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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(contact)" data-source="post: 1130439" data-attributes="member: 41">86—The Memory Charm, part IIIIshlokShe was a deity with no following in the planes, one of the rare creatures who kept her realm within the prime material plane—a world called Isk.  She explained that she had no need for followers, but those souls under her care were placed within a cycle of life-and-rebirth culminating in an enlightened state.  This deity contended that Good was the inevitable result of freedom, and her pasoun had been built to prove it.  But more to the point, Ishlok would hide the brothers—change them enough to render them immune to divination and location.  The souls who usurped a Lord of the Nine and embarrassed the entire Baatezu race would, as a point of technicality, be gone.  After all, the Baatezu had been using technicalities against the mortals for so long, it seemed only fair that their own weapon be turned against them.  In this way, Taran and Thelbar submitted to Ishlok’s protection, and came into the service of the Mother.IskThe duo did not see much of Kyreel once they were established in his home world.  He had his duties, and they had their own.  Ishlok’s pantheon consisted of herself and her three children:  Isk, the world itself, Hustaiir, a goddess of magic and neutrality, and Iiam, the last-born and most wicked of the three.  The brothers settled in the grand city of Isenthal, a complex of small islands connected to a larger mass on a pennensula.  Thelbar became enamored with the place, and began to put his intellect and magical capabilities to work building the city into a military and trade power.  Despising autocracy (a reaction from his recent experiences in the Lower Planes), he put forward a new form of government—a system whereby influential guilds and merchant houses could form a parliamentary body that would both advise, and if necessary, overrule the hereditary King.  To ensure that his new system would last, he saw to it that the monarch was a like-thinking half-elf.  This new king could be expected to rule long enough for several human generations to be born and die.  By the time a more willful king might ascend to the throne, this new government would be firmly established and well-rooted in precedent.Taran used his new-found sanctuary to chase after the simple pleasures of his recent past.  But in the wake of his adventures in Hell, and the toll their terrors took on his psyche, he was unable to find contentment.  He fell into a cycle of drunken debauchery, and grew ever more debased.  His prized mercenary company was usurped from his control by his trusted second, and Taran was gradually removed from day-to-day operations.  Eventually, the mercenary band left Isk altogether, and left their founder behind.Occasionally, Taran would emerge from his stupor and make loud noises about “taking up the adventuring life,” but the local tavern (built with his fortunes, and owned by him) always proved closer than the nearest rampaging dragon, and the one enemy Taran could not defeat was himself.  Reduced to an ineffectual state by his own willfulness, but granted an unnaturally long life-span through Thelbar’s magic, Taran faded from the halls of the powerful, and found his own personal Hell—a hell from which no crusading paladin might rescue him.  He fathered many children, but raised none of them.  He was as useless a family man as he had been effective as an adventurer.  Thelbar came into the direct service of the goddess Hustaire, and took the title of “Balancer.”  He used his other-worldly knowledge to place himself above the other wizards of Isk, and organize them into a grand council at the goddess’ disposal.  With no formal priesthood, Hustaire had previously had no active role in the lives of the Mother’s Children.  Isk was a magic-poor world, and by submitting to Thelbar’s divinely-sanctioned “guidance,” these other wizards were able to plumb the secrets of what the multiverse at large knew as the heights of spell-casting.  Thelbar built for himself a wizard’s tower that floated on a cloud above the Ishlokain peninsula—it soon became a symbol of the city as well as of the power of its primary protector.At this time, Isenthal‘s rise brought the city-state into conflict with the Empire of Ishlok—the continent’s great sea-faring imperial power.  The Holy Ishlokian Empire was a theocracy devoted to the goddess in name only; its rulers had long since fallen from grace, and declared all forms of magic “demonic,” as well as removing through state-sponsored genocidal pogroms and purges all demi-human inhabitants of their expansive realm.  The Ishlokians had maintained their hegemony through military force, and responded to the Isenthanian upstarts in a predicatble fashion.  What no one could predict, however, was the effect that Thelbar’s outworld knowledge would have on the face of armed conflict for the world.Isk had always been an isolated place—its magic was only one facet of its larger culture that was to prove ineffective in the face of  Thelbar’s imported thinking.  The smaller Isenthanian army was able to use unconventional tactics to win victory after victory, seizing shipping lanes and severely restricting the Ishlokain’s control over the more far-flung elements of their empire.This was all well and good, but despite his lofty title, Thelbar the Balancer could not leave well enough alone.  Believing himself divinely-inspired, and perhaps still a little mad, he once again overstepped himself by moving against the machinations of the world’s sole deity of Evil.  Iiam did not take favorably to this challenge, and as a jealous sibling, he resented Hustaire’s new proxy and her increasing power within the mortal sphere.  Iiam confronted Thelbar, and mocking him, stripped from Thelbar the one thing that had always put him above other mortals—his spell-casting abilities.  Iiam personally tore from Thelbar’s mind all knowledge of wizard-craft, and cruelly, left the former mage to live the rest of his natural life without any extra-normal gift.What transpired then is unclear, but Thelbar found himself entirely unable to live a commoner’s life.  Ashamed of his weakness, he fled from civilization, eventually finding solace (and perhaps a bit of wisdom) in the hermit’s life.Deprived of Thelbar’s longevity magics, Taran also grew old and weak.  He put his drinking behind him, but the damage had been done—his health destroyed, his fame nonexistent, the bullish fighter found that he too had outlived his bravado.  None remained who remembered the man he was, and few could respect the man he had become.At this point, Ishlok herself intervened.  Their mortal lives had played to their ends, she told the brothers, and should they wish to remain within her protective graces, they must enter fully into her pasoun and become true natives of her realm.  Faced with unimaginable torment, the brothers had no real choice.  They submitted to a ritual death, and were reborn as true Children of Isk.</blockquote>

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