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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ciaran00" data-source="post: 2192848" data-attributes="member: 12493">* From the players' perspective: An opinion on the past which we do not remember. Here's a guess as to a scene from Mhoram's past which is unrelated to the main story arc. Read for fun. Skip if only interested in story main.There were no fields here, no forests or groves or meadows, just earth. No corner was left untouched by boiling magma and acid rain, and not a single leaf was spared on the spiderwork branches of the occasional dead tree. Sparse skeletons dangled from petrified branches, stripped of all their flesh by fire and left with their souls still screaming inside them from the time when they uselessly tried to defend their domains from the fiend who sat ruling it, unopposed. The ground still shuddered and groaned from the endemic curse that inhabited it, planted inside it by its arcane devastator. The wound was most apparent in a crater that stood at the heart of the blasted dominion, an ocean of ash that moated an obsidian tower that connected the sunless sky to its dense, bone foundation. The featureless tower was marked with a single man-sized doorway which stepped out into a precarious, banister-framed balcony.From within his nest which was, no doubt, stacked with a demiplane's share of books and elixirs and arcane armaments the archwizard Mhoram stepped out onto the balcony. The suspicion which had brought him there could only be confirmed by his own faultless senses. Mhoram sniffed the air, as he had learned to do during his century-long incarceration in the Abyss, searching for the sign of an enemy he knew was trespassing in his kingdom of bane. The archwizard wore a featureless white robe and bore the appearance of just a man. Like the rest of him, his hands were skin and bone. Flakes of ash, the tell-tale remnants of enemies he remembered once razing, caught in his black hair and thick of his beard. His eyes scanned the standstill clouds in the sky. Suddenly, his head snapped around until he was staring back behind him with an eye. An apparition of a winged, humanoid figure stood not far from him. One of its arms flared into a blade of translucent, white fire and its mouth of fanged teeth was gleefully stretched about nearly the full circumference of its skull. Mhoram's eyes narrowed as he found himself momentarily transfixed by its fell gaze. And then, it happened.The cloud moved, stretching gracefully out into the monstrous essence which, until now, was using it as cover. Its bone wings swiped out like two scythes, carrying its great skinless draconic bulk towards the archwizard who was its enemy. The dragon landed its claws upon the crown of Mhoram's tower, arcing its great maw towards the balcony. Just then, Mhoram's insubstantial guardian merged with its master, imprinting the outline of its avian bones into his featureless robe, as the archwizard floated out and up backwards from his balcony. Human and draconic eyes locked each other with equal and opposite rage, each too intense and alien for the other to fully weather. Somewhere else, a billion leagues away, an intricate and intensely-warded bone column that served as a long-dead dragon's phylactery throbbed nervously from the archwizard's piercing stare.Pockets of air and the hollow spaces where marrow once was whistled with air as the dragon spread his jaws. A grey mist of howling, writhing spirits coned out from its mouth and blanketed the air where Mhoram floated, stripping the skin off the archiwizard's human body, corroding away his brain and lungs and blood, leaving behind only a vapour of his viscera and a fading echo of his pain. As the mist dissipated, Mhoram seemed only a memory.The dragon was not so easily tricked. It dugs its claws into the obsidian tower, and placed its chin on its folded wings, waiting... anticipating... the counterstroke that was all but inevitable. It had all of time to wait out the conclusion to the duel. Its nemesis did, too.ciaran</blockquote>

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