Chapter 1. Of the Prophecy and the Age

​

There are tales that belong to a single lifetime, told of a battle won or a treasure claimed, and there are tales that belong to the very bones of the world. The chronicle I set before you now is of the latter sort. It reaches back to the dawn of days, when the gods yet warred openly and the shape of Norrath was not yet settled, and it reaches forward into ages that even the wisest among us cannot fully read. We name this the Age of Destiny, and it is fitting, for destiny is a blade with two edges, and the tale I tell concerns two blades indeed.

 

Long before the Rending sundered the lands, before Freeport rose grim upon the ashes of the old and Qeynos gathered the faithful beneath the banner of the Truespirit, there was spoken a prophecy by one whose name is uttered warily even among lorekeepers. Zebuxoruk, the fettered one, the seer who saw too far and paid the price of gods for his sight, left behind a saying that has haunted every scholar who dared to write it down: Cleft in twine at the dawn of time, the two shall stand once more in a united front against that which brings the end.

 

For centuries these words gathered dust. They were reckoned riddle, or madness, or the idle music of a broken mind. Yet words of that kind do not perish. They wait. And in the days of the Echoes, when Faydwer opened once more to the feet of Norrathians and the old wounds of the world began to ache anew, the prophecy stirred to life, and two mighty powers awoke to hunt the same secret across the face of the world.

 

Chapter 2. Of the Two Powers That Hunted

 

The first power was the Order of Marr, servants of honor and the Truespirit, whose knights answered to fair Antonia Bayle, Queen of Qeynos, she of the noble line and the gentle hand and the iron resolve beneath it. When word reached Qeynos that a weapon of terrible import had surfaced in the world, the Queen did not hesitate. She mustered her finest cavaliers and sent them forth, and any who beheld the gravity upon their faces understood that this was no errand of chivalry but a matter upon which the fate of nations might turn.

 

The second power was the Lucanic Knights, the mailed fist of Overlord Lucan D'Lere, who rules Freeport as a tyrant rules, by will and by fear and by the long memory of grievances unforgotten. Lucan too commanded his fearsome knights into the field, and Lucan's fury was of a colder and more personal kind, for the secret that stirred all Norrath was, in truth, his own loss made manifest.

 

When two such enemies (Qeynos and Freeport, light and shadow, the Queen and the Overlord) turn their eyes upon a single prize at the selfsame hour, the wise do not ask whether the prize is great. They ask only how great, and whether the world shall survive the reaching for it. It was said in the halls of the learned that only one thing could stir both realms to such frenzy: the sister blade to the fabled Qeynos Claymore, the second of an ancient pair, sundered at the beginning and long thought lost.

 

We of the Norrath Secret Society mark this well, for our order was not idle in those days. Where kings send armies, wiser powers send watchers, and there were eyes among the seeking that answered to no crown at all.

 

Chapter 3. Of the Whisper in the Academy

​

Not all revelation comes by the sword. In Freeport, within the cold spires of the Academy of Arcane Science, the mages bent over their tomes and traded a whisper that traveled faster than any herald could ride. They had unearthed again the old prophecy of Zebuxoruk, and they read in it a meaning that chilled them.

 

Cleft in twine at the dawn of time. Two things, then, that were once one. Two swords, perhaps, forged of a single purpose and broken apart when the world was young. Or perhaps, said the subtler minds, two cities, two peoples, Qeynos and Freeport themselves, sworn foes who might yet be compelled by some greater dread to stand together against a doom that would spare neither. Both readings carried the same shadow at their heart: that which brings the end. Something waited in the deep places of the world, and the swords, whatever they were, were the key to meeting it or the key to loosing it.

 

I have pondered these words many a long night by candle, and I confess the doubling of their meaning troubles me still. A prophecy that speaks of blades and of nations in the same breath is a prophecy that means to be fulfilled in both. That which was cleft at the dawn of time must be made whole. Norrath has never yet learned that lesson without paying in blood.

 

Chapter 4. Of the Froglok at the Ruins

​

The threads of great events are often first taken up by unlikely hands, and so it was here. The tale, as it came to be told among those who walked it, began not in a throne room nor a temple but amid the broken stones of Val'marr, in the desolation of the Commonlands, where a Froglok knight named Sir Groktog kept a lonely vigil.

 

Now, a Froglok bearing the shield of the Qeynos Guard is no common sight, and those who knew the older chronicle of the Claymore understood at once that this was no chance meeting. Sir Groktog was a knight of proven faith, tied by his history to the very weapon that had first roused the Order of Marr, and he stood now at the crossroads of a new and darker matter. To him came the seekers, and from him they took up the first labor of the odyssey: to liberate the cavaliers who had been taken, to loose those loyal knights from their captivity, that the Order might gather its strength and press the search.

 

Thus did the chronicle open in liberation, in the freeing of the faithful, and I hold this a fitting beginning. No great work is done by a single hand. It is done by the freeing and the gathering of many, and the first virtue of any order worthy of the name is that it will not abandon its own to the dark.

