The Throne of the Gods

Danneci

Two hundred years ago, Danneci was a young girl. She was filled with the hopes and dreams of all young girls, to meet the man of her dreams and be swept away. She liked to work with gemstones, and had been pestering her parents into allowing her to apprentice to Galin so she could learn to be a jeweler. At twenty-five she was still young for apprenticeship. Her older brother had not been apprenticed until he was thirty, but the Hunt's Master had asked for him specifically, which is why it was allowed so early in his life. Still, Danneci was convinced that she would soon be allowed to apprentice to the Jeweler.

That year however, was the year that the world changed. She began having nightmares; extremely intense nightmares about the underworld, or Hells, as some might say. She woke screaming, night after night as she dreamed of people being tortured by demons and devils. Priests were called from all parts of the Elven nations, yet none of them could discover any problems, physical, mental, or magical.

One day, a couple of months past her twenty-eighth birthday a strange human wandered into the city. He claimed to know what the malady was that affected the poor Elven girl. The council conferred with Danneci's parents and decided to risk letting the Human examine her. The Man spent a week testing the young girl, he showed her magic, and taught her what she had become. He called her a sorcerer, a being able to touch the dark planes where the demons and devils resided. Her magic, he explained, came from channeling the energies of those planes through her own body. This was a dangerous thing to do, if too much of the energy was used it could burn her up.

The Man told none of this to her people. He told her that they wouldn't understand; they would see her powers as evil, having not come from study or divine favor. Instead of the truth, he told her family that a minor demon had attached itself to her and that he had tested and exorcised the fiend. He offered to take the girl on as his apprentice, to teach her the ways of discovering and exorcising these lower plane entities. Her people wouldn't hear of it however, she was too young to go gallivanting off into the world in the company of some Human.

So he left Danneci with her people, but not before admonishing her to hold in the fear of the dreams. She must act, he said, as if she had been cured. He told her to hide the magic, to practice with it only when she was certain she was alone, and to never, ever tell another soul.

The city was relieved when the Human left but they still felt for the poor little girl and for the pain she had gone through. So, at the age of twenty-eight she was allowed to apprentice to the Master Jeweler. For two years she worked with the Jeweler, learning the trade that she had longed her whole life to learn. It was not as she had fancied in her young dreams. The gemstones no longer called to her as they once had. The work was menial and boring. It became the thing she suffered through so that she could steal a few moments to increase her powers in sorcery.

As it was bound to happen, she was discovered. As luck would have it, however, it was her brother who discovered her secret. He begged her to stop, to be happy with her trade. Failing that he asked her to go see the mages. "If magic was what you want," he said," then you should learn it as an honorable trade."Danneci tried to leave the mystical behind, for she loved her brother dearly, but it called to her, it sang in her blood, it was her life.

She had used a small spell to increase her understanding of gemology so that she could proceed past the apprentice stage and into journeyman status so that the Jeweler would not be watching her so closely. This did more than she expected. Her skills with gem polishing and cutting began to far outshine her master. Many a person would claim how her gems would rival the very stars in the sky. Some even assured her that the gods themselves would only get their jewelry from her hands.

That was a minor thing, the spell had taught her so much more. She had learned that gemstones, when polished and cut just right, could be used to capture and hold mortal souls. However, even that discovery paled in the knowledge that if she channeled her sorcery through such a gem, the power of her spells increased dramatically. At first she was repulsed by the thought.

Once more she tried to throw off her addiction to the mystical powers. She threw herself into her work; she created many wonderful pieces of art and won the journeyman status and the praise of the master. He was so happy with her work that he begged her parents to let him send her to the Elven capitol of Cilestrious. Only there, among the most talented of Elven jewelers, could her talent be fully realized. Although Danneci was only thirty-three at the time, her parents accepted.

Once within Cilestrious, Danneci quickly settled into her role of journeyman jeweler under Master Jarik. For nearly two months she managed to ignore the call of the magic in her blood, but forces beyond her conspired to bring her to a full realization of her destiny. There was another journeyman who had been sent to Jarik around the same time. His name was Furnito, he was fifty and jealous of her early success. He pestered and bullied her endlessly. He even went so far as to destroy her work area while she was away.

Danneci was getting frustrated with the foolish antics of Furnito. The power flickered at the edge of her consciousness making her all too aware of what she could do to the asinine journeyman. She began to prepare a gemstone for capturing a soul. She really wasn't thinking of using it, but the knowledge that she could gave her a sense of empowerment. When the jewel was ready she placed it into a necklace and left it on her workbench.

Furnito had been watching her painstaking work on the necklace and he figured that he could really annoy her by taking away this treasure she had meticulously manufactured. He slipped into her work-space and took the necklace. Danneci found the necklace gone and lost her temper completely; she confronted him in front of Jarik. Furnito of course denied any involvement in the necklace's theft. Pushed beyond her limit Danneci reached out with her power and activated the gemstone, sucking Furnito's soul down into the facets of the crystal.

Furnito's empty body crumpled to the floor and Danneci drew her necklace from his pocket. Jarik was terrified by what he had witnessed. He called for the guards. Danneci grabbed as many of her personal effects as she could and ran. She used her magic to change her face, she hid out in Cilestrious, and she watched the reactions of the people and learned firsthand what her Human tutor had tried to tell her. The fear that gripped the population of the Elven capital was palpable. Wizards and priests teamed up with the city guard, looking for the 'evil' girl who had killed Furnito.

Danneci knew she would be discovered if she stayed, so she decided to go home. Her home was surrounded by more wizards and priests. She watched for her brother and followed him to an inn. When she tried to talk to him about what had happened he tried to turn her in. “It's your own fault," he told her. "You brought this all upon yourself.” Once again she called upon her magic. Changing into a cat, she slipped from the inn and went out into the countryside.

She left her people then, knowing full well that she would never be accepted by her race. She journeyed for many months before she reached the Human lands. For the last two hundred years she had lived among them, moving from kingdom to kingdom when her powers were discovered. All her childish dreams were shattered, but she had created new ones from those pieces.