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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MulhorandSage" data-source="post: 1961480" data-attributes="member: 751">From the annals of St. Eleador the Survivor. (Note: the following, while not greatly embellished by the author, may have a few details whitewashed):When Eleador and his fellows investigated a gateway to another world, they came to a great port whose walls were lined with black banners, where theiir ship was beset by the powers of the local authority. Upon a display of the ship's powers, Eleador's companions realized they could not defeat the opponent, and to a man, all surrendered, save Eleador, who went into a trance and communed with his god. The great Pholtic power told his high priest that he could not surrender, so Eleador defied the local tyrants. Unamused, the captain struck down the great cleric, and cast him into the water to drown.But Eleador survived. Supported by his god and his own inner strength, the cleric washed to shore, half-drowned but alive. Learning that his fellows were taken to the black capital of the empire to be slaves for the empress's amusement, Eleador donned the disguise of a mad dervish, whom no one in that world would touch.Eleador's fellows were imprisoned, and his two closest friends, the paladin Dudley and the ranger Magnus, were forced to do battle in the arena as gladiatorial slaves. They annoyed the empress by exceeding her expectations (ie. they did not die), so the empress and her wizard brother proposed a crueler enemy - a giant hydra, whom they would not be able to slay. But Eleador came to the city, and when he learned of what the empress proposed, he vowed to stop it. On the day of the combat, Magnus, Dudley led a rebellion of the gladiators, and instead of attacking the hydra, they hurled their weapons at the royal box. But this was to no avail, for the wizard had protected the box via a spell. But using his guile to sneak to the box, Eleador beheld the wizard as he commanded the hydra to attack and finish off his friends.Then Eleador strove forward. and his wrath was apparent, and the Pholtic power waxed within him. On the authority of his Lord, St. Eleador shouted a single word at the wizard, a divine command that only the strongest of wills could resist."Dive!"Compelled by the powers of sacred Elysium and the fires of the Celestial Crucible, wherein the darkness of the soul burns into impotence and ash, the wizard found his body seized by a compulsion that his malefic spirit could not contravene. Obeying the word of St. Eleador as readily as he had obeyed the sadistic impulses that had previously driven him in his worldly matters, the wizard dove from the balcony, landing with a sickening thud on the ground, forty feet below. The hydra immediately turned on the creature who had been controlling him, and in the panic of the crowd, Eleador snuck away. The Empress's guard, who hated their mistress but feared her brother's power, laid hands on her, and struck her down.The gladiators fought their way to freedom and were soon reunited with the great high priest, who had brought down an evil empire with but a single word, though a greater evil would soon follow...</blockquote>

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