Immolai

'Epithet: The False Self

“The untruth beneath a gray sun.”

Introduction

The unholiness of the Shimmer is well known from the towers of Otharine to even distant shores of some Rhystian villages. The foul lie that so many choose to believe when seeking out the ancient power is a promise of belonging, of union and community, and of achieving some great godliness that once existed within an age long since lost. Even so, there is an underlying, twisted sense of justice desired by those who still kneel to a murdered god. Many believe Oberon’s hubris must be answered with the full fury that the Shimmer once wielded. They would believe that “divine wrath” lost with the fall of the Eidolon, and yet, some speak of the Immolai, or the “False Self” as translated from the scripts of the High Faerlan hunters who have managed to survive encounters with this wretched creature. They would say that the judgment of the Shimmer is still yet to come, and that through the Immolai it will be delivered.

Background

The Vast Mirage, the barren wastes that mark some far reaching expanse that even the most brave denizens of the Faewild have yet to explore, is the realm of strangeness the likes of which many find difficult to comprehend. The sands have been rumored to be limitless to those that have undertaken the endeavor of venturing across the deserts, and even the strange people who have marked it as their home speak of the land as if it holds dominion over them and not the other way around.

It is within this forsaken place that the Immolai resides, as it is one of the primary reasons why those not native to the Mirage have come to fear the dunes. Traveling for several days through its environs, if one is capable of surviving even that long, means a likely encounter with swirling sandstorms and harsh, scorching winds.

Where these cyclones rage, the sun’s light becomes blinding while its radiance is lost. The white and bleak grayscale of the landscape tricks the mind into believing that even color has been bled from a lifeless wasteland, and the Mirage proves its namesake via guaranteed hallucinations brought on both by mental and physical fatigue, but also by what many swear to be the echoes of the murdered Shimmer.

Faces travel on the wind, emerging only for brief seconds where the sand shifts and turns. Whispers hiss within each plume of dust, speaking to the lost travelers that hear them of things that should never be spoken aloud. It is a haunting, one that begins much like some ghostly encounter, that could continue for days or even weeks still depending on how well one can survive the deserts themselves.

Eventually, however, the predator of this realm finds the game no longer amusing, or perhaps whatever motivates it to drag the process out comes to an end should it not feel such emotions. In any case, a sand column hundreds of feet wide and tall enough to reach the dusting clouds above visits these victims. Only a handful have ever survived the encounter, though they have never been the same again. High Faerlan hunters have been lost to the madness of the Mirage, while fairies and other more colorful fae creatures fell prey to bottomless and paralyzing sorrow following an unexplained and often miraculous escape.

Those who have returned mutter more of tortured faces, of elongating limbs and damned shrieks of horror, pleading for aid. They have mentioned reflective and fractal scales or some sort of mirror-like shell that caught the blazing sun in all its hate. They have spoken of something that only showed them the falsehoods of this world, a mockery of all they held dear in their lives and in their minds, something that made even their most hopeful desires and ambitious dreams nothing more than parody.

Though the Convergence and its influence are now a thing of the past, where the Faewild merged closely with the desert wastes upon Rhyst some have found shining, translucent shards of an unknown, hardened material. Throughout the ages of the plane, the Immolai is believed to have utilized the merging of both worlds as a means to cast these relics out and beyond the borders of its domain. Some who have found them have lost their sanity, others have picked them up and simply vanished from known existence. Even with their dangerous nature apparent, they have traded hands and become treasures of curious value in communities and cities that live near these sites.

These relics have been called prismatic glass and have been used in a variety of dangerous rituals by cults and mad mages seeking entrance to the Faewild. This much they can promise, but with all things regarding the realm of chaos, there is a price for any exchange, and the doorways often open up to a howling wind and leaves its summoners no choice but to step through into its domain.

Trivia

Many seem to believe the Immolai must be a large shard of the fractured Eidolon, though what actually comprises its body and form is known only to those that it has slain

The Immolai’s physical form is not well documented, though the faces and reflections that poke through the column of gray sand seems to be a common thread between all sightings

The Immolai is not known to leave the Mirage which has lead many to believe it has territorial behaviors at the very least

Credit

Author: Tattles https://forum.verdict.dev/showthread.php?tid=3869