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Act Zero: The Girl Without a Name
🕑 Added 2024-11-26 07:36:40 +0000 UTCOnce upon a time, there was a stupid girl who tried to be clever. It cost her everything.
Veseryn was born to a world of countless secrets and terrible powers, and she was born to nothing. No gift of sorcery, no bloodline of eld to grant her unique abilities. Others could wield power, a world of wizards and warlocks and blessed of sky and sea, but the world gave her nothing. No gods heard her prayers, and no manner of magic responded to her studies.
Given nothing, Veseryn learned to take.
There is power in taking, but it is the power of a thief. Flame and wind, secrets of blood and bone, all these could be usurped but they could never flow from her own hands, her own will. Always stolen, always spent. She amassed a great collection of trinkets and tokens, a wealth equal to any wizard’s hoard, but still she was merely mortal. A frail, passing thing. A mortal woman, doomed to die.
So it was only natural that Veseryn would seek to become a lich. As a deathless queen, she would slay both of her foes—powerlessness and frailty—with the same masterful stroke. But the arts of ascension are not something so easily reproduced. She was no necromancer to slave death to her will, no wizard to master the mysteries of higher arcana, no warlock to wrest immortality from the lords of the burning hells. She was, and could only be, a mortal thief.
But she was clever, little Veseryn, and she was persistent. She sought the trails of ancient relics long passed from memory, bargained with fae and fiends for their secrets, and spent her collection like never before in search of the answer to her life’s wretched riddle: how can a thief become a god?
The answer, she believed, was to steal ascension from one who had earned it.
Veseryn set her sights on treasures both common and esoteric alike, crossing every line she’d ever drawn in their pursuit. Always a thief, now a murderer and blackguard, she claimed her prizes one after the other: blood of vampire and scale of dragon, crown of fae and horn of devil; these and many more, a piece of every sphere with a claim at true magic. And still, none of these would be enough without the jewel of her scheme: a phylactery, forged by another yet bereft of master.
This last step would be the hardest, she knew. The very nature of a phylactery runs against the notion of one existing unbroken or unmastered, but in her scheming and her seeking she had learned of an exception: a lich who had been destroyed, soul and all, without their phylactery ever having been found.
Veseryn scoured old records, hunting the artifact’s trail, desperate to get her hands on the key to all her woes. She found it, at long last, but the news was unpleasant: an ancient goddess, an elder evil beyond anything Veseryn had ever bargained with before, had meddled in the affair from start to finish. The entity had known many names, her research suggested, but it had extended its influence to that conflict in the role of Crawling Chaos, and so that was the name that Veseryn summoned it by.
Ripping power from lesser treasures, Veseryn called forth the Crawling Chaos and laid out gifts of food, wine, and knowledge to appease its hunger and tempt it toward a deal. The goddess ate nothing, drank nothing, and looked not for a moment at the texts on offer, but it was still more than happy to make a deal. It had been waiting, it confessed, for quite some time.
The goddess gave favorable terms to its petitioner, terms almost too good to trust: for the empty phylactery still in its possession, all the goddess requested was for Veseryn to prove herself worthy. The old monster would arrange for opponents and challenges, but claimed they could be surmounted by someone as clever as Veseryn thought herself. For one year, Veseryn would struggle against terrible foes and fearsome trials, and the end of that year would see her efforts held to account: if she rose to the occasion and triumphed, the Crawling Chaos would not only release any pretense of debt, it would empower Veseryn even further. But, if Veseryn failed… then the goddess would pluck her soul from the pattern just as it had done to the lich before Veseryn.
It was a dangerous gamble. Too dangerous, for most. But Veseryn thought she was clever, and that she knew more than the old monster about her capabilities, and so they haggled over terms and means and in the end she accepted, signing their pact with her name. And it was then that Veseryn was completely and utterly ruined.
Veseryn had been born to another name, and so when she took the name of her adult years she thought it sufficient protection from the arts of subversion that relied on a name unsealed. But there is a truth to names that she was never taught: they are only what is made of them. And since the day she had named herself Veseryn, she had never known another. Her birth name, reviled and discarded, was not her name at all, and so Veseryn was her first and only and just as vulnerable.
