If you felt something deep within beckoning you—a prophecy in your dreams or a feeling in your heart; a calling from somewhere or someone beyond, asking you to make a long and difficult journey to change the terrible fate you had been dealt—one you may not survive, one you could never return from—would you abandon everything to answer the call?

 

A young man, starved and restless, felt compelled to change his fate. He escaped from his shackles. His body damaged, but a servant of his master no more, he forsook his owner and abandoned that prison as it docked into the harbors of a place he'd never been. He ran into the woods of this unknown land; he ran for days upon weeks, not stopping until he happened upon a dilapidated and near-collapse stone tower. He read the words inscribed on the signage hanging over the door: 'The Last Library’. The land he had come to was the farthest east in this world; no further is land charted on any map, but it was just shelter from the rain to him. In truth, it was a forbidden place full of dangerous secrets, hidden away at the world’s edge.

The young man entered the library, an abandoned, dusty, and rotted place where the books were lonely and decaying. A single book lay upon a table in the darkness. It was a strange book, bound in a sort of flesh, with a grotesque slit in the center to which it looked as though an eye might open. The young man felt something from the book, it’s aura called to him, begging him to open it; it was daunting and uncanny for the boy, it compelled him to gaze upon it’s visage. He opened the book to find most of its pages bloodied but blank, with no words, no images. Until one of the pages started to bleed from wounds in the shape of letters. It was someone’s frantic style of inscribing; like someone was quickly scrawling from the other side. The book was bleeding prose. The words appeared, though no one wrote them; they just wrote themselves upon the page.

 

I am The All-Seer. I have lived a number of lives as different beings in my past, but the one I recall most was when I was born empty. I had died and shed my mortal body. I thought I would wander the world as a spirit forever, but my soul deteriorated to something abhorant; all that was left was the malice in my heart and memories of the sins I once committed. I felt nothing but hate. I looked towards the sun and felt envy, yet I hated what I had become just as well. When you are reborn into the world of Zenarok with no soul, you become a monster in the image of your sin. Your divine light is severed, and the darkness that’s left behind becomes your body.

 

Taking the shape of my sin, I became The World-Eater, a basilisk of enormous size. My most nostalgic memory was the hunger I felt—the desire to consume innocence and divinity alike. There were a countless number of mortals I ate and killed. Creatures of all kinds—humans, elves, orcs, giants, dwarves, men made of wood, men made from stone, men who flew, men with gills—I devoured them all, and of course, I still hungered. I must have hungered so loudly that the gods could hear the growling.

 

The One True God approached me. He knew that his world had felt my wrath, and it had been enough. He asked me something I will never forget. He asked me, ‘Did you know their stories? Did you understand their lot when you cast them from the cruelty of this world?’ This god’s name was Zenarok. He told me that the stories of the beings of this world are worth hearing, and knowing them would forever change, if not other lives, my own. He said that so long as I knew them, he would spare them not from my consumption. The option he presented me with was that I could become a new being, a chronicler. He opened the Aeon and told me to write in it the stories of the people I consumed. He told me to protect their stories forever and to defy the gods no longer, but my new role would be to serve them instead. That was the day I became who I am now.

 

I am The All-Seer, protector of the Aeon, a chronicler of the world of Zenarok. These are my tales; they tell of this world’s beings. These tales are about those who came to know my new master, for he too began by becoming lost in this world. He would soon look upon the sun emanating its divine radiance on the universe. When we looked upon its beauty, the envy I felt once before had become our admiration and inspiration.