This player, who is on this website (Hi, Song!), Discord, and whom I’m actually still playing with (this moment happened quite recently in fact) helped shape the Sterid Empire into what it is. He created the Lord, Lordling and Top Servant (Richard, Aldin and Tiavo respectively) of the Earl estate and laid the basis for there being seven more (Falamus, Rey, Torres, Davelied, Caelum, Hargreave, McCannock). He made the Forest of Wisps (on the inner edge of which this takes place!) and was the first person to put up with my complicated class system instead of buying the weapons and then being naturally classed from there. He started as an Elementalist-Black and at the time of the drawing had made his way to Pigment mage.
Lucid, an NPC Crystallist who had joined alongside him, was admiring the tree that had been planted at the player character’s birth and, due to the rituals of his tribe, he would be buried under. He recounted the tale of how he had become a sorcerer, having met the True Elements after taking a nasty fall in the mountain trail. They gave him a blood pact and saved his life for a price: using magic would destroy him slowly. He worked for years to mitigate this effect, but even now, if he really needs something done powerfully, he draws blood as an offering to honor the pact… the rest of the group had already seen this in action and fear him for it. He tore through the Void in order to save our Runner, Vhale, from his own sacrifice.
Lucid’s story was a bit more lighthearted. Before the Genocide of the Foxkin occurred as he was a teenager, he had lived in a religious colony dedicated to Sathon, the Aster of Creation. He was the son of the High Oracle, Emeka Avir, and therefore destined to become an Oracle himself. Which caused a little trouble. You see, in their religious texts, it says that the Priests and Oracles of Creation must remain silent, as Sathon himself had toiled in silence to create the world, and Lucid was just about the loudest mouth in the Colony. Eventually, the High Oracle signed off on sealing his voice away — a seal he still has, for the record — and Lucid was mute. He HATED being mute. And then a friend of his showed him Crystallism, transferring status effects from person to person. He saw his chance. He studied Crystallism day and night along with the Books, trying to see if it worked on divine seals.
It would only work for an hour once every week, but that would be all he needed to raise hell, and even made it easier to hide how he was doing it. During that hour he would tear through the colony, shouting obscenities from the top of his lungs, evading the grasps of the Priests attempting to save High Oracle Avir’s reputation, and then get caught at the end of his hour, relishing in the fact that they could not, for the life of them, figure out how he was speaking around his seal.
Furry Times 