The old monster gave Veseryn the prize that had been bargained for, the silver ring that could contain her soul and grant her the powers she had dreamed of, and Veseryn received it with greed and joy. She could take it, she knew, and bind it to herself, and then it would be in the end a quite simple matter to perform the ritual that would make her immortal and a true mage after so many long years of mortal thievery.
But before Vesern could speak the words to banish the entity that she had summoned, covenant clutched in hand and seared soul-deep, the goddess spoke first. It spoke her name, written and spoken so carelessly, and it said:
“Veseryn, know this and let only ruin follow: you are not as clever as you think you are.”
The curse, for it could be nothing else, sunk deep into the very essence of her being, burrowing amongst thoughts and feelings, hollowing out her heart to make a nest. And though she banished the goddess swiftly and stumbled home, the words followed her. She wrestled with them, trying to lay them to rest, but they were echoed by a thousand lesser curses she had allowed to fester inside her. Hatred and loathing and fear warred with her mind for control of her body, and it took her three sleepless nights to master herself.
Veseryn knew that she was not in a condition to perform the rites of ascension, though she hungered inescapably for all that had been promised and knew that her time was running out; in haggling with the goddess she had bargained for a certain grace period, but if she did not complete the rites by the turn of the moon then she would be facing a lich’s foes without a lich’s weapons. She labored for two weeks to contain the curse, burning yet more of her stolen fortune to acquire potions and artifacts that might settle the mind and steel her resolve. The ritual grounds were prepared with every countermeasure she could think of, a level of security approaching paranoia, and at last she could feel the venomous whispers falling silent.
Fearful that further delay would court greater calamity, Veseryn began the ritual at once. She burned a lifetime of pilfered artifacts and magical components, the envy of any archmage, and sacrificed the vastness of her collection to empower the silver ring that would become her phylactery. She would not content herself with a few morsels of power, not allow herself to become bound to any one school of magic; Veseryn had been given nothing, and so now she would take everything. It was her due. It was her right. It was her reward.
The ring took the power, as she had known it would, and then all that remained was the binding of her soul. This was the most delicate part of the ritual, the most important, and the fine control required here was why Veseryn had strived so hard to master the curse and keep it from interfering. And as her soul was drawn out of her and made contact with the ring, Veseryn smiled and scorned the words of the goddess as lies: she had bested its curse, she had done what none other could, and in this her brilliance could not be contested.
And in that moment of burning pride, in the moment that she considered herself clever, the curse flared and screamed its words past all her protections, vibrating through the soul she had made vulnerable: you are not as clever as you think you are. Her control slipped, her soul shattered, and the ritual collapsed.
The power she had gathered, the toil of years, was ripped away from her and cascaded through her sanctum. The unleashed magic destroyed her wards, her remaining artifacts, and brought down the very walls of the place she had called home. The work of a lifetime was gone in an instant.
Veseryn choked on ash, shivering in the ruin of everything she had ever built. The ring, that precious trinket she had bartered everything to hold, had not been spared calamity; where it had lain in the very center of the array, now molten silver sank into the ground. And so her last hope was snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane, and Veseryn knew bone-deep that she had a year at most to live.
On the eve of her greatest failure, Veseryn wanted to die. The jeering voices in her head, strengthened by the old monster’s curse, tried to take her life twice that night, and their assault only ended when she cloistered herself in a corner and drank a sleeping draught. She slept for a full day, or near enough, and she dreamed of death and chaos.
When she woke, her fear had taken a new form: she had to get out of her bargain, or she was going to die.
With only a few days remaining in her grace period, Veseryn cobbled together new ritual arrays from the tattered remnants of her hoard and summoned up every devil and fae she believed herself still capable of restraining. She asked them, all of them, if there was any way to annul her contract with the Crawling Chaos and undo their deal. She believed, or at least she hoped, that in casting its curse the goddess had betrayed the arrangement in some significant enough manner that it could be turned into an argument for dissolving the contract or at least weakening it. Failing that, there had to be a loophole to exploit, something that creatures of twisted law could use to save her.
There was nothing. The Crawling Chaos was beyond them in every way that mattered. Veseryn had vastly underestimated exactly what she was dealing with when she called up the ancient horror, and now she was paying the price. Nothing in the world could make that goddess do a thing it didn’t want to. Steal the written copy and burn it, find a loophole and present it, call for demon lords and choirs of angels, none of it would mean a thing; the goddess had claimed her, and its terms were clear: win or die.
