Entry 2: The Foreshadowed Coming

-Rai-

I'll begin my writings with a short account from Rai - a Gruul tribesman I knew very well, long ago.

When I mention that Rai was a "Gruul", you may be thinking of the black skinned barbarians squatting in caves and hunting wild beasts with spears. They're certainly like that nowadays… However, the Gruul before the Magic Sundering Era were quite different – Rai being the prime example.

Instead of being clothed in beast skins, Rai was adorned in colorful cotton with complex designs. Just his work clothes alone were more fine than the rich folk I've seen your people in Alaraan wear.

On the day it all began, Rai would have been walking towards the Crystal Forge, where he worked every day. On the way, he would have seen many fields in the outskirts of his small village, full of tall, healthy grass with big fat cattle that his village used for meat

Thankfully, there were two other shamans in the village – one of which spend all day using alchemy to create water, and the other would use enchantments to accelerate the growth of the cattle, allowing them to have several generations of meat in 1 year. Everyone had enough to eat, despite living on a small plot of land in the middle of a desert.

Rai himself was a shaman, but his duties were a little different. Every morning, he would get up early, eat the meals that the villagers prepared for him, wear the clothes the servants had set for him, then head off to the Crystal Forge located in the center of town.

I've actually visited that remote little village and inspected his Crystal Forge. Of course, by the time I got around to visiting several years later, everybody had already been killed off. The forge itself was a giant, underground furnace. The furnace was very long and narrow, with a small slot where Rai would slip in a long, iron rod.

Now Rik, I really want you to understand the kind of world this place used to be, and the Crystal Forging process itself fascinates me. However, it kind of gets in the way of what I want to tell you, so I'll make a footnote for you and let you read if for yourself another time.

In short, Shaman Rai's job was to use the techniques taught by his tribe to extract energy from the heat in the furnace and the rod, then transform it into Essence – the resource that every shaman needs to cultivate their own powers and grow in strength. It's a very precious job – very lucrative too. It was easily enough to let him and his pregnant wife, Pam, live in luxury.

It was thoughts of Pam that kept Shaman Rai coming back to the Crystal Forge every day, really.

Despite being dangerous and unpleasant work, thinking of his wife growing old and chubby with him made him happy. Even more so, it felt good to realize they could have as many children as they wanted and still provide them anything that money can buy. It's a satisfaction that only shamans get to enjoy, really. They always have the best jobs.

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One day, as Shaman Rai was working at the Crystal Forge, bare shirted and sweaty from the heat, he started to feel dizzy on the job. No doubt he was feeling confused, since Shamans very rarely get sick. They can even go weeks or sometimes months without food or water. Why would he suddenly feel so weak?

He definitely didn't have time to think on this too long before he collapsed – unconscious.

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When Rai's mind gathered itself again, he knew exactly where he was. The common folk call it the "Realm of Dreams", though the title is a bit misleading – as every shaman knows.

It's true that the mind comes here while you dream, though only those with powerful magic are fully conscious in this place. The normal, magicless folk like you only have fuzzy memories of the place, so they have a lot of wrong ideas about it. Shamans, though, have powerful minds and are fully aware of what they're doing.

Upon arriving in the Dream Realm, Shaman Rai was suspended in the air with a vast desert beneath him. The fact that he was hovering thousands of feet up in the air wasn't strange at all in the dream realm, since Physics doesn't work normally here. Everything in this realm is at least partially shaped by thought, so the fact that the land was a desert was normal. Shaman Rai himself lived in a desert, so it's natural that, when imaging the Dream Realm, it would be a desert.

Rai was feeling confused and scared. "Why was I suddenly brought into the Dream Realm? Did something go wrong?" He was only 120 years old, and there were still plenty of things he didn't know yet! "What about my teacher? Maybe she might know something?"

Just when Rai thought about his teacher, a balding old woman seemed to appear out of nowhere in front of him. "Master Kava!" Rai called out, "What's going on? You were called here as well?"

Shaman Kava was a neatly dressed woman with a scarf wrapped around the crown of her head, covering her balding scalp… and she was holding a plate of food. She must have been feeling hungry and was thinking about breakfast.

"I don't kn-" Before Kava could answer, she shot her hand and grabbed Rai's arm for stability. "DO YOU FEEL THAT?!" she hissed at Rai.

"Feel what? The wind?"

"No," Kava shook her head, "have you noticed that we're being pulled somewhere? Look at the ground! You should see it."

Indeed, the landscape below them was drifting by at an alarming rate. Where were they going? They didn't have too long to think about this, as they began to see other dots in the sky, all being pulled in the same direction. As they got closer together, Rai and Kava realized that other shamans too were in the Dream Realm. The more time went on, the closer everyone became.

Rai soon realized that hundreds, then thousands of shamans were coming into view. Everybody was being pulled towards some location in the center.

"Kava", Rai asked in fear, "Your magic is better than mine. Can you use one of your spells to see what's going on? It's too far away for me."

Kava's eyes flickered yellow for a moment, and she frowned. "Alar's here. He's going towards the center, where we're all being pulled."

Rai furrowed his eyebrows. "Alar? What's one of Amodia's gods doing here? Did they cause this?" This was a fair question, because the Amodians to the west weren't exactly friendly with the Gruul. Their gods coming to cause trouble wouldn't be very surprising.

