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[Ekoth Ilzaeum]

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It reflected a memory of life, a mere reflection. No true sentience. A shadow of a long-gone past, or perhaps one so recent the days were countable. It was short yet thick, cut somewhere down the line of a much longer thread. It had no beginning and it had no end. It was somewhere in the middle. It was a piece of recollection in a much larger story. Of a life. Of someone’s life. But this piece, this white, shimmering thread, was surely not from his. He knew it. These memories, he could care less about. They were dictations of lives that did not matter to him.

This man sat in a dimly lit room of a small chantry north of the Britain Crossroads, pulling a short, glimmering white thread through his dead-pale fingers. It nearly complemented his extraordinary pallid robes that almost glowed at times. The light died above his chest, and his face was lost in the darkness.

He paused and leaned back in his chair, dropping the thread onto the stone pavers. “Its semblance is a lie, right under my nose,” he whispered with a voice that sounded like echoes from the distance. “Meaningless.” He let out a heavy sigh and rolled his head back over the top of the chair. “Ilkür-meht.”

Zachary had told him of the thread’s whispers: You’re blinded by bursts of color, and reality seems to bend around you. He had told him of other threads he had, those of love, imprisonment, friendship and violence, but only this one had truly captured his interest. It was a Thread of Life, a strand of a memory. For so long, this man, branded and nameless, had been robbed of his memories, his visions of the past lost in the thickest of fogs. Perhaps this here, he thought, was the key to it all, to open the sealed gate that has so long barred me from my past.

He knew the past was unimportant, irrelevant to him now, but at the deepest roots of his humanity—or whatever he was—was a weakness of curiosity. Even deeper was the hope that the knowledge of who he was will actually help him now.

But it is such a weakness, and in this deserted night, he did not care. His work in life would grant him forgiveness in Oblivion, should delving into the past not lead him astray from the faith.

This particular thread, it had connected with him instantly. The moment he picked it up from the fallen dark wisp. The moment he caressed it. He heard its echoes, but he could not decipher them. When Zachary told him of the thread’s meaning, his bond with the thread grew even greater. It was more specific and powerful than the others, and this nameless man knew it held wonder. An answer. Each time he touched it, his mind felt at ease. A surge of warmth rushed through his body. Yet in the dark of his mind’s eye, he would occasionally see a flash of death in the form of a bleeding grey eye. It was impalpable, and it was somehow the answer.

But this could not be his memory. It was another’s, he thought. He had been sitting here for many hours, perhaps days, and still nothing. On the verge of quitting, he picked up the thread and concentrated with all his mind.

An hour or so passed.

Nothing.

Without a clue what to do next, he ripped a small tear into the Void and, thinking it better to be rid of the thread permanently—this whole thing, maybe it was a test of his will—, reached his hand into the emptiness as if to throw the thread away, like he had done with countless, useless materials. It was in this moment all thought escaped him. He fell into a catatonic state, his body suspended, as it was, his arm in the air with its hand no longer visible. The world around him melted away. He saw nothing.

Until his mind passed through his arm and into a different time and space.

[Ekoth Ilzaeum]

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“Bazem!” screamed a shrill voice through the maze of a small yet intricate cavern.

“Bazem!” It was the voice of a woman gone mad, horribly mad. “My child, where are you!”

The small child, whose face held nothing but absolute terror, had his back pressed as hard as he could against the deepest wall of the cave. He could hear the woman’s cries navigate through the winding tunnels. He knew who yelled for him, but the voice had changed. It held cries of death. Of murder.

“My beloved child!” came the cracked, high-pitched voice again. “Return to mother, my child! I love you so much. I am not going to harm you. I love you, Bazem!”

Tears fell freely from the child’s grey eyes. With each word he heard, the less he recognized this woman, his so-called mother. He turned his cheek against the wall, where on it was the dark red outline of a pentagram that had somehow indented itself into the stone. Bazem clenched his eyes shut once he saw the design, but the tears still managed to slip through.

Please, please do not find me, he thought to himself. Please, go away. Please.

“I’m sorry, Bazem! I only did it for you, for us.” The echoes were getting shorter. She was getting closer. “I love nothing more than you, my sweet child. Mother loves you dearly.”

But the child did not listen to her. He kept praying she would make a wrong turn and continue to wander in circles, in her blood-drunken state, until she left. Until she was gone from his life forever.

But his hopes had failed. Mother was here.

“Bazem!” she screamed in insane triumph, clapping her hands together proudly. The faint light in the cavern revealed a maniacal smile on her bloodied face. “There you are! Come to mommy.”

The child shook his head, his eyes kept closed.

“What is wrong, dearest? I am here because I love you. I have saved us. Everything I did, I did for you.”

