010 Hank, Exposition

Aeons ago, long before many of the races you know of were born, my people existed in peace and knew of nothing beyond each other. We knew not words, not gods, not realms, not races, we only knew each other. We knew joy, we knew beauty, and we knew life, but not in the way you or I know these things by these words now, but in concepts beyond time, space, and the physical. We were minds, adrift in an infinite realm of nothing but thought.
Over time, something began to intrude in our realm. The physical encroached upon our infinity, and we began to change. At first we couldn’t understand the physical at all, so foreign a concept was it to our minds, but one and then others of us found ourselves slowly pulled unto it, becoming quasi-physical beings. We called this the new paradigm.
As our presence grew more physical, we learned the ways that matter interacts with other matter. What is knowledge easily learned by any mortal child, that by touching something one can influence it, came to us incredibly slowly - like a glacier, a sense of weight bearing down upon us and pushing us down into the real. The more we put our minds to understanding the new paradigm, the more we were drawn to the physical realms of reality, until eventually we found ourselves anchored in something we had never before imagined.
It was a single time and place, finite in physical dimensions, linear in the flow of time. This drove many of us mad, to experience this now, then, and not yet. In time most of us recovered, but some few of us never regained sanity and drift still in our ancient realm, minds shattered and insane.
Where before we had known infinity, we began to know limited width, depth, and breadth. What we knew as everything became distinct and separate light, shadow, or dark. What had been only us became space, air, and matter. Our eternal homeostasis began to change, and we began to live, and with life comes it’s opposite, death.
We found ourselves huddled together, grouped at the centre of this terrifying newness, when the first of us died. It was not a whimper, or a cry, or a simple seizure of movement as mortals know, for it was the death of something infinite, within a finite realm. It rang with a power beyond any that had existed before, and flung us against the hard edges of our reality.
Like water in a heaving bucket we dashed against the edges of reality, splashing sideways and slantways and longways and backways. Each time we struck each other, small pieces of us broke away spinning into the void, and we began to grow smaller. Eventually some of us grew small enough, real enough, to interact with each other in a form of touch, reaching out with our minds and our physical presence to cushion the blow. The chaos slowed, and then stilled, allowing us to regain control of our mental capacities.
We had always been able to sense each other, but in this new limited dimensional form we learned new ways of sensing. When we had struck each other, we had begun to learn to feel by touch. As we mourned pieces of us lost, we learned to focus our minds and see. We began to recognise our own rippling movement as sound, and to hear it.
We mourned what we had lost. We mourned our fallen sibling. We mourned for this new future, beginning to understand we were now finite like the realm we found ourselves in. That with time the rest of us would too die.
But in the dark, after time uncounted, we began to see light. To hear the edge of reality shake with rhythmic song. There was movement and form outside of us, rising from our own ashes, seeded among the finite matter.
The pieces of us that had fallen away began to coalesce, drawn to the remaining parts of our dead sibling. The largest gathering lay at the centre of our finite reality, pulling gently at all within the realm. Smaller parts gathered too, yet also reaching out with their own gentle pull. We reached out with our minds, rejoicing together in song and hoping to find new minds, but heard only quiet echoes of ourselves.
In the centre of our finite realm, a singular body of heat and light drew together. This we called sun. Other solid forms slowly coalesced, and we called them planets, and moons. The remaining scattered matter we called nebulae where they drifted, or rings as they settled around planets.
We gazed upon it all with rapturous joy, entranced by the geometric beauty and organised chaos. We began to sense movement within and indeed upon these heavenly bodies. Minds, independent of each other and of the larger body, their thoughts so like our own but infinitely smaller and faster. We theorised and studied this life as it changed and evolved. Were they of us? Were they something new? Were they something that had been here before us, that we hadn’t been able to see?
We didn’t know, so we watched, and we learned.
This life became more and more complex, in both it’s nature and it’s expression. Intelligence arose, communication followed, and communities formed. Civilisations rose and fell. Empires grew and collapsed. Entire races were born, grew old, and died. It was fascinating, and it became everything to us.
And just when we thought we had adjusted to it all, reality broke us again, as the edge of the finite opened and something came through. There was not only something beyond our finite realm, but something had breached what we had thought to be the edge of reality.
