanse the world in righteous fire. She would seek out those who have done her wrong, done wrong to all those who's only crime was merely existing, and eliminate them, starting with the man who lied to her, abused her trust, and killed her oldest friend.
Benevolence was gone. She was Rapture now.
Part 2
From that day forward, Rapture would never let her trust be misused again. She cut down anyone who she deemed wicked; a definition that broadened with each passing day. She was through giving second chances. She raised followers in the Arcanium and then expanded her ideals into the region beyond. Some joined because they believed she was right, while others joined simply out of fear. She and her followers relentlessly pursued Tovenaar across Horizon and beyond.
But Tovenaar did not sit idly by. He amassed his own group of followers, promising to lead humanity down a firm yet kinder path than what Rapture was offering. He became known as the Shepherd, and he too sought to claim the Oculus Infinium for himself. He was no saint, however. While Rapture was upfront about her fanaticism, Shepherd worked in the shadows and won over followers through coercion and manipulation; and those that he could not persuade, he beguiled through magic or even outright killed and resurrected using dark magic to do his bidding.
And so the two of them waged a bitter grudge-war across Horizon, culminating at the slopes of Metran Peak at the doorstep of Shepherd's massive underground lair. And in the very depths of that lair Shepherd and Rapture met for their climactic rematch. The battle was so intense that the soldiers fighting around them ceased their battle to watch the duel unfold, oblivious to everything else around them.
Their struggle culminated in an epic beam battle cast directly from each of their pieces of the Eye: blinding, radiant energy from Rapture's and pure black, necrotic power from Shepherd's. And then suddenly, an explosion.
The last thing Rapture saw as the light of the blast enveloped her was Shepherd turning to dust from the impact. And then nothing.
Nothing for a thousand years until one day she awoke entombed within the ruined remains of her old fortress deep within in the impregnable Liminean Wilds, still in possession of her half of the Oculus Infinium.
But now she was weak. Too weak to safely use its power without burning away her mortal form. And so she bided her time. She traveled back to civilization only to find that the Antecean Empire had vanished over a thousand years ago, leaving behind nothing but burned out ruins.
And so she found herself in the city of Crucible, or Castelium as she had known it in her time. She joined the Temple of the Attuned, a religion that reminded her uncomfortably of her own story, ostensibly as a Forum scholar learning more about the regions history and lore. She remained here for several years, catching up on everything she missed, essentially relearning the common tongue and rebuilding her lost strength.
What's more, her centuries in stasis seemed to have mellowed her out some. She no longer felt the burning need to cleanse the world in fire and brimstone. Instead, she simply felt empty. Directionless, like a whisper in a void: Echoless. She still saw the same old corruption around her. Humanity was still its worst enemy, but she took small comfort in knowing that civilization still existed after all this time and had not yet managed to implode on itself.
It wasn't until later that she discovered that her old followers had survived through the years, at least in a sense. There existed a cult in modern day that preached the return of "Rapture", a powerful being who brought about the end of the Antecean Empire. They claim she was ultimately tricked and sealed away atop Metran Peak and that only the "Almighty Eye," a relic they sought, could free her. When that day came, she would return and cleanse the world in holy fire.
Be it out of need for closure, a returning sense of purpose, or simple curiosity, Rapture, now calling herself Echoless, returned to the sight of Tovenaar's old lair to indeed find it perfectly sealed. The magic of the seal resonated with her Eye, which she now wore as an amulet. However, she was still too weak to use it. Nevertheless, she needed to open that door. She needed the other half of the Eye that she knew would still be interred with Tovenaar's remains, even if she didn't quite know herself why she needed it. Perhaps, if nothing else, she needed to see for herself that he was truly dead and gone. And thus she hatched a plan.
She did not care for this cult her one-time followers had become. While they preached holiness and repentance, in practice, they were little more than fanatical extortionists. They demanded tribute and condemned anyone who did not subscribe to their doctrine, often hunting down naysayers in their homes and putting them to the sword. This was a far cry to what Rapture had truly stood for. She would kill two birds with one stone and have one of them open the door for her and die in the process.
On her return to Crucible, Echoless discovered that one of the mid-ranking priests at the temple, an elf named Garav Arashammad was secretly the head of the Cult of Rapture, the illusive "Seeker" as the cultists called him. So Echoless convinced him that she too wished to join the cult. Once she had earned his trust, she confided in him that she had located an object she believed to be "the almighty eye" they sought.
The two of them swiftly returned to the sealed door on Metran Peak. And this is where the first snag hit Echoless' plan. She had underestimated Garav's strength of will and skill as a divine spellcaster. While it took him great effort, he was able to successfully unlock the power of the Eye and open the door sealed for a millennia.
The second snag was when the horde of undead poured out of the newly opened lair like an avalanche of bones, limbs, and swords. Echoless knew that Tovenaar had studied necromancy, but she had no idea that his magic had yet lingered and that he had raised so many dead. When the undead appeared, Garav fled; teleporting away on the spot. Leaving Echoless to flee down to the town below in the hopes of warning the innocent folk of their impending doom…