Artias Al'tiago the Secret, Initiate of the Scarab

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Chapter 1

Artias was born in the cradle of prosperity, heir to the Al'tiago fortune, the
golden child of handsome, happy parents, the embodiment of their best wishes for
life, the culmination of a consuming, passionate, true love, widely renowned and
the envy of every Galadonian. He lay in his swaddling wrappings, an innocent.
blissful grin creasing his rosy cheeks, twinkling blue eyes peering out from
beneath stray tufts of curly blond hair, as throngs of his father's associates,
servants, and mean well-wishers carried on their vapid conversations, cooing and
fawning over the darling cherub.

It is for the best that Artias cannot remember that day, else his self-loathing
would be magnified to such an extent that the temptation of suicide might
become too great to resist. As a young child, he was deemed morbid--it was
called a natural, passing phase, but his famous parents went to great lengths
to conceal him from the same throng to whom he had been proudly displayed not
long prior. The "phase" did not pass. He was withdrawn, had neither friends
nor a desire for such. He spoke often of death. He frustrated and at times
terrified his parents with questions about the soul, mortality, and human
nature. By the time he was a teenager, hope had long since been abandoned
Artias was left to his own devices, locked away in the cavernous libraries of the
family manor-house. Servants and associates came to know better than to mention
him at all when his parents were around. They sometimes spoke, far from their
masters' earshot, in hushed tones, of the "sad, troubled boy" when they were
feeling kind, or of the "lunatic" when they were not. Artias was not insane--if
anything, he was too lucid--he refused to allow himself to take for granted the
easy answers offered by society, by life. He refused to settle for an empty,
meaningless existence, full of pleasant-seeming and vapid superficialities, and
he searched tirelessly for an alternative besides suicide. He found his answer
in the depths of the library, inside a cracked and frayed tome caked with dust
and grime, clearly untouched by human hands for ages. It was written in an
archaic script, and bore no mark of an author save the mysterious engraving of a
scarab inside the front cover. He read, and with each page, his eyes opened
further Artias had finally found the understanding that he had sought for so
long. It brought no happiness, but rather furthered his profound feeling of
disgust. But the beauty of it was that at last his loathing had an object, a
focal point against which he could strike. Artias had always hated the world,
wanted it destroyed whole. Now he instead resolved to remake it into something
that would disgust him less.

It may have been the disappointment, the heartbreak, and the poorly-concealed
resentment they harbored towards their son. Or it may have been something else.
But gone were the smiling faces, the light hearts, and the unquenchable optimism
from the Al'tiago manor. His parents seemed to wither as time passed, their
hair fading rapidly to a blotchy grey, and deep furrows came to mar their once-
flawless visages. One morning, neither woke up. Some time later, the coroner
would find and be perplexed by a small torn scrap of parchment marked with a
scarab, tucked into the folds of their garments. As griev

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