We sensed it with every core of our being. It was both beautiful and terrifying to every sense we possessed. It was orders of magnitude larger than any independent life we had observed, yet indeed it was itself alive. It was as large as the smallest moon, and its mind was complex beyond anything we had experienced since the great before. From whence it came it left a hole in reality, a window upon our error, and we saw we were merely at the edge of one everything. We could see into a world of colour and possibility. This rainbow ocean flowed around the edge of the finite, and within it we could sense other finite realms, other minds, and it vibrated with what we called the music of the spheres.
The portal closed behind the giant beast, which moved through our realm with powers similar to some of our own. Taking words from the younger races we had observed named this force magic, and the beast we named Spelljammer. Upon its back it bore life of kinds we had never seen or imagined, and it fascinated us with its wanderings through our finite realm. It left a trail of magic as it passed each world, enhancing the power of the younger races, or indeed bestowing control of it where none had been before.
When it reached the edge of our realm another hole opened into the rainbow ocean, and The Spelljammer left us. It took with it beings from our worlds, who had watched it’s passage and learned their own forms of its magic. It left behind others from afar, like footprints in the sand.
Gazing through the second portal before it closed, we learned more of the nature of our reality, and what lay outside it. We reasoned we lived inside a crystal sphere, one among a potentially infinite number others, floating loosely in the flow. We synthesised this knowledge with everything we had learned since our fall from the infinite. We began developing systems of speculation, and engaged in academic discussion. We became scholars watching you all in silence, shining down from above.
As our knowledge of the finite realms solidified, we were able to understand more about the new paradigm, and again borrowing words from the younger races named our ancient existence the mindscape. Using magic and our minds, we were able to touch upon the edges of it once more, and we learned to cross parts of our minds from one sphere to another through our ancient home, and even to remain within it for a time. Try as we might though we could never cross the barrier into the flow, even the smallest parts of our minds withered and died in moments outside of the spheres. Indeed, the mindscape seemed somehow disconnected from the flow, somehow blocked by it.
Would that it had stayed that way.
Nearly a hundred of your years ago over a period of months, such a short time to me even now, the rainbow colour of the flow drained, leaving a stark whiteness behind. It was as though all the energy of the flow, a realm we theorised to be as infinite as the mindscape, was pulled into a central sphere far from our awareness. We watched this focal point, by way of nearby portals in other spheres we had projected into, as the last traces of colour wisped inside of it
Not long after the colour had gone, the flow exploded. The mortal races had long known the flow could be volatile, but none had predicted such a sustained maelstrom. A wave of violent colour tore back out through the flow, bleeding out across infinity, tearing at each crystal sphere it passed. We wept as we watched this power tear apart all that we watched, all that we had loved, and were unable to stop it. Every sphere the explosion touched cracked, shattered, or exploded.
We acted in concert as those first spheres died. We used our minds to draw upon the mindscape, lacing it with the power of our own magic, and shielded the suns and worlds inside as many spheres as we could. Thousands of us spread across an equal number of worlds, and kept them from harm. We burned up our minds, shielding the mortal races from annihilation, thousands upon thousands of us dying. Those that survived the explosion began to die of a psionic asphyxiation, the silvery ephemera poisoning the space around us like gas in a well. The strongest of us drew together in groups of three, anchoring themselves within celestial bodies of power and pushing back against the white void. They bound themselves to suns, every essence of their beings dedicated to keeping the local system safe, and were lost to us.
We could not survive outside these systems, so it was an academic sacrifice on our part. Those of us that remained found ourselves drifting, untethered to the inner walls of the spheres, so we began to seek refuge among the younger races. So close to so many of you, we found ourselves overwhelmed by the cacophony of your minds bleeding into where our own touched the mindscape, and once again many of us were driven mad and died, or fled insane into the mindscape.
