Archon's Fall

Four Cerberus Academy apprentices trained by Perennus accomplished what three centuries of wizards had not: Aldor, Gyllyn, Frolix, and Vidock, who by then had no body of his own and travelled as the second mind inside Frolix. They began at first level and climbed to the height of their art. They brought war to the Ark. They won.

They were five in the classroom. Glandir was called away to Eden in the second year and left the Academy for good; he was not with them on the Ark.

The war was long and costly for everyone. Dwarven war machines pounded the Sylla Peninsula into smoking ruins; before that, Censor Sylla had erased entire dwarven clans from the Ark's plains. Senator Florentus Telus remained neutral, and his island was spared. He makes no secret of it: he backed the winning horse.

Archon never came out. The whole war ran its length without him, and when the Ark surrendered the apprentices walked into the Central Ark and found the god in his study, suspended and motionless. What held him was his own Soul Odyssey. Aldor shut it down.

Archon had been living a second life as Polymarch, and Polymarch had died on the Sylla Peninsula the year before. That second self was owed a year before it came home; breaking the spell brought it home at once. Polymarch's life and memories returned to Archon, and he stood up stronger than he had ever been.

Then he explained himself. He was looking for Manatar, who made humanity on this world and left it. The Partage was how he meant to gather power enough to find him again. He offered nothing else for three centuries of it. He could have killed the foreign armies standing on his territory and he teleported them off it instead.

Both sides went after Manatar. Cerberus won the race on a divination by Gyllyn and Cosimo Leblanc and found him on Brazzant. Manatar merged with Gyllyn, Frolix and Aldor, and considered them his successors.

They returned to the Ark and challenged him. It was a hard fight against the last and greatest wizard alive, and they won it. Aldor disintegrated the body so completely that not a molecule remained.

The Partage fell with him. Mana returned to every person's veins.

Whether he had to die is not a settled question. He kept his word about the armies, and the people who killed him spent the next twenty years trying to steal his knowledge of the planar seal out of the past.