Waiting for the dead of night, you watch silently as people, one by one, find their way back to their homes. Just after midnight, you decide to take action and pick one man at random. Prying open the gates to his mind, you are able to read much of it like a book, learning many useful things.
Chief of which is that the locals worship a deity called Zyr, Keeper of Knowledge and Enlightenment. Two of the presences you felt earlier are accounted for by the two clerics keeping the practices of Zyr alive in the local church. Prayer, meditation, and a mindset towards progress are all that are asked. A yearly religious event consisting of the carving, anointing in oil, and ritual burning of the symbol of Zyr takes place on the summer solstice, with a festival following the next day. You learn that this symbol is a radiant sun with a small skull set somewhere inside it, with the sun representing knowledge and enlightenment. The skull represents the dangers of ignorance and recklessness while its varying position embodies the prevalence of the latter traits in society.
Zyr is a relatively minor deity with only a few thousand followers, but it is said that these followers are responsible for the vast majority of societal and technological improvements in the known world and as a result of this, their church is quite wealthy indeed. Officially known as the Academy of Lore, they have brought scholarly investigation to what is known to the commoner as magic, many of the particulars of which are closely guarded secrets.
This village and the lands around it belong to the Kingdom of Ciradia, and the forests to the north and east are largely unexplored, home to untold, some say unimaginable, creatures, plants, and magical energies. The Academy is obviously quite interested in these allegations and possess what they claim is a research outpost within its outskirts some thirty miles away. Others might call it a citadel.
Attempting to reach into this man's mind, you are rebuffed by a wall of stone, and are able to do little more than whisper through its cracks. So you do, whispering of pain, destruction, and darkness. You paint a picture of nightmarish ruin, of flames licking at the fabric of time and space itself, but are entirely unsure how much is getting through.
Picking up another tidbit of information, you learn that a number of men were sent into the forest on the clerics' orders to bring back the best wood they could get their hands on for the ritual in addition to their normal task of gathering wood for other purposes.
It is now roughly 3:00 AM, July the Third.
Power: 4.0
Focus: 4.1 (Temporary due to your.... focus on the task at hand.) The more overall time and effort spent on the same thing, the more your focus will increase in relation to it, though it is not guaranteed to increase.
Experience: 0.2 Experience is rather self explanatory. You gain it by taking on challenging tasks and gaining power, and lose all of it upon your defeat.
Oh, also, last call for names. If there are no other votes, our name is Sirith, Bringer of Night. I'd say our name is LEGION, but I believe there was a certain intelligent lizard-thing with the same name around the time this began.
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Topic: You are an Ancient Entity of Evil Malevolence... Sithis. (Read 8967 times)