Those few of us left near the end, perhaps a score or two across the nearby systems, found we could reduce these effects by binding ourselves smaller and deeper in the physical realm, reducing our reliance upon the mindscape. This locked us into a spiritual psionic form which could only survive by inhabiting sentient minds, like a poltergeist might inhabit a mundane object, or as our powerful guardians inhabited the suns. This process would dissolve the existing mind we inhabited, so we chose only the most abhorrent of creatures to inhabit, those that would destroy or subjugate life, rather than celebrate and support it. We jumped into minds that held both small and large aspects, minds adept at changing nature in ways we had never imagined. Minds without souls, as we have since come to understand in our esoteric studies.Most of us lost contact with each other in this process.
I do not know how many of us survived once I entered this body. More may be out there. I know the mind you knew as Frank survived, and I can feel a handful of others here near this place you call Faerun, in this system your elders called Realmspace.
We lost much of ourselves in jumping into these minds but it should be said that fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Rarely had we seen evil such as theirs within the spheres, but the minds of these ceremorphs foster a hungering darkness that is absolute. They exist only to dominate, to feed, and to destroy. These beings had used the mindscape as a destructive tool to subjugate, so were they aptly named as they flayed the very minds from their victims. Weep not for what we did to them, for they would feed upon or enslave every one of you.
Frank and I began to sense the power of Acererak twisting Faerun’s magical ley lines, and began to travel here, to Chult. As we travelled, we tried to rehabilitate those thralls that we could, but Frank became weak in their new form, and lost control of the process. The thralls turned on Frank and I, and I fought many of them off, drawing them away so that Frank could try to land safely. The released thralls’ hated me all the more than Frank, you see, as the host I had taken had been the vilest of them all.
I leapt from the ship into the void, just there (points above), near the Tears of Selune, using my psychokinesis to pull them off the deck with me. We drifted, unreachable, and they suffocated in the void. I am ashamed to say that as I was bound now in this mortal form, so too was I bound by its physical hunger, and I was forced to feed upon their carcasses like carrion. As I did when you rescued me in Hrakhamar.
Through the mindscape I contacted Frank, and we discussed our next moves, but as time wore on the power of Acererak here in Chult grew stronger. Acererak began twisting and consuming the local mindscape with thanergy - a power of anti-mind and anti-life - and in time I lost all but the most fleeting contact.
I dedicated myself to mastering the only tool remaining to me, the only ‘gift’ of this form I now possess - that of a deeper control of magic. The body I reside in, unlike that of Frank and several others that successfully landed, was of an enhanced nature, a terror among terrors, or a king among kings. Named here it is Ulithiard, the ultimate mind flayer, and I control all it’s faculties now, indeed I used them to reach the ground of this world, though it drained me. I rode the weave of Faerun down from above the world, crashing down far to the north, and made my way south here to Chult under cover of magic and my psionic powers.
I had thought, had hoped, to rejoin Frank and for us to end Acererak’s thanergic orgy, before returning to the stars. As you well know, that was not to be. In placing ourselves in such shells we had drawn in, compressed ourselves so tightly, and we became vulnerable to emotion and instinct - as you saw take hold of Frank at their end. In their time here on chult, indeed in coming to know you, they had tapped deeper into emotion than they were able to control, weakened by Acereraks proximity. This lead to their own sad death in Hrakhamar, but I feel their touch linger among you all, and I know they chose wisely.
Acererak has defiled the mindscape and this place with his thanergy. He will feed upon the magical energy of this world, and the mindscape energy of its people, and he will become a power far greater than any the spheres saw before the shattering. Already he has gathered the souls and minds of thousands of sentient beings to this end, indeed he has captured your own, and he plans to use this power to emerge within a new, thanergic body. That of an immense Dracolich.
I cannot get close to him, but you can. This charge must be lain at the feet of The Lightwood Company, to enter the Tomb of the Nine Gods, to undo his thanergic barrier, and to aid me to destroy this terrifying abomination. There is a space, an absence, in each of you. Therein I can place a part of my mind, to protect you from the worst of his corruption, and to anchor yourselves to me. To Izzurba I also pass my staff, the symbol of all that is me, and with his power and mine you will be able to breach the barrier without Acererak’s knowledge, and return here should the need arise.
But make no mistake, eventually he will sense you, and when you destroy the source of the barrier he will turn all his rage and fury upon you. But at that time, and in that place, I will be there with you, and we have a chance at victory, no matter the cost.

Related Characters

• Hank