Repentance

Part 1

At the battle of the Spirit Vale and Salvation's Pass, in the Spirit Vale - at one place and another the Pact and her armies triumphed, and drew the noose tight around the Forsaken Thicket. The White Mantle lost their biggest strongholds within the Thicket. The Bastion of the Penitent was all that remained in Maguuma for them.

So it was that in the Bastion, even through its walls were bound with old powerful magics, home and heart of the White Mantle, still there was a sense that things were at their ending, that the Pact would throw down the house of their elders and magics, and that the White Mantle would pass from Tyria forever.

The Confessor Arjun Zittel dressed himself all in alabaster white, and blood red, and with his wife, Justicar Leah, spent the long days of the Pact's siege which quickly became months. Not even the Pact's own firepower could not throw down the work of the White Mantle overnight; listening to pensive music and the poetry of the White Mantle's brighter days in Tyria. From the outside, in the camps the beleaguering Pact forces waited. The Bastion still seemed a place of great power, wrapped tight in the glamour of sorceries and bloodstone... but inside the gleaming husk the heart was of the Mantle rotting away.

There was one among the White Mantle, who wished it otherwise and was not content to spend his last days grieving over lost potential and desecrated halls. He was the Confessor's son and his name was Antaeus.

Antaeus' brother Aniello was horribly wounded amidst the initial battle, burned by one of the Pact's artillery fires. There was no cure for his injuries or their unending pain in all of Tyria, but neither did he die. At last the Confessor had him put on a wagon with his most trusted servant and they passed through a secret tunnels of the keep in hopes of making it through the jungle's thick brush.

Then Antaeus, despite the great deed of slaying Pact Captain Caecilius Headsmoke became his father's heir under the shadow of Aniello's fall. Blaming himself, perhaps he spent long days in the pursuit of knowledge that likely should have been abominished to man. At first he may have thought that he could make his brother well, bring him back from his sustained injuries... but as with all such pursuits, soon the probing became its own reason and compensation, and Antaeus became more and more a stranger to his people, a searcher in occult places.