Her grace period was up, and the first enemy found her that evening. Veseryn escaped by the skin of teeth, started running, and didn’t look back.
She needed to survive a year of deadly trials, but the power that would have let her even attempt that gauntlet was dust in the wind, and what was left? Her collection was burned, her nature still that of a powerless mortal, and her very soul had been fractured and cut to pieces by the failure of the ritual. She had no allies to shelter her, as a lifetime of thievery had made her few friends and many, many enemies. She was alone, and she was going to die alone.
Stealing, Veseryn knew, was not going to be enough to save her life. Not against the caliber of foe soon to seek her head, the kinds of monsters and champions that a lich could expect to struggle against. She was desperate.
But not, she realized, without means to bargain. The very failure that had cost her everything had also given her one last gift to barter away: her soul, cut to ribbons, was now something she could portion. It had pained her, the damage to her very essence, but she took strength in that pain. She would not give up, not yet.
Veseryn cut at her soul, hacking away at every loose piece and breaking off shards of herself. It was butcher’s work, gruesome and agonizing, but it was necessary. Every moment she could spare between running from pursuers she spent mutilating her own essence to scrounge a few bargaining chips from the most ruinous night of her life.
Her soul was owed to the goddess, true, but only if she failed. Only if she lost. An ugly wager to make, a cruel trick to play on the entities she went to bargain with, but were those entities not masters of ugly cruelty? She felt no guilt and bore no shame for selling her soul to rival buyers.
With each shard of herself she ripped away and sold, her chances of survival went up. Morsels of power, nowhere near what she had desired but perhaps enough to stave off the enemies coming to kill her. Still she ran, from town to town and from bargain to bargain, terrified of what followed.
Veseryn won her first victory by blind luck, picking an engagement on grounds hallowed against her pursuer. Her second victory came from caution and preparation, a trap laid over three days and three nights. Those were the easy challenges.
Old enemies crawled out of the woodwork, stirred to hunger by the hand of the goddess. Wizards and dragons and vampires, every sorcerer she’d ever stolen from and all their allies and minions. She ran, she bargained, she took, but always it came to violence. She won more than she lost, but even victory had its scars and she was already such a broken thing.
She only had so much soul to sell, and half the year was still left. And no matter her arsenal of tricks and trinkets, no matters the contracts she called upon, in the end she faced one undeniable fact: without power of her own, she could not grow. Her challengers were more vicious and more dangerous with every passing week, but all she gained from victory was what she could steal. Where a real mage might be pushed to revelation and become something more, Veseryn could only scrounge and barter. What she gained was always less than what she had faced, and that gap widened and widened as the year stretched on.
In the eighth month of her trial, she began to lose more than she won. Still alive, still a survivor, but losing more and more whether she fought or ran. In the tenth month, she didn’t win a single fight. In the eleventh, she was broken and crippled by a foe that spared her out of mockery. She had no more shards of herself to sell, and too little left to mutilate.
On the first day of the final month, Veseryn died beneath a setting sun.
In her last moments, as she lay bleeding and felt all her dreams slip from her grasp, a shadow swallowed the sun and came to tower over her. The Crawling Chaos looked upon the girl who had been given nothing and tried so desperately to be clever, and she told Veseryn a simple truth: “My child, my dearest, you will die alone and your name will be forgotten.”
The old monster told her, then, something that cut deeper: that it was the goddess who had kept Veseryn from ever holding magic, had cursed even before their fateful meeting. Her whole life, Veseryn had been cursed with torment. And Veseryn, broken and bleeding, ruined and ravaged, asked the goddess why she had done this, why she had given pain and suffering from birth to death. Why had she been chosen, seemingly on a whim, to spend her life ever tormented by what she could not have?
And the Crawling Chaos answered, “Because I still haven’t found the answer that I’m looking for, so I need to keep hurting you. All of this must happen again, and again, until I finally have it.”
But the struggle of Veseryn was not the answer that the Crawling Chaos had been looking for, and this world had run its course as so many worlds before it. So the world burned, burned to ash and quiet cinders, and from the ash the Crawling Chaos fashioned something new, and a new face to go with it. As she had before, and would again. Again, and again, and again.