He stood completely still, like his mother was a bear preying upon him.

“We must go, now, or else others may find us.”

He did not move.

“Bazem! Now!” Anger began to slowly rise in her voice.

He did not move.

“I will not have this,” she said sternly and less absurdly. “I am your mother and you will obey me.”

He did not move.

“I love you,” she said, this time with no anger, and with a seemingly genuine sweetness.

But when he did not move, she knew she had lost him forever. He no longer trusted her. She was no longer his mother. He was no longer her son. She had failed.

It was over. She scowled at the child and drew an obsidian dagger, still dripping with hot blood. She charged at him, dagger first. Bazem continued to stand still, but when she was close, his eyes opened in dread. They quivered and began to bleed. It was in this moment, nearly half a second before the crazed woman would have landed her weapon in the child’s neck, an ethereal white hand reached out from the old pentagram and grabbed the child, disappearing with him back into the wall.

[Ekoth Ilzaeum]

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All around the child was never-ending emptiness. No color. No light. No darkness. No air. No sound. Utter nothingness. He seemed to float in the center of a great vacuum. His body was lucid and almost unreal, yet at the same time definite. He did not know where he was, but he did not need to know. He was exactly where he needed to be.

After what may have been seconds, days, or years—time could not be measured here—a voice reverberated through the empty space. The words were powerful and foreboding. They evoked an atmosphere of something long gone. They were of some eldritch language, but the child had no trouble understanding them. The voice spoke to him:

“Bazem. Thy mother has failed; she has lost her ways. Thou must know thy time is not yet to end, not for many years. I shall bless thee with anonymity and ye shall take the throne of Eidol. I shall speak to thee again once thou hast reigned a hundred years.”

With that, the voice died out, and shadows engulfed the child as he fell out of consciousness. Out of memory.

[Ekoth Ilzaeum]

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The child awoke in a bed of a luxurious house. He was still young, but his body had greatly changed. He was much less skinny, as he appeared well fed and healthy. His eyes were green and his skin was fair, yet his hair was still a deep brown.

As his eyes came into focus, he saw a man and a woman, both attractive and wealthy-looking, hovering over him and smiling. He did not recognize them. In his state of amnesia, the two adults explained to the child they had found him abandoned and on the verge of death in an alleyway deep within the city of Eidol. They could not bear this sight, and they did not hesitate to find the boy’s parents. After a few months without success, they adopted him. Rothton and Osina were their names, and, since the boy had forgotten his name, Rothton named him Relos, after his father.

This child, called Relos, still confused, appeared almost delusional and not fully conscious. Something else was troubling him. He spoke in a soft, humble voice. “Where’s… Bazem? Where’s his… mother?”

Both of the adults glowered.

“She’s locked behind bars for good, where she belongs, so she may suffer for what she did,” said Osina. “And the corrupt child,” she paused briefly. She spoke with a mix of distaste and relief. “The bastard child is dead.”

[Ekoth Ilzaeum]

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The two adult figures had faded away, and the walls began to close in around the child. Quickly the sandstone turned into dark stone, and the floor became matching stone pavers. The child was now a man sitting on a wooden chair. He was adorned in white robes, and his face was still obscure in the blackness of this small chantry. His arm fell to his side as soon as his hand reappeared, and a dull grey thread, which was so recently shimmering white, fell listlessly to the ground. Reality had returned.

“Bazem…” he whispered. He leaned forward and rested his elbow on his knee, and his chin on his hand. A week’s worth of delicate musing was to begin, to further explore this fragment of a memory. But whose memory? Could it possibly be his?

His face had fallen into the dim light, revealing the rest of him. A mask wrapped itself around his face. It was ashen white, with thin and thick streaks of light-grey and black found in remote places upon the face; somehow, the highlights were apparently painted (if that is how they came to be) with absolute precision and enigmatic purpose. Tiny letters of another language were scattered amongst its surface; some of the runes radiated, dispersing and relocating themselves at times somewhere else on the mask. Two holes were cut to permit eyesight, yet each one appeared as a black void, as if the holes led to the endless wastes of space. Where the mouth would be was also a dark pit, leading deep into some unnamed vortex where speech was conjured; the hole stretched down to the very bottom of the mask, separating to meet with the collar of his robe.

Another unmistakable trait of the façade were the diminutive pinnacles and columns spread amongst the mask, further embellishing this enigma. The mask wrapped itself entirely around his head. What might be the most peculiar element of all was how well it blended in, molding to virtual perfection, as though it were an actual part of the man’s head. The complete mask was a puzzle—a riddle, one best left unsolved.

But this memory—if that’s what it truly was—might have dared to start a path to the solution, to revealing who this man was before he came to Sosaria.

For Oblivion’s sake, he thought to himself, let me not regret this.