Hierophant Lazarius

Hierophant Lazarius, Keeper of the Great Dragon Shrine of the city of Twinrift, was among the greatest luminaries of the Dragonkin Empire. But, driven by his liege lord the Emperor Undrakar, he became one of the architects of its downfall. His home of Twinrift, second center of power after the imperial capital of Allreach, was named for the Rift Below — a massive oceanic trench just offshore – and the Rift Above, a gleaming pinpoint of light hovering above the summit of the hill that overlooked Twinrift’s bay and anchorage. It was a tiny hole in reality, beaming out the raw potentiality of existence itself, the shining medium through which Lumaya and Siroth Danced all Teleria into being. In awe of the Rift Above, the Dragonkin built the Great Dragon Shrine beneath it, and in their endless curiosity and ambition, they built a device called the Vortex to study and control it. Its use was as much an art as a science, and Lazarius’ skill allowed him — to an extent — to channel, reflect, and shape the emanations of the Rift, approaching, if only stumblingly, a power known only to the gods. He was quietly furious when the Emperor dragged him away from his work to pursue a different goal. Emperor Undrakar wanted to duplicate the dimensional breach of the Rift Above, at a grander scale, to make a gateway through which to send conquering legions. Claiming that, for state secrecy, even Lazarius could not know the full details of his plans, the Emperor begged Lazarius’ trust and asked for his expertise. Lazarius was doubtful, but he was a devoted Imperial citizen and servant, and so he quashed his misgivings and designed a huge structure of metal, stone, and crystal to serve as the mystic scaffolding of a huge spatial warp. In the valley of Stormwind it stood tall, broad, and elegant. When he was satisfied with the construction, Lazarius returned to Twinrift, leaving the Emperor’s favored son Ramantu to attune the portal’s destination in compliance with his father’s secret wishes. As Lazarius proudly watched the inauguration of the portal in a burnished bronze scrying mirror, his satisfaction turned to terror when fiery gouts billowed from the opened doorway, and through it he saw a parched and blasted hellscape. Lazarius realized that all along Undrakar’s secret plan had been to breach into Anathraad. It was blasphemous folly – a stain on Teleria’s history that became known to future generations as the Sin of Dragons. The Dragonkin army that marched through the portal was crushed. Siroth’s minions seized control of the portal, and launched an invasion of Teleria. The horror that unfolded was beyond reckoning, all the more so for guilt-wracked Lazarius. He worked feverishly with the Vortex, hoping the Rift Above might provide salvation. Within days, Allreach fell and the Imperial Fleet was obliterated, and Undrakar was forced to flee to Twinrift and the Great Dragon Shrine. Lazarius held his colossal rage and resentment in check, and counseled the disgraced Emperor. As Demonspawn swarmed the streets of Twinrift, Lazarius wearily told the Emperor that his search had yielded only one remote, perilous possibility. Using the Vortex, along with the will and imagination of the mortal mind, they could fashion a war-beast from the stuff of eternity to defeat the Demonspawn and destroy the portal – now called the Brimstone Gate. But no mortal mind is constructed to wield the god-like power of creation, and it would exact a great toll. Only a mighty and steadfast ego could emerge unscathed, he warned. Lazarius had not understood Undrakar’s true designs, but he knew his liege’s temperament. Undrakar would take any chance offered to him, his pride and paranoia permitting no other to be the conjurer of the Dragonkin’s revenge. And so Lazarius enticed his sinful Emperor to a grisly end: Undrakar was consumed with rage and madness as the Rift’s power surged through him, and from it sprang a many-headed Hydra so vast and terrible as to shake the world. Undrakar perished a broken husk, but not before witnessing what he had made, and gasping out a last cryptic command to Lazarius – or perhaps the Hydra — to end it all. Lazarius beheld the Hydra, and the Demonspawn swarming the last bastion of his people’s greatness, with himself caught between. He realized there was one thing – one act of penance he could pay on behalf of his whole species — that could at one stroke stop both these threats from rampaging throughout the wider world. He collapsed the Rift Above, triggering a massive blast that obliterated Twinrift. Like the maw of a beast greater even than the Hydra, the sea and the Rift Below consumed all traces of Undrakar, the Hydra, and the last remaining bastion of Dragonkin power. But not Lazarius. His initiating surge of magical energy, and his proximity to the epicenter, resulted in a different fate. The shining force of creation momentarily inverted itself as the Rift imploded, and Lazarius was de—created: every ontological particle of his being, across all mental, physical, and spiritual axes, was voided of validity, its animating light withdrawn, his self unbuilt. He became a noumenon, the ghost of an idea, a ripple or pattern in the glow of uncreation existing only as memory and conception. Yet somehow, in the faintest possible way, he still did exist. Years and centuries passed as Lazarius’ deeds reverberated through history. And then, as casually as a morning’s rising from easy slumber, Lazarius became extant again, his reality collapsing into being from the realms of the unreal. And where else did he find himself, but in the presence of the Arbiter — for who but she could call back the echo of the great sage, and remember his genius? If the Sin of Dragons is unpardonable, who but the Arbiter could give Lazarius anything close to redemption for his errantry?