The Story of Yellan Stow

A temporal omnipresence.

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  Yellan Stow, that great dragon, was not always the divinity we understand him to be today. He is known, now, as a great dragon, but before he was the hulking beast that he is today, Yellan Stow was a normal dragon, not the first, not the last. His four wings bore him great distances over the cold tundras of Mornstar, searching for prey, treasures, and most of all, other dragons. Not only did the great blue dragon wish to find a mate to sire him a clutch, he also considered himself a great combatant, and he was keen to prove it to any other dragon that may doubt him. It brought him great pleasure to accure scars, to plunder another's hoard, and that avarice was in all dragons, even then. Yellan Stow, whenever he had the opportunity, found himself enslaving the craftsmen of the mortals, for chief among his treasures were his collection of great books, and he had need of many shelves to store them. However, after a making a meal of a few of them, found dwarves, ancient humans, elves and other beings such as that to be quite disgusting. Eating them, he thought, was a great endeavour that beings such as him should not stoop to for the food they offered him. It was easier to take great fat cows and hogs as tribute, and take half the time to eat them for twice the food, than to fuss about eating his slaves when he no longer saw need of them. So he would freely distrubute the gold and jewels as repayment for the craftsmens' work, and he eventually became the safeguard, kingmaker, of a royal family in the ancient days of what would become known as the Triumverate. They were an elvish family, and Yellan Stow saw many of their generations grow from children to old age, and presided over the burial of many more. His library became known as the greatest in the land, and the advice from the scholars of these kingdoms was oft treasured more than any gold or silver. The deft tongues of these kings, trained in conversation with the blue dragon, were able to deftly avoid the great wars that plagued many other kingdoms by showing great skill in logic. Yellan Stow became a great researcher, and by and by he attained the knowledge of the creation of demiplanes, taking space in the space between and carving it out for yourself. Many sorcerers today can do it, but the rituals required to make permenant this space are of great undertaking, and they require the sacrifice of years spent in study. But Yellan Stow was a capable magician himself, and this was before that awful time, before the great war, when magick was taken from the mortals and gifted to the titanic animals the gods created to safeguard the natural order, so he was able to make himself a wonderous plane well equipped to hold his collection of books and treasures. Yellan Stow often valued the strange more than the material, preferring an object with a story to a gold coin. He had seen the rise and fall of many kingdoms in his lifetime, so a man's minted money had lost it's luster. When men can live and die by steel swords to win their kings gold enough to feed a kingdom, and it was instead hoarded, Yellan Stow secretly wept for the children that would starve, fatherless.

  Yellan Stow still was a capable vizier, overseeing the finances of his kingdom, and his great wings even bore him to sample the drinking water of the localities outside the walls. At that time, Yellan Stow still only had four wings. He was, after all, a blue dragon, scintillating amethyst hues like beautiful gemstones reflecting the light of Romoi's gaze. He collected odds and ends and stored them in his demiplane, but chief among them were books. He considered these to be great stores of knowledge, like chests of the written word. He was something of an antiquarian, but being antiquated himself much assisted in his study. In fact, many historians used him as a primary resource, for his memory was renowned for it's accuracy. When the three-petaled flower of Mornstar bloomed, when the first drafts of the treaty that created what is known now as the Triumverate, Yellan Stow was witness to it's signing. Then all men rejoiced, for the stagnant motion of commerce, oft stalled by inter-kingdom regulation, could flow as a river. Scholars from across the world flocked to the newly forged kingdom for it's freedom of knowledge. Many powerful wizards made their study under the wings of Yellan Stow, and he watched their minds bloom like a field of flowers, moments of realization lighting their faces under his incredible intellect. It brought him a pleasure that could be matched by nothing, but he understood the desire for knowledge frequently drove the ancient race to awful goals. Necromancy was an unsavory magick, even then, for the perception of those wizards who studied the force of life and it's cessation frequently wished, beyond all grisly means, for a scientific way to go beyond death, forever creating an immortal race of intellectual antiquarians. They seeked to 'cure' death, and it was against these that Yellan Stow found his first enemies.

  A student of necromancy attempted some foul magick to bring back the life of his mother without the soul. Today, it is understood that the mind of the person reanimated could never be the same without the soul, coaxed from it's plane of eternal rest by ritual and worship, coaxing from the gods and the affectations of mortals. Many scientists, magicians and sorcerers in those olden days sought to restore only biological function, never bothering to reforge the semantic link between the body and the soul. Many succeeded, and some succeeded still in creating a wholly new soul, sparking life into dead flesh. The most prominent of these researchers was Silax, a man who sought to plumb the deepest depths of knowledge that he could find, attempting to create simulations of his own soul in the event of his death. But chief among his pursuit was to bring his mother back to the world of the living without the soul, a goal which he accomplished and saw through to it's bitter end. The body had only the instinct to guide it, and it's unsettling countenance revealed it's thoughtless existence. The soul is necessary for intelligent thought, and life cannot occur without the occurance of a soul. What Silax had created was a body capable of motion, but reduced to it's most animalistic. It knew only hunger, it knew only necessity, but Silax did not see it for the horror it was. Either he was blinded by the monster holding the countenance of his mother or his own ambition prevented him from seeing and understanding the unnatural thing he had created. His cohort researchers called upon him to destroy the thing, and when he did not, he was expelled from studying with the minds under Yellan Stow. His unsavory study did not stop, but the stories of Silax, Narathrule and Brynskild are not this.

  Yellan Stow considered the grisly research of Silax over. The exiled sorcerer became quiet, and no news of him reached the college in the Triumverate. However, those among you familiar with Silax's story know this is not the case. He continued study under the cover of night in remote villages before finding more like-minded individuals, pursuing the Shrouded Answers. He was the one that called the abberant things to this plane, with a perversion of those sacred rituals, needing the assistance of the gods. Those rituals unnerved Yellan Stow, but when the gods came to the material plane, Yellan Stow's voice reverberated in his head, calling him to do something. His own thoughts detailed to him a process, something that would make him omnipresent over all of time, exerting his presence over everything. It would make Yellan Stow eternal, and would transport his consciousness back to the beginning of all things. Yellan Stow underwent the process in secret, acquiring the materials he would need to undergo the ritual. While he made these preparations, he realized that htis was the stuff of the gods, and that this ritual would place him among those same gods. He would meet, face-to-face, Folodar and Folodae, he could shake the hand of Romoi with his claw, and he carefully considered these steps. Would it be correct to commit these acts? To impose himself into divinity, when all he considered himself was a humble researcher? He assumed that somewhere, he had already done this, for what else could explain the thoughts of this ritual that were planted into his mind?

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