Real & Half-Real: Iskierka's Notes | OTA

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Who: Illarion's Omen Iskierka and anyone who happens to stumble across her notes.
What: Receiving messages from hell.
When: March 5 onward, after Sayo's full return to the Waking World.
Where: Throughout Trench and the Levels

Content warnings: All of the following are mentioned or discussed obliquely: magical zombies, mind control, emotional manipulation, war-time violence, murder of family members, drug use, cannibalism, suicide, hallucinations/derealization, existential horror, apocalyptic setting, kidnapping, enslavement.



Iskierka has not been idle while her Sleeper is missing from Trench. Somewhere, he's wandering a hell far removed from the Waking World; somewhere, he rehearses to himself the briefing he might give to any would-be rescuers when they arrive, what is necessary to survive and sufficient for Sayo's ritual. When hoping for rescue pales on him, he dictates his thoughts to the air or an animal or a corpse's patient ear, and she hears it.

She hears every word of it, and she cannot respond; she listens faithfully, and the words fill her head to the point of forgetting. When there's no more room for them, she writes. With whatever comes to hand--beg buy borrow or steal--on whatever surface she can find, she writes--scratches out--rewrites. Notes and letters emerge beneath her pen, and she takes them where she thinks they belong. Some she abandons in significant places and others she brings to significant people, urging them to take this fragment of her lost Sleeper.


It may help, when they go to rescue him. If anyone can.

[[ OOC: Real & Half-Real Plot Write-Up and Interest Check, for those just joining us. Even if you haven't left a comment there you're more than welcome to join in on finding notes!

See comments for how to use this post and tasty tasty plot hooks. ]]

Comments

QUESTIONS

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(frozen comment) OOC | HOW TO USE THIS POST

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Highly recommended that you go read the plot write-up if you're not familiar with it!

All of the notes listed in comments below can be found around Trench or given to Sleepers who interact with Illarion's Omen, Iskierka. The OOC portion at the top of each note details where it can be found, whether there's multiple copies floating around, and any conditions on receiving it from Iskierka. Anyone can find any note out in Trench; the conditions are only on whether or not a given character could be directly handed the note by Illarion's Omen.

Notes left around Trench can be found by ordinary sleuthing or searched out via supernatural means, such as Paleblood visions or psychometry. As a bonus for Sleepers with keen senses of smell, they do have Illarion's scent on them. Many of them will also be easy to simply stumble upon in the open.

Notes labeled "A" -- for "analysis" -- in the header are dry facts of the world. These are generally easier to find. Notes labeled "O" -- for "opinion" -- contain more of Illarion's thoughts and feelings about his subjects. These are harder to find and might be more cryptic.

If you'd like your character to get a note, you've got options:

1. Use the note comment as a top level. If you want Iskierka to deliver it, just put "for Iskierka" in the header and I'll hit you up.
   
2. Comment with a link to another thread where the note is discovered, whether incidentally or as the focus of the thread.
   
3. Just post you're claiming it, with a little description of how that goes down.

All plot-relevant knowledge in the notes can be assumed available by the start of the next phase of the plot, so don't worry about rigidly claiming notes or having to thread for them. This is more of a make-your-own-scavenger-hunt that you can participate in exactly as much as is fun for you.

Feel free to hit me up with any questions or requests via DM or Discord (Plagueheart#0051). And above all, have fun!

MAGIC | The basics of Nephelian magic, and what one needs to survive it

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MAGIC | The Throne Above Thrones - 1A

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Note location: All over Trench, the Jungle, and the Catacombs
Number available: Lots - one of the most common
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

The first thing you must understand about Nephele is the Throne Above Thrones. It is the axis of our world and our magic, the cause of war and its solution. To Princes, it is a ladder to godhood. To the rest of us, it's death.

