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Lucky Breeze
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Know that I speak for the Ark.
Two thousand five hundred and twenty four years ago, the Two-eyed peoples, the Eldefolk, and the Waan, and the Furlesians, turned their warring gaze from each other and onto the twin gleaming Arcanopolitan cities of Ios and Eos, centers of knowledge and culture. It was we who had tamed the power of the Oculus. Our blood was pure in those days. The two-eyes had long ago used magic and technology now long forgotten to reduce many of their own battlefields and lands into the sand and desert of the Wastes, and they sought new territory for expansion and ruin, and new enemies to battle.
The cyclopean citizens of the Arcanopoli were as strong then as we are now, but there were too many invaders, and we began to fall, one by one. Monsters, they called us, fiends. And so they pushed us from our cities, and they dwelled in our houses and despoiled our lands and systematically they began to murder us, our men and women and children.
By the end of the slaughter there remained two hundred of us. And fifty, the First Fifty, took the Oath to defend the rest, to guide them Home. We would be their saviors. Their Ark.
We were the ones who defended them in their flight, and we fought and died to protect them.
By the time we had reached where the Arcanopolis now stands, away from danger, there were twenty three Arkers left. And the other magi thanked us profusely, and then, promptly, they shunned us. Because we had scarred ourselves for them, physically and mentally and spiritually, and they decided they no longer had a use for soldiers. We were outcasts in the society we had saved from extinction.
And now the cyclopes once more deal with the two-eyes, and we trust them once more, as we did long ago. We are the only ones who remember the fire and the death. The only ones who know that trust and our ties to our old lives are a weakness. We must be stronger, this time. We see the storm coming, as it came before.
And for the sake of our homes we redden the Eye and remove the Ear and willingly, joyfully, accept the hate of those we are bound to save, for the Ark must be rebuilt.
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