 

Chapter 5. Of the Crusade to Faydwer

​

From the parched ruin of the Commonlands the trail bent northward and across the sea, to the ancient wood of Faydwer, where the boughs of the Greater Faydark have stood since before the memory of the younger races. A crusade was called, and the seekers crossed the waters to that green and shadowed land, for the sword's path led there, into groves where the fae flit and the old powers of the world lie thinly veiled.

 

It was in this leg of the odyssey that curious companions entered the tale, and I would be a poor chronicler to leave them out for the sake of solemnity. There walked among the events an inspector of gnomish make, one Berlok Beeglesnoop, whose method was neither prayer nor prophecy but the patient stitching together of clue upon clue, poem and letter and testimony, until the shape of the truth stood plain. And there was, if the accounts may be trusted (and I have found them stranger than fiction and truer than I wished), a rat named Chypp who possessed the gift of speech and was not shy in the using of it.

 

I set these figures down without apology. The grand tapestry of Norrath is not woven of heroes only. It is woven also of the odd, the small, the overlooked, the talking rat in the cellar who has seen more than any lord above. The wise seeker learns to listen to all of them. Our own order has long held that the humblest informant may hold the thread that unravels an empire, and the tale of the Swords bears this out.

 

Chapter 6. Of the Knights in the Round and the Naming of the Blade

​

Here the mystery, which had hidden its true face behind speculation and rumor, at last unveiled itself. In the place called the Acadechism the seekers came before an assembly of knights, and there, in the round, the great secret was spoken aloud.

The Sword of Destiny was no unknown sister to the Claymore, no nameless relic of the elder days. It was Soulfire.

 

Soulfire. Let the name settle. For those unversed in the deeper lore, I shall set down what our archives hold. In the days before the sundering of the world, in old Freeport that was, there stood an order called the Knights of Truth, and they were sworn protectors of an ancient force they did not wholly comprehend, driven not by understanding but by faith. Into their keeping passed a blade of holy fire, and its name was Soulfire. Among the knights of that order was one Lucan D'Lere, and by that blade and by that fellowship his name first rose. Yet Lucan's soul curdled, as all Norrath now knows, and he cast off the truth he had sworn to guard and became the Overlord, tyrant of the new Freeport, a servant of shadow where once he had borne the light.

 

The blade Soulfire, holy thing that it was, came into his keeping across the long years. And now, in the days of the Echoes, it had been stolen from him. Torn from the grasp of the Overlord of Freeport. That was the secret that had set two realms to war in the quiet. That was the wound behind Lucan's cold fury. The mightiest tyrant of the age had been robbed of a weapon of destiny, and he would burn the world to gravel to have it back.

 

I have often reflected that there is a bitter justice in this. A blade of truth and holy fire, borne once by a young knight of faith, stolen at last from the tyrant that knight became. It is as though the sword itself remembered what its bearer had forgotten, and sought a hand more worthy of it.

 

Chapter 7. Of the Hand Behind the Theft

​

But who had taken it? The trail, as all dark trails in that age seemed to, led toward Mistmoore.

​

Rumor had reached the seekers, brought back by those returning from the grim halls of Crushbone Keep, that Emperor D'Vinn (that proud and cruel lord of the orcs) had been closeted in secret counsel. And with whom did the Emperor take his private words? With none other than Mayong Mistmoore, the vampire lord, one of the eldest and most patient powers of all Norrath, a schemer whose designs are measured not in years but in ages.

 

At the ending of another matter entirely, in the depths of the Acadechism, it was witnessed that Emperor D'Vinn grudgingly yielded up a sword to an agent of Mayong Mistmoore. A sword surrendered against the giver's will, passed into the hands of the vampire's servant. The pieces, long scattered, began to fall together into a single dreadful picture. Soulfire had been stolen, and the hand behind the theft reached from the shadowed halls of Castle Mistmoore.

 

Now, of Mayong Mistmoore I could write a chronicle ten times the length of this one and not exhaust his intrigues, for he is a weaver of plots within plots, and no mortal has ever been certain of his true aim. That such a being should covet a blade of destiny is no small thing. When Mistmoore reaches for a weapon, it is never for the weapon alone. It is for whatever door the weapon opens, and the doors he seeks to open are seldom ones that ought to be unlocked.

 

Chapter 8. Of the Stone, the Ankh, and the Heart of Mistmoore

​

So the odyssey turned at last toward its darkest passage. From the shores of Butcherblock the seekers climbed toward Castle Mistmoore and the black catacombs beneath it, into the very heart of the vampire lord's dominion.

