The Living Shadow

The Discovery

To be honest, they were born curious, so I suppose nothing could have saved the kid from becoming an adventurer. They had, of course, other brief phases: a wizard searching for magical truths and a scholar, but those didn't quite scratch their skin like they should've. Let's just call them two identity's crisis among many more our kid would've gone through. There was this hidden path once, they'd found in the depths of Mutjar Forest and decided to follow. Laneth was nine and the grass was all covered by a thick layer of snow. T'was odd, though, how the only bit of lea that wasn't a white shiny carpet was exactly that path. I obviously wasn't the only one who noticed this, Lan did too and curiosity showed up once more. It was an easily accessible track but seemed pretty much untouched and they started questioning why. Things got weirder and weirder as we continued: the trees grew incredibly massive and by the end of the path one could count two dwarfs with full armour as their width; not to mention the greenest grass and the healthiest flowers we've ever seen, during midwinter! We reached the end of it and these huge ruins appeared ahead of us, a kind you've never seen for about a thousand years. Yet they, also, were untouched, absolutely untouched by time nor dirt though green creepers covered some parts of 'em. Laneth took a look at all the ruins and glanced at the surroundings just to come up with a hypothesis: everything but the ruins was good as new and from a very old time, so there must have been cast some sort of spell to preserve all of this. It doesn't only make sense, it seems logical as well, if it wasn't for the ruins, well, being ruins and not magnificent castles or such. Why were those decadent? That was still a question to answer. Exploring, they found among the various trinkets some crucial items too. Items which, funnily, answered all of their questions: a prismatic piece of the most transparent glass along with a bunch of books written in an unknown tiefling-like language. They were filled with maps and what could've been accurate representations of ancient buildings and the biggest had a spell in symbols in the very first page. The kid took the glass and looked at the pages through it. He was able to read just by that. Every book covered different areas of what this remote civility consisted of. The big one was a history book, telling specifically the events of the Whale war. To sum up, the ruins are such because they were meant to deceive the barbarians so they wouldn't attack, dropping special explosives called whales on the tieflings settlements like this one. The tieflings didn't know much about those bombs yet to create a counteroffensive, at best they could hide for now. They would build perfect ruins and use the spell to make them eternal because in that way they wouldn't really decay, possibly causing damage, and obviously last more, outlasting the war. On some maps were marked every other settlement. There was also another curious thing mentioned in a smaller book: other spells were cast, among them two which seem to concern us. The paths for all different ruins are accessible only by descendants of these people, which makes Lan one. They had even schemed a saving plan, something remarkable in case the conflict took a dark page: all of these people had a living shadow which could be freed and spread darkness. And all of their descendants too, apparently, because you see, that happens to be me. I'm Laneth's living shadow though they don't know I'm here, consciously of course. Luckily for me, that's about to change since my curious kid will soon visit every ruin and detect the truth about me. Without doubt, they'll free me. And they'll come across the third identity crisis: what kind of adventurer do they want to be? Because, how will they use me? To do good? Bad? Neither, both? I'm about to find out.