A Prince is a Prince through the devotion of her followers. A Prince becomes a Monarch by ascending the Throne and thereafter has no need of devotion, for she's a self-stating natural law, wed to Generation. Her domain pervades the world and grants it her Throne-gift--a magic she believed all the world should have, so much she would climb over the bodies of all her competitors to gift it to us. While Enthroned, she forms angels to be her hands and her eyes in the world.

For thirty years (give or take) she grants her gifts, until her hold on the Throne becomes so tenuous a rival can unseat her and we change the name of the years. So it has gone for all of recorded time. So there is no mortal generation in millennia that has not known a war.

Has it been worth it? O Loneliness, First-Spouse, who called us forth from the void and Generation's mind, was this what you wanted?

MAGIC | The Throne Above Thrones - 2A

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Note location: At a number of Lamp locations throughout Trench, stuck to the Lamp Friends
Number available: Lots - one of the most common
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

The Throne is not a place. To arrive at it, you must climb the Spire, but in climbing you climb out of the world entirely. I have not been to the foot of the Throne. I have been to the foot of the Throne. By and by I will make the attempt, for the sake of this briefing, but she will devour me I don't know what happens if I die up there.

It is said to be a space entirely in the Monarch's influence. It is said to take the shape of her domain and inner self, grown vast in apotheosis.

What does it look like, standing inside the mind and heart of a woman who only wishes the world dead?

MAGIC | Throne-song - 1A

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Note location: In the Pale Sanctuary; on the shore where Leviathan died
Number available: Two
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Most likely to award to a Disciple or Night Walker

The Throne will sing to you, if you're near enough to see it. Though "seeing" is a tricky thing. The story of Foolish Berthold says he touched the Throne while blindfolded and found only a rock. But the Prince of Song, who was blind from birth, followed its call thirty miles through a fog as thick as night, unseen by her enemies' armies. I'm no Song, but I'd estimate I hear it at ten miles.

Throne-song, I'm told, is different for everyone; Princes hear it clearer, stronger, and almost welcoming. I hear a buzzing in my bones and a vast slow inhalation, like a sleeping tyrant dragon. I don't want to climb the Spire again.

It will offer you Infinity and the pain and glory that come with it. Don't listen--anyone but a Prince who mounts the Throne will die in the attempt.

MAGIC | Princes - 1A

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Note location: Anywhere in Trench, the Jungle, or the Catacombs
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Slightly more likely to award to someone who is an obvious Leader

There are two primary magics on Nephele: The magic of devotion and the magic of effort.

A Prince is the product of the first. She arises through the devotion of her followers, her Court. Once there are enough of them, they grant her apotheosis and the Prince-gift of her domain; she grants them their Court-gift as an echo of her own magic. As long as Courtiers remain devoted to their Prince, they keep their magic and she hers. Any who fall away lose their Court-gifts, and if enough leave her--or are killed--she will lose her Princehood.

Only a Prince may ascend the Throne and become a god, and only a Prince would think it reasonable to spend her Court in war for that end.

My lone consolation here is that my Prince is alive and so I find myself a Knight-Preserver again. This would be more useful if I knew any of these twisted echoes of the people I loved well enough to heal them, or cared. I do care.

MAGIC | Effort-gifts - 1A

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Note location: All throughout Trench, though most are in Gaze, Prufrock, and Lumenwood; inexplicably, one in the Jungle has been pinned to the Hunter's back
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

There are two primary magics on Nephele: The magic of devotion and the magic of effort.

A mage is the product of the second. She immerses herself so completely in her art that--with a decade of practice--her expertise transcends nature. An effort-mage may grow so strong she crushes boulders to powder with her fists, or so sturdy her skin can't be cut by blades, or so skilled a rider her steeds run on water.

It is rare, but possible, to make a mage in much less time. All the avenues are bitter, though some less than others. Children who devote themselves obsessively to study happen in every generation. Children whose parents or minders or leaders devote them obsessively to something are more common. Children whose very survival depends on desperate daily practice of some skill may be mages before their majority, and permanently maimed for it.

