Role

Chapter 3

Within the tortured realms of his unconscious mind, Oroas became a silent
sentinel to phantasmagoric scenes that defied the laws of the physical world.
He stood, helpless and horrified, as he beheld his father through the lens of
an otherworldly voyeurism. It was as if he peered through a crystal barrier,
one that shimmered with the illusory divide between reality and the realm of
spectral leeches. These vile specters, invisible to the most enlightened of
mages, revealed themselves to him in the vulnerability of sleep, a perverse
privilege that turned his rest into a gallery of silent screams.

Through this translucent partition, he witnessed the sapping of his
fathers life essence, the vital force being drawn out in tendrils of
ethereal mist by the unseen parasites that feasted upon the living. The
beings were insidious, lurking beyond the veil of perception, thriving in the
shadows cast by the light of the arcane.

At first, Oroas dismissed these visions as mere figments of his own twisted
imagination, the spawn of a mind too long steeped in the arcane. They were,
he assured himself, the nightmares of a soul that had wandered too far into
the mists of the unknown. Yet, a disquiet gnawed at his reason, a worm of
doubt that wriggled its way into the marrow of his convictions.

Armed with the full arsenal of his shapeshifting guild's lore, a mastery that
he had sought as both sanctuary and sword, Oroas ventured back to the place
of his lineage. He returned not as the prodigal son, but as a harbinger of
truths unsought, bearing the weight of revelations that threatened to
fracture the very foundations of his world. His homecoming was to be a
testament to his journey, a demonstration of the arcane to a father who had
seen him as little more than a leaf in the wind, now returned as the storm
itself.

Oroas returned to the cradle of his youth only to be greeted by the grim
visage of decay. The once indomitable figure of his father was now a husk, a
vessel succumbing to the ravages of time accelerated by unseen leeches. The
patriarch lay withering before him, his vitality siphoned away, leaving
behind a shell aged beyond the cruel hand of nature. Oroas was engulfed by a
deluge of sorrow as he kept vigil by the bedside of the man who was both his
mentor and antithesis, watching the dwindling sands of life slip away.