The Free Era

Twenty years have passed.

The Ark has a king: Gyllyn Leblanc, whose Divine Armor keeps him twenty-five forever. He married Mathilde Leblanc, Cosimo's daughter, and their three children are Archon-Marie, Joséphine, and Christophe. He has learned no new spell since his victory. Three centuries of dependence on a god left a people who must relearn how to live through their own weak, personal magic, and rebuilding consumes all his time.

Cerberus also has a king: Aldor the Infernal, who finds the world interrupts him too often. In one year he repelled three demon invasions, destroyed a Githyanki colony, and dissolved seven dimensional gates. He has a minister of magic, Jean Morin; a wife, Ivana; two children; and a permanent tax dispute with his former master Perennus.

Cerberus was a republic for forty years and now calls a man king. The pactstone is still there and still works; it has nothing left to hold. It was never enforced by power. It held because three consuls chose to honour a contract written by a young man they had all known, whose own house sat on the council. The men who came back from the Ark had merged with a god, and no contract binds that. Nobody has tried to write one.

Frolix, the Grand Psychic, proudly rules nothing. He lives blindfolded and levitating on the Crassus Peninsula, sensing dwarven excavation through the ley lines.

Merenin is the first king to unite the dwarven realms, and his mines now open onto the Ark itself. Einar still rules Brazzant. The four thrones and the Grand Psychic have maintained an alliance since the war and are beginning to argue over who does the work.

The Monks of Kaz'Nakaram

After Sobiesansky's defeat, Valin, head of the merchant caste and servant of King Merenin, arranged the theft of his laboratory before Frolix could recover its contents. He gave the Psychic research to Portin, a dwarf of Numbers. Portin protested that the work violated his caste, but Valin threatened and manipulated him until he began.

Dwarven special forces returned to the Underdark for pieces of Jerax, killed there by Aldor, and Sobiesansky, killed by Gyllyn. Within months, Portin built the first Psychic implants.

The Granitefist clan, monks of Kaz'Nakaram, became the first subjects. Their mental calm let them survive the implants and fuse their intelligence with blue mana. Each implant holds a trace of Valerium whose power slowly becomes blue mana.

These implanted dwarves form a special class available only to dwarven characters in the Free Era. They call each spell slot a Ki point; the two are mechanically identical.

Victory carried an unforeseen price. Archon's planar seal was powered by the Partage. Killing the god opened the world. Creatures seep in from other dimensions, renegade wizards open portals to summon worse things, and the only man powerful enough to put out every fire is tired of being called like a gardener.

The proposed solution is the Soul Odyssey. Jean Morin spent fifteen years mastering the spell Archon designed to create Polymarch. It can send a soul into the past—not to observe, but to exist there, written into the memory of mana particles. The destination is the Ark three centuries ago, ten years before the Partage, during the Golden Age when Archon was still a hermit recruiting his first disciples. The objective is to enter his archives and retrieve the spell that sealed the world.

One constraint is absolute: the past rejects a powerful soul. Aldor, Gyllyn, and Frolix cannot go. Unknown, weak, young people must enter the viper's nest of the dying Republic. If one dies there, nothing guarantees that the soul returns.