Role

Chapter 1

Some things should remain slumbering. Some power should be kept
from mortal hands, lest the world be torn asunder. Life and Death.
Order and Chaos. A heart of Oak to withstand the passage of time,
the intense flame, howling wind, and pounding rain.

Phen was young, once. His earliest memory is not of violence, or
fear, but of peace. He gazed, as perhaps an older boy would at a girl,
longing for an embrace, at a simple flower. Not a flower in full bloom,
not one crisp and fresh, smoldering with dew, but one upon deaths knell.
A flower tormented by disease, and by pain.

He watched the single leaf cling in desperation to the stem, like a
parasitic host upon a body, or perhaps, the opposite. He wondered. Was
the stem the parasite?

Perhaps the host is the land itself, and the flower the parasite. Tapping
his cheek while he rested upon his elbows, he looked eye level at the
wretched, dangling leaf.

Is it not strange. He spoke aloud, "in death you shall rise again."

The words escaped his lips on some unknown and unwilled desire. Words
he knew in truth, for the cycle of life has inglorious ends and messy
beginnings. These words, words spoken in an innocent understanding that
captured the nearby interest of a passerby, unknown to him.

The next feeling Phen knew, at the ripe young age of 6, was peace. A
deep slumber he had not felt before. A slumber of death.

When he awoke, a dark cousin of his lifted his chin, and wiped free
a dribble of spit and snot that had run down his chin. The dark creature
whispered the words, "Dos zhal tlu arlathil aphyon." Rise, beast, he
commanded. I am your Master. For you, we have grand plans.