Elizadon's Story

Elizadon, known as 'Liz' to her colleagues, was born around 1500 years ago to a low class elven family in the so-called "Gateway Colonies" after the mouth of the Chrysocolla Sea. This area is currently known as Feylin. The landscape was very different at the time. There was no Fae Glen, the Mage Blight was much larger and the jungle extended much further East than it currently does. Much work was being done to contain the mysterious blighted lands in accordance to the Principle of Duty (an elf's duty is to protect the world from the mistakes of the mortal races). The principle that Liz was most interested in, however, was the Principle of Destiny.

The Principle of Destiny states that an elf is fated to live as long as they continue to learn. A bored elf is an aging elf and Liz was worryingly bored as a young adult. She made the decision to assist in containing the Blight in a more academic way; by joining the survey team tasked with discovering the root cause of the problem. She traveled all over the region, undertaking the dangerous work of studying plants and animals affected by the scourge, taking samples from blighted undead and learning a variety of spells that assisted her in these endeavors. It wasn't until her team finally reached the epicenter of the Blight that they were able to piece things together.

At this point their objectives changed. The colony's scientific leaders made the decision to abandon the surveys in order to establish an institute that would research and test methods of bending the thin fabric between this world in the next in order to form a wall around the Mage Blight. If the obelisk was a magical sink, perhaps blocking magic from entering the area would effectively contain it. With this reasoning her team set to work creating such a barrier. An abandoned orcish temple to the north was used as a test site. A miniature magical sink was placed inside and tests were performed by imbuing the physical walls with different types of magical insulation. A reoccurring issue they ran into was the formation of a sort of magical vacuum within the temple, which would cause the containment to collapse as the pressure built outside. The solution: a selectively permeable membrane that could allow controlled levels of magic to enter the temple when the pressure built too high. Using this method, the researchers were able to keep the artificial Blight in a state of equilibrium. This solution was quickly deployed around the Mage Blight, and the orcish temple was sealed forever, to be monitored at intervals as a long-term experiment. 

With this the Temple of Knowledge had achieved its purpose, but certain discoveries regarding the nature of time and space made during the pursuit granted Liz and her colleagues a whole new frontier to study.

It is this period of time that must be omitted, regrettably. Many more discoveries were made and much was sacrificed, needless to say. In order to circumvent the Principle of Unity (that no elf be permitted to kill another of their kind), Liz allowed herself along with several of her colleagues to be injected with experimental reptilian genetic material that altered her brain's biology. The serum was revealed to grant a secondary effect as well, replacing her need to learn and greatly extending her life, at the cost of her ability to procreate.

These breakthroughs never left the Temple, however, as the elves on the outside declared the work to be blasphemous. They claimed the academics had severed their connection to Tir Frig and as Liz examined what she had become, she couldn't argue. The only recognizable piece of herself left was her ambition, and it tasted like dust on her forked tongue. The things she had done in the pursuit of the truths of the universe could never be forgiven, but still she chose the path of atonement. What remained of her colleagues were sealed away along with her. Enchantments were placed on the temple to bind her to it forever and she contented herself with a new Principle of Duty: to protect the world from her own mistakes, and those of her people.

Liz does not consider this fate to be a bad one. She studies, reads, experiments, hibernates, and sometimes, if she's sure it's safe, she'll open the seal and watch the stars, recording how they've changed over the eons. Her rewired brain is incapable of boredom and although her body has continued to mutate over time, she's managed to reclaim a part of herself she had once feared lost forever, and this is her greatest solace.