We did wonder, at the beginning of the war, how Eyes could field so many mages. Even when he slaughtered Clarent and the Shroudwood, he didn't kill as many as were in his ranks.

The solution to that problem comes clear, if you give it a little thought: We dead need never take time off from practice, and it is a matter of our survival that we obey the necromancer who raised us.

MAGIC | Angels and demons - 1A

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Note location: All around Cassandra; at Pthumerian altars; in Moss King's home; on the beach where Leviathan fell
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Most likely to award to Disciples or those close to their Patron Pthumerians

The Monarch enthroned needs hands and eyes to shape the world, and so angels are born from the Throne. The Monarch dethroned sheds their ambition to rule as they fly to Generation's side, and so demons are born from the Throne. These Throneborn are shards of a Monarch's person and power that can--are you surprised?--be wielded as any other weapon.

Angels are all reason and no will. Once their Monarchs have died, they wait inert for another's will to summon them. The ambitious and the desperate may contract with angels for their powers--becoming warlocks, and using a dead Monarch's Court-gift like it was their own. But beware, o thou would-be warlock, that their contracts are more iron than ours and never as sensible. The Joy-of-Roses demanded a thousand poems and a thousand duels in ten days from its last unlucky warlock.

It's said that foolish soul failed and instead of the glorious death he expected, was forced to live his threescore years so blighted no one would recognize him for a rose.

Demons are all will and no reason. Courting possession isn't wise but the even more desperate may do it, and the unfortunate may stumble into it. Warlocks run special risks: A Monarch's demons can smell the imprint of their angels.

A demon consumes the host's will, becomes the host's will. In return for being driven forever to seek the Throne and die on it, a demonhost gains a Prince-gift without the knowledge to use it. Few survive and fewer thrive.

Nephele-that-is has no Demons of Sacrifice. To willingly renounce the Throne, it seems, leaves one's will intact.

Since taking a contract of my own, here, I have been followed by lean and starving temple animals.

It is good I don't need to sleep.

MAGIC | Angels of Sacrifice - 1A

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Note location: The Archives, the Catacombs, the Sleepy Town deer statues
Number available: Several
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

St. Sacrifice's angels are among the most contested and desired of contract-partners--for those peculiar individuals who risk the crime of warlocking to help others. Sacrifice's Court-gift is a subtle thing, taking truly-felt altruism and magnifying its effects to the miraculous.

St. Sacrifice's angels are also sought by those who've learned to tear apart Throneborn for the power in them. The Blade of Sacrifice was once an angel itself, though it is said it consented to its use. Insofar as an angel might consent.


The unscrupulous make no pretense of asking the angel before consuming it. So we shrikes learned to our woe with Biding and Sacrifices; so we ate a half-dozen of these precious angels to save ourselves from our own dissolution.

The ones here have halos of white phosphorus and pyre-smoke. They offer the deadly gift that our St. Sacrifice abjured the Throne to write out of reality: A life for the magic to wipe a battlefield clean.

I hate that they have it. I hate that we will need every one of them we can find.

MAGIC | Angels of Sacrifice - 2O

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Note location: The Archives, the Catacombs, and a statue to the Reckoning in Prufrock
Number available: Two or three
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Most likely to award to someone Illarion knows to be self-abnegating

I've found Unremembered Gift and contracted with it again. If I had that day in the ruins of Haunt-of-Owls, when it told me everything would be all right, would I be here? Would I be dead? It's more durable than I remember Angels of Sacrifice being. Or whatever I did to get her home wasn't enough to destroy it even if it destroyed me.

It gave me new terms this time. With no life, no line, and no legacy to live for, I find them acceptable.

??? | Pillars of the World - 1?

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Note location: All over Trench and the Catacombs, but most frequent near blood blisters; typically left in places they would be easy to overlook, like rubbish heaps
Number available: Many more than anyone would like
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Iskierka will not give this note to anyone

[The text of this note is completely illegible.