His master shook her head, "I don't think so. He looks pretty confused as well; I think he's trying to figure it out. What's he doing…?" Kava's eyes widened, then grabbed onto Rai's sleeve to stabilize herself, "AH!" she gave a panicked scream.

Rai didn't even have to ask what shocked his master. A large black tear in space was rapidly growing larger in the center, and it was pulling everybody towards it. It grew so large that even Rai could see it now.

"RUN!" Kava screamed. "IT'S a hole to the Void! If we fall in, we'll never come out!"

Alas, no matter how hard they tried to image themselves far away from the ominous HOLE, it only seemed to be getting closer and closer.

Then, powerful shock waves flew out of the black HOLE, as if something were trying to escape it… and all at once, the entire Dream world exploded into madness.

The ground beneath them shook itself to pieces, and the air in the sky scattered – all of it only to come back together in confusing shapes, as if it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Mountains rose and fell like ripples in water; even the ground seemed to alternate between being up or down. The stars in the sky would randomly fade away, then flicker back up again in another place, and the sky would change colors so quickly that it made Rai sick just looking at it.

Worst of all, Shaman Rai's thoughts were thrown into chaos, and he screamed out in agony. According to the people I've spoken to, all the other shamans experienced similar bouts of madness and hysteria. In short intervals, the world would settle down into a new shape, as if the world itself was trying to hold itself in order, giving Rai a short reprieve from the insanity that was trying to beat this realm to pieces.

Every time the Dream world was broken down and rebuilt itself, there would be a little bit less of it left. Soon, there was more empty black space than there was actual landscape. Many of the shamans were too close to the pulsing hole to the Void, and they disappeared entirely. Other's simply went mad, and their minds shook apart – their mental forms simply tearing themselves in two and fading away. Rai and Kava were just lucky to be far away – and thus, avoid the brunt of the destruction near the Void Rift.

In the periodical moments of clarity, Rai looked at the ever growing ball of blackness in the center, and he saw shapes on the other side. It looked like a large black beast of some kind. Since the beast was too big, and the tear in space too small, he couldn't see what the beast really looked like. He only knew that it had slitted golden eyes that shone so brightly that it seemed to light up the Dream Realm in place of the sun that had disappeared along the way.

The golden eyed beast seemed to be fighting something – it was clear to see it writhing about in the Void, slashing its claws and biting with long, wicked looking teeth. Every time it struck a blow, the Dream realm would shudder, and another wave of madness and destruction would sweep out.

Just as frequently as the black beast struck, there was a flash of light – presumably from whatever the beast was fighting. When whatever it was struck back against the black beast, the world would restore itself, and everyone would regain their sanity for a moment.

This went on for several minutes, until the hole got large enough for some to see what it was the dark beast was fighting. Rai himself never got a look at it, as his mind was far too frayed to focus, but I've managed to find out what was there from other people I've spoken to. I've confirmed that it was a tall, grey skinned man with pointed ears so long that they stretched wider than his shoulders. He had long strands of pure white light leaking out of his back, and he had a very fierce expression. Next to the beast, he was looked like a tiny speck. From all the people I've talked to over the years, nobody could tell me what the pointy eared man was. Nothing like it seems to have ever existed on this world.

The grey skinned creature – er – man flickered into view one moment, threw something out of the black hole the next moment, then vanished. The moment he disappeared, the dark portal to the Void shut tight, and everything was still once more.

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The Dream Realm slowly knit itself back into order, and all the affected minds recovered, except for the ones that fell into the Void Rift and were destroyed entirely.

Rai shuddered and cried out in fear, "What was that, Master? Are we going to die?"

Kava paused a moment and replied thoughtfully, "The Portal to the Void has already shut. We should be fine for now. In case this danger comes again, we can only let the gods worry about it."

"Excuse me," one of the other shamans near them called out, "Did you see what the pointy eared creature threw out of the portal?" The man was wearing a green tunic with crisscrossed patterns – a shaman from the Palls tribe.

The reason he asked Master Kava in the first place was because she was quite famous for her spells that let her see far away places. Kava considered his question for a little bit and replied, "It was a glowing white crystal."

After the Palls shaman left, Rai whispered to Kava, "Why did you tell him?" Rai and Kava didn't have a very good relationship with the Palls tribe.

Kava shrugged, "There's no point trying to look for the thing and claim it for our tribe. Something that valuable and eye catching is a good way to get our tribe killed. We can't hold on to such a thing. Forget about it.

Rai agreed on that. Such a strange artifact is too dangerous. It's not worth getting mixed up in. Best to let the gods figure that one out.

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By the time Shaman Rai woke up, it was already dark – the entire day had already passed by. Rai's heart was still heavy in his chest, and his limbs would freeze up just thinking about what he saw. His mind was filled with some unsubstantial sense of doom.

All those dark thoughts suddenly jolted out of his mind when he looked to the side and saw his wife lay sleeping at the side of his bed with her hand on his. Next to his bed was a bowl of porridge, which had mostly cooled down. Looking at his wife, she was certainly exhausted taking care of him and worrying about him all day.

The things Rai had went through today had thoroughly shaken him, yet he suddenly felt calm – as if everything would be all right as long as he focused his thoughts on the warm hand clasped with his.

What he didn't know was that this was the first event recorded about the Magic Sundering Era – the beginning of the end.