TRA: A God's Sorrow

Authors note

Hello everyone, before we get into the next chapter, I'd like to say that this was the most depressing moment for me in The Rebirth Algorithm timeline. I'm sure many of you reading this have already figured out what will happen and those who haven't, please skip over this and continue onto the story.

As Gralls player, I always knew he wanted death. He wanted to be able to be with his wife in the spirit realm, but something always prevented him from doing so. (I'm talking about the Shadow World of course.) I used this to explain why every time he had tried to die, every time he recieved fatal wounds, how he was connected to his tribe, how he was originally the chief of his tribe.... but now, something I neglected to explain in earlier chapters for no one, not even Grall and Grodak, knew this.

Gralls connection with the Shadow World had been broken. It wasn't really explained in the campaign why such a thing had happened. I had asked the gm, Jarada Daedre, to make it so and no one explored the reasoning behind it.

I knew the in game reasoning so I am here to explain it to you, the reader, so that you may understand why. When Grall lost his wife, Leah, a second time. The Reaper part of his soul, the part that Grall, as an infant, had made to submit to him, an action that had caused The Reaper to become a prisoner in Gralls body rather then becoming one with him as he had done in every cycle before this, to break free and kill the part of Grall we have seen so far.

As was said in earlier chapters, the Shadow World could only revive Grall once more. When the Shadow World had revived him, however, it wasn't able to repair the rift between Grall and The Reaper. This meant only one could inhabit his body and The Reaper, being stronger then Grall, had been the one to win.

I know some of you are wondering how Grall was able to dominate The Reaper as a child but not as an adult. The answer is really simple, when The Reaper is reincarnated he has no powers and must build up to them. The Reaper was weaker then an infant without his powers, but when he finally was able to take control of them he made sure he was the one in control.

Many of you are probably thinking this is a cop-out and at the time it was explained to me, I did as will. Then the gm, Jarada Daedre, explained to me that after being forced to live in the same body as Grall and experiencing so many deaths, The Reapers mind had taken a toll. There's more to The Reaper that I will show you later, but for now this is all I wanted to say.