Touching it has a small chance of immediately infecting a Sleeper with a single golden eye. Attempting to read it has a better-than-even chance of causing an outbreak of eyes or a period of 112 minutes where the Sleeper sees unnatural colors and cannot comprehend written language.

Omens are not affected by touching or viewing it.]

MAGIC | The Blade of Sacrifice - 1O

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Note location: A statue of the Reckoning in Cassandra
Number available: 1
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Very close CR; should a Sleeper receive this note from Iskierka she will remain with them for the rest of the day

I knew.

I knew, I think

that a world like this could not have had St. Sacrifice as we knew them.

They did not give themself up here. They didn't relinquish their rule.


The world paid us the price to kill a Monarch. The Suncrowned pulled apart an angel to make the Blade of Sacrifice and put it in our hands.

We murdered them. We murdered our saint upon their Throne.


The age of miracles lasted five short months.

[This is the final note to appear. No new ones follow it.]

LOCATIONS | A scattering of places one might stumble into, and what may be waiting there

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LOCATION | House Beyond the Last Cedared Hill (Biding's home) - 1A

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Note location: Crenshaw and Lumenwood
Number available: Several
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

When we first fell into this shard of hell, it was malformed. People and times and places crowded in on each other; I walked the ruins of a dozen cities from two continents and a dozen islands, and witnessed people from as many places killing each other in the streets.

It has since settled more into a sensible shape--the Petheryga I remember--but the House Beyond the Last Cedared Hill is still here, just beyond Shroudwood, when it belongs to Nabea and the Surmountine Forest.

There's logic to it. It's Biding's ancestral home and deep elves rarely stray from those. But Biding is here with his doxy his victim Sacrifices to stoke the war of shrike on shrike, so his home must come too. Except it stands abandoned; I sat outside a full day in stupor some hours and no one entered or left.

It is unprepossessing as a manse though that's saying little to the unfamiliar. Instead: it is a vast pile of gleaming colored marble and elfstone cobbles, full of the man's secrets. There are traps (even Asphodel Hall has traps despite its students) and unburned unshriven dead. Whoever enters must tread carefully. I will not go; it is not a place for a shrike, or foreign dead, or a servant of the black gods, and he won't invite me.

I'd spite him if he did.

LOCATION | Isle of Joy - 1A

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Note location: Cellar Door and the Red; the Moss King's home; the Jungle
Number available: Several
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: More likely to award to someone who recently played the Moss King's games

The Prince of Pleasure's demesne is pleasant to look upon and poisonous within. When the rest of elvenkind sought solitude or our oaths to prepare for the end of the world, the swans (the high elves) chose to end their days in debauchery. They would have ended like our cousins the sparrows (ruined, penniless, stripped by mortals of land and wealth through law and conquest and fiat) except they found willing enablers in Sirira--who will do business with anyone, for anything, as long as the money's good.

If there is nothing else good or authentic about the swans, there's at least their money. It was enough to buy them an island.

The Isle of Joy is a study in studied contrasts. There are the forested hills, which we elves don't do well without, and there are the fields of dream-poppies in every color through ultraviolet. Much of it is tamed and managed and manicured as a Clarentish formal garden. It would not be any use if it were not.

The swans keep their manses and dachas and villas and estates and palaces by the waterfront in sight of the channel and Sirira across it. They keep their servants and "servants" further inland.

Here, they keep their shutters drawn against the battles in drowned Sirira, and the vampires that roam their streets by night at the Prince of Pleasure's behest.

LOCATION | Iron Steppes - 1A

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Note location: Mostly in the Jungle; a few in an abandoned airship tower in a remote part of Willful Machine
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

The Steppes are too vast to easily describe. You don't grasp it entirely on foot, standing hip-high in the grass that stretches horizon to horizon. You don't grasp it entirely in the cities of the Fringes, varied and bright-hued as they are, home to a hundred peoples of all the four principles. You don't grasp it entirely in Nirraz, looking down from their mountain as they drive their herds out to roam and forage for the summer. You don't grasp it entirely from above, where the Skilled soar the high vault of the sky above the teeming Verdant Sea.