​

There was a stone to be sought, hidden behind an ankh, a sign of life set as a lock upon a place of death (for Mistmoore delights in such cruel ironies). The seekers pressed into the catacombs and thence into the heart of the castle itself, that ancient seat of dread where the dust of centuries lies undisturbed and the dead do not rest as the dead should. To walk willingly into Mistmoore's house is a labor that tests more than the strength of arm. It tests the steadiness of the soul, for the vampire lord's halls are made to unmake the will of those who enter them.

​

I will not pretend the archives hold every particular of what transpired within those walls, for much of what passes in Mistmoore's keeping is meant never to be spoken again. But this is certain: the seekers went into the heart of the shadow, and they came forth again, and the thread of the blade's destiny was carried onward. That alone is a deed worthy of a chronicle. Many enter Castle Mistmoore. Fewer leave it with their purpose intact.

 

Chapter 9. Of the Overlord in the Court of the Queen of Felwithe

​

The final passage of the odyssey carried the tale to a place of light, though the errand there was grave enough. In the throne of New Tunaria, in a working the seekers named Operation Overlord, the trail led to Queen Lenya of Felwithe, the high elf queen of that fair and ancient city.

​

For long years the Queen of Felwithe had kept a secret. A secret held close and guarded well, hidden from the ambitions of empires. And that secret, when at last it came to light, was named a key to destiny. What precisely the Queen of Felwithe guarded, and what door her secret was fashioned to open, the archives render only in part, and I will not embroider where the record is silent. But mark the meaning of it. When two realms and a vampire lord and an orcish emperor all reach for a single blade, and the last turning of the trail arrives at the quiet court of an elven queen who has hidden a key for generations, then you may know that the blade was never the whole of the matter. The blade was a piece of a puzzle far greater, a puzzle universal in its scope, of which the strivings of Norrath's kings were but the local and visible portion.

​

That, in the end, is what the name of the Swords of Destiny truly signifies. It speaks of the Age of Destiny itself, the age in which we live and strive. And it speaks of the fate of Norrath, the reckoning toward which all these threads are drawn, the doom that Zebuxoruk foresaw when he spoke of that which brings the end.

 

Chapter 10. Of What the Swords Would Yet Become

​

I would be an unfaithful lorekeeper if I closed this chronicle at the unveiling of the theft and left you to believe the tale ended there. For the swords cleft at the dawn of time were not gathered for their own sake, nor for the vanity of kings. They were gathered against a foe.

​

In the fullness of the age, when the ways to the Plane of War stood open and the fortress of Drunder loomed before the boldest champions of Norrath, the Swords of Destiny came at last into the use for which prophecy had preserved them. With those blades in hand, the mightiest heroes of the world ascended into the domain of Rallos Zek himself, the Warlord, the god of strife, and there the swords were turned against a deity. That which was cleft at the dawn of time stood united at the last, a weapon fit to strike down a god of war in his own house.

​

Consider the shape of it, entire. A blade forged in the elder days and given to knights of faith. Borne by a young Lucan D'Lere before his fall. Stolen from the tyrant he became, by the reaching hand of Mayong Mistmoore. Sought by two warring realms, unriddled by a gnomish inspector and a talking rat, drawn out of the heart of a vampire's castle, and bound at the last to a secret kept by the Queen of Felwithe. And all of it, every league of that long road, was but the gathering of a weapon meant to face a god. This is what it means to live in the Age of Destiny. The smallest errand, the freeing of a captive knight in a ruined waste, may be the first link in a chain that ends at the throne of a deity.

 

Chapter 11. Of Our Order and the Weight of the Age

​

Why, you may ask, does the Lorekeeper of the Veil set down at such length a tale of blades that no member of our order forged and secrets that no member of our order kept? I answer thus.

​

We are the Norrath Secret Society, and our creed is written in three words: Seek, Discover, Endure. There has never been a fuller telling of that creed than the odyssey of the Swords of Destiny. To seek is to take up the first thread from the hand of a lonely Froglok in a ruined field, not knowing where it leads. To discover is to sit with the gnome and the rat and the whispering mage until the true shape of Soulfire stands revealed, and to walk into the heart of Mistmoore for the sake of what waits behind the ankh. And to endure is to carry a purpose unbroken through catacomb and court and, at the last, into the plane of a god, and to strike the blow that a thousand years of prophecy had waited to see struck.

​

We were watchers in that age, as we are watchers still. Where the crowns of Qeynos and Freeport sent their fearsome knights to seize the blade, our order sent quieter eyes to understand it, and understanding, I have ever held, is the sharper weapon of the two. Let the great powers grasp. We of the Veil observe, we remember, and we set down the truth of things in ink that will outlast the reigns of tyrants and the mourning of queens.

​

Keep this chronicle, then, not as a tale of others but as a mirror of ourselves. The world is cleft in twine, and the two shall stand once more against that which brings the end. When that hour comes, and I do not doubt that it will, let it be said that the Norrath Secret Society did not sleep through the gathering. Let it be said that we sought, that we discovered, and that we endured.

​

The blade remembers what its bearer forgets. So too must we.