Arcanna'se Effigy of Rebirth

Before the spires of Thalumbra were named, before the deep cartographers of Norrath had pressed their instruments far enough into the world's underbelly to give that vast and lightless place its proper title, there was a fire burning where no fire had any right to burn.

 

Those who first descended into those airless corridors beneath the Faydwer shelf brought back stories that were not immediately believed. They spoke of a tower rising from the floor of a cavern so immense that its ceiling could not be found by torchlight, a spire of pale stone wound through with veins of amber luminescence, pulsing at long and irregular intervals as a sleeping thing breathes. They spoke of warmth radiating from its walls, of a heat that had no furnace and needed none, fed instead by something older than fire itself, something the scholars would eventually agree to call Arcanna'se, though no consensus was ever reached as to whether that was a name, a title, a forgotten word in a tongue no living race still spoke, or simply the sound that the place made when the wind moved through its upper passages in a particular way.

 

What the earliest accounts agreed upon was this: Arcanna'se was not a god. It did not receive prayers. It did not grant audiences. It did not concern itself with the petitions of mortals, however earnestly those petitions were delivered. It was older than the gods of influence who walk among Norrath's clouds and move the fates of cities and kingdoms as a child moves stones across a riverbed. It was older, and it was indifferent, and it burned with a quiet, ceaseless intensity that had survived the Shattering, the silence of the gods, the rise and fall of every empire Norrath had ever produced, and it would go on burning long after the last of those empires had dissolved back into the soil from which it came.

 

What it represented, the scholars eventually settled upon in rough agreement, was the principle underlying the phoenix. Not the phoenix itself, which is a creature of feather and flame and is born and dies and is born again in the manner of all mortal things. What Arcanna'se represented was the force that permits the phoenix to rise. The animating principle of return. The law, older than any god, which states that what is genuine cannot be extinguished permanently, that what possesses true essence will always find its way back to form.

 

The Effigy was, by all accounts, made by someone who understood this.

 

It is a sculpture of modest dimensions, though modest is perhaps the wrong word for a thing so obviously dense with concentrated intention. The form is that of a phoenix in the moment of ascension, wings flung back, head raised, every feather caught in the precise instant between collapse and combustion, between the end of one life and the ignition of the next. It is wrought from a material that none of the Society's craftworkers have been able to name with certainty, something between stone and metal, carrying the weight of the former and the faint warmth of the latter. Beneath its surface, visible only when the surrounding light is low, runs a tracery of amber, the same amber as the veins within the Spire itself, faint and unhurried and utterly, inexhaustibly alive. Those who have spent time in its presence report that it does not radiate power in any aggressive or demonstrative sense. It does not pulse. It does not hum. It simply makes the air around it feel like the air that exists at the moment just before dawn, charged with the particular energy of something that is about to begin.

 

The Blessing it imparts to those who stand within its presence is commensurate with this quality. The mind sharpens. The body responds with greater authority. The hands of the craftworker find their surety. The scholar's eye moves across a text with an ease that was not there before. It is not a transformation. It is, if anything, a restoration, a returning of the self to what it was always capable of being, unimpeded by fatigue or doubt or the slow erosion that ordinary living works upon the spirit over time. It gives back what was always there.

 

How the Norrath Secret Society came to possess it is a matter the Lorekeeper records without embellishment.

 

During one of the Society's expeditions into the deeper passages of Thalumbra, in the years before those territories were widely known, a small party of our members found themselves cut off from the principal route back to the surface by a collapse in the passage behind them. They were not injured. They were, however, thorough, which is the Society's way, and so rather than wait to be extracted they pressed forward. What they found, in a chamber that bore none of the markers left by any previous expedition, was a figure they could not clearly describe afterward, seated at a table of the same pale stone as the Spire's walls, as though they had been waiting there for a very long time without particular impatience.

 

No words were exchanged. None of our members could later agree on what the figure looked like, whether it was male or female, young or ancient, whether it was clothed or armored or neither. What they could agree on was that when they departed that chamber, the Effigy was among their carried belongings, and that the passage behind them had reopened.

There was no demand made. No bargain struck. The Society did not seek the Effigy, and it does not claim to have earned it by any measure of conventional merit. It was given, in the manner of things given by forces that operate outside the logic of transaction, simply because the time for it to be given had arrived.

 

It rests now in the Society's hall. It burns with what it has always burned with. It asks nothing of those who dwell near it.

 

It gives back what was always there.

​

Seek. Discover. Endure.

​

Mordven Nocturnis, Lorekeeper of the Veil, Norrath Secret Society, Antonia Bayle.

​