Though I lose myself in nostalgia and sentiment, here--understanding the Steppes entire would require my Prince's years. Require having seen it all from the beginning. I did not. haven't, couldn't. We sold our years for children. They are worth eternity and now I have no regrets that he would be abandoned by the mayfly Court he had made. He shouldn't have preceded us it upset the order of the world.

The crossing from Tmutarakan to Shroudwood--the shortest way, due north--has two great risks now: the storms and the dryads.

Thundering's Court has turned the whole sky dark and windtorn--unnavigable to to an airship, proved by the half dozen you will find ground -wrecked on your way. Do not approach these, where they appear overgrown; the dryads have taken them, as they have taken most of the Steppes. I do not know why they've spread so far but that Locusts' ascension has maddened them--their only war on Nephele-that-is is with each other, and whatever wheat-field or orchard or garden was placed in their way. They didn't always kill animals who walked through their battlefields (as often tried to coerce them, to eat the other side)--but tore them swiftly apart, when they did kill, fuel for growth.

Here you will die smothered and clambered with vines, saved alive for weeks as they grow through. Better to cut your own throat before that, and lie down in the long grasses to give your blood to the soil. It will not appease them, but it may slow them down to drink and spare those who come after you.

LOCATION | Shroudwood - 1A

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Note location: Trenchwood, Feed, Ache; Illarion's yurt and the Salt Lake; Achelliac and Saphora
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

If you can survive Trench, you can survive Shroudwood.

It is the first thought to mind on returning to my home, after months in the Waking World. Trench is a trial and horror to most Sleepers, the worse to the solitary. Survival requires constant vigilance and exacting performances. Trust in friends, family, and flock are necessary, but the threat of corruption and wilding stretches all those ties to their limits. Trench, at least, still has sun and moon and stars overhead. We lost them, when we sacrificed our Starwood to the pillar and were given Shroudwood in return. (A thought for logistics: We'd need torches. Shrike eyes are made for the gloom. The abominations now haunting it can't need more light than we did.)

Yet, Shroudwood--even here, even in hell--is still more alive than Trench. Pillar corruption is not blood pollution; it doesn't sterilize the soil. (Though Locusts will in time.) There are still stargroves. There are still places the dusk-deer crush the bracken-fern to bed down in it, and reaper-hawks come to hunt them. The apricots are in bud; the sap is rising in the laurels, and by and by they will open their eyes but for now they are demure and lovely.

I wish I could see it. Even knowing I will see the scars of blade and mattock, the gas burns and the torn tracks of tanks. Starflower will grow through them in time. Cyclamens will reclaim it. They always have.

As with Trench, you will survive longest by keeping simple rules in mind: Don't walk alone. Beware of eyes in the dark and never meet them. If you are in a place you don't recognize, speak softly amongst yourselves; if you can't understand each other, retrace your path immediately. If you can see your shadow, retrace your path immediately.

If you see the sun rise above the top of the trees, be still, do not move, close your eyes, wait for rescue.

TARGETS | The thirteen most important people in the world: the ones who need to die to end it

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TARGET | Domnika Cor Hydrae (the Swan Sorceress) - 1A

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Note location: All over Trench, but most frequent near shrines to Mother Mercy or Moon Presence
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

On Nephele-that-is, the Swan Sorceress is a wicked woman. She besmirches the line Cor Hydrae with her greed and aberrant lusts.

In some jurisdictions she is still wanted for the murder of her husband and grandson.

Very few recognize her for what she is; her first mastery is deception. To most, she is a gracious hostess and sparkling socialite, generous in her substance (so long as you remember who you owe patronage). Her house on the Isle of Joy (a warning sign by itself) is a place of culture and peace away from the ongoing debauchery under Pleasure's continued misrule.

She does not excel in the martial arts and shows little apparent interest in political power. It's unnecessary she dirty her hands with them. Her magecraft lets her possess the minds of others to act as an extension of herself. Her centuries of practice at manipulation ensure her loyal followers will act nearly as quickly as the half-dozen she can hold in her direct thrall.

She is not a Prince only because she doesn't want it as much as she wants to spend her playthings' lives whenever it suits her, however it suits her.

Here, she has her own captive harem of elves still uncorrupted by death and return. They are miserable and beautiful.

She uses anyone else she has to hand as a shield before using her prizes; she uses them to beg and plead for their own lives with any who threaten her. In the biting moment, because she is a coward, she will sacrifice all of them to protect herself.

TARGET | Domnika Cor Hydrae (the Swan Sorceress) - 2O

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Note location: The Catacombs; Bone House
Number available: Few
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Close CR

[One sentence scrawled a dozen times, each larger than the last:]

SHE KILLED MY SON.

TARGET | Prince of Preservation (Evdokim) - 1A

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Note location: In most districts of Trench except Prufrock; in the Catacombs; around effigies of Madam Generosity
Number available: Lots
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: None

For all the centuries I spent in Preservation's Court, I still find him difficult to rightly describe. (Or rightly difficult to describe.) He was a general and an academic. He was a brilliant tactician who despised his art and a wise diplomat who oversaw the deaths of thousands. He led his people with tender kindness and love and insight and still treasured his moments alone with his murals and manuscripts and pottery fragments. He was in the end my Prince and held all my devotion, and he won it honestly.

The man who wears his skin and out-self here is not my Prince even if I have his Court-gift. He is a shallow hateful shadow who prolongs conflict rather than ends it; his love of our past is perverted into a desire to keep it from all others by erasing the future.

I don't know whether his gifts are still as they were on Nephele-that-is. I must go to him to know and I am loathe to learn how completely he's been distorted. I am afraid of what he will be, and who I will be around him.

TARGET | Prince of Preservation (Evdokim) - 2O

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Note location: In the Archives and in Gaze; at the Gate; in the Moss King's home
Number available: Few
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Most likely to award to anyone Illarion's discussed his past with

I think we--my Prince and his inner Court--all felt we were failing each other, after those first nightmarish hectic years. We rebuilt ourselves to survive what the pillar did to us and to survive how the world saw us. We enacted our great plan to eradicate war through making it unthinkable to wage; we perfected our contracts and spy networks and the veil of secrecy--and our justifications and dissimulations and diversions. We accomplished so much and did so much and couldn't make up for the great moral wound we tore in ourselves.

We knew something was wrong. We still sent our sons and daughters off to war but now there were enough of them it wasn't grinding us to extinction. We said if there were any other way aloud and looked at each other with eyes pleading for the other way we all knew must be there and none of us could voice it.

It was easy, having lived it, to believe the propaganda: That something in us had broken past repairing, that we were monsters past redeeming or reasoning with.

My Prince never believed that. He never gave up on us. He would have outlived us all and never given up though his heart broke.

But I think he still felt he'd failed us even up to his death. He could not solve the flaw in our natures any more than we could solve the flaw in the world that led to all war.

TARGET | Prince of Preservation (Evdokim) - 3O

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Note location: In Illarion's yurt by the Salt Lake
Number available: One
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Very close CR

He (my Prince) called me and I came.

He called me to him and held me and named me Hydra-Heart again. He restored me to the moment I was his favorite son. Whole, not hollow-hearted.

o rod o stars o argonaut let me die there. let me die then and not the moment after when he put talons to that foolish dream.

TARGET | Prince of Preservation (Evdokim) - 4A

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Note location: Prufrock and Lumenwood
Number available: Several
Conditions to receive from Iskierka: Most likely to award to a Hunter or a Blood Minister

This awful echo of my Prince doesn't only heal.

He restores us to our worst states as well.

I think he always could and he was always too kind to use it as a weapon; he only ever did this to us against his own intent.

He meant the best for us.