Nakish, Ahemat's Bane

The Tale of Nakish
You see a stone forge, marked with glowing runes. It is flanked by three mages on each side, hands splayed, and chanting. The fires within burn a deep, bloody purple.

At the mouth of the forge works a human smith, wearing a simple wrap about his legs, a thick pair of scorched leather gloves, and closed toed boots. His brawny torso glistens with sweat in the forgelight.

He works night and day, as the sorcerers come and go in shifts. He is working on a single blade.

It takes shape slowly. Each layer seems to drink in the arcane fires around it, as the sword is folded again and again.

When it is complete, the smith quenches the blade a final time in a cask of strange, syrupy liquid.

He lays it out and examines his work, panting. The sorcerers have already retreated. The smith mutters to himself:

“I did not expect this blade to take so much from me. It will be my last, I think. And perhaps my best. It has a thirst all its own. A calling.”

The craftsman does not rest. He sets about buffing, grinding, and sharpening the blade. It would not permit him to wait.

-.-.-

You now see the blade strapped to the back of a soldier, wearing the ancient garb of Lazar. He is standing atop an enormous wall, spiked with fin-like pyramids jutting from the otherwise flat frontward face. The soldier trembles. Outside of a bubble extending perhaps a mile out from the city, chaos reigns. Black fire rains down from the sky, blasting the ground below into planes of chaotic glass. The fire itself howls, and swirls, with eyes and mouths peeking out from its depths to delight in the ruin it causes. It is impossible to tell whether anything yet survives anywhere else in the world. One does not dare to hope.

-.-.-

You see the blade, bright and shining, nearly the height of a grown man in length. This is the first time you have seen it unsheathed in all its glory, and you see now that it is inscribed with several lines of runes, telling its deeds. They run along the curved spine of the blade, which is wide and flat like the swords held by the Order of the Blades in Lazar.

The current bearer stands amid a pile of wounded men, fiercely keeping a platoon of Schir at bay. It is hard to tell whether it is his strength, or the strength of the sword that keeps him standing. It is one of many such tales in these dark times.

-.-.-

In the centuries following the Desolation, it was discovered that the sorcerer-kings who betrayed mankind were rewarded for their treachery. Granted new powers and new armies by the cataclysm, each set themselves in one of the ruined strongholds of the region, looking to dominate the others—and more importantly, the holdouts in Lazar.

It began as a besiegement of the city. Lapping hordes of demons crowded the desolate glass plains, clambering up and over the walls to get at those inside. The men and women of Lazar fought desperately, and the fighting forged them anew. What started merely as platoons of guardsmen on the walls grew into a fighting force feared by the demonic hordes. This was the beginning of the Blades.

<p align="LEFT">As the decades began to pass and the Youth yet survived to hold the portals closed, the demons slowly began to thin in number. The Sorcerer Kings set their sights on the strongholds of one another, each thinking to conquer and consolidate the others into one army, and thereby take the City of Man. Their infighting only weakened them—only gave the Blades a chance to turn to the offensive. This, then, was the beginning of the first Crusades.

<p align="LEFT">The Crusades lasted for over a hundred years. They began as a series of guerilla raids intended to provoke the demon factions into war against one another. As time passed, they gathered momentum, until the Lazarene armies found themselves toppling the Sorcerer Kings one by one. They fielded valorous, shining armies, which marched the desert to besiege great cursed ruins. They had not the resources to settle or fortify any of these City-Strongholds, and would leave them unmanned in favor of more sensibly sized forts and waystations.

<p align="LEFT">As victory followed victory, It seemed that the bright spirit of man would win the day. That the guiding hand of The Youth would show them victory. It seemed too good to be true.

<p align="LEFT">It was.

<p align="LEFT">The Youth, in fact, was much too preoccupied to be guiding anything outside of the dream realm. There was another hand at work here. Ahemat, first and shrewdest of the Sorcerer Kings, had been using his own daemonic and undead forces to soften up the others. He would harry and torment the other daemon armies, leaving them overwhelmed and undermanned by the time the Blades struck. And as each of his rivals fell, Ahemat would gather what remained of their troops and pull them south. South, to the black stones of Arken—once the largest city in the Empire.

<p align="LEFT">It was here that he would draw the armies of Lazar. Lure them into a false sense of security and victory, and overwhelm them when they came for his seat.

<p align="LEFT">And so it happened. Or, it would have, if not for the bearer of Nakish, the bright blade of Ahemat's Bane. As the armies of Lazar were ambushed and encircled outside the black walls of Arken, this hero led a picked troop of warriors up into the city through its catacombs. He stormed the throne room, where Ahemat scried upon the battle through mirrors of crystal. The ancient hero managed to overcome the Sorcerer King in single combat, at the cost of his own life. His lifeless body was dragged from the city of Arken by his three sisters, the only surviving members of the troop he entered with. They bore him back to Lazar rallying what they could of the shattered Crusading Army as they went. Lazar would never regain the strength they had during the Crusades—but then, there was never again an enemy strong enough to demand it. Without the Sorcerer Kings to guide them, the daemon armies became more of a pest problem than an existential threat. And so the city returned to small scale raiding and patrols, and thus they continue into present day, where they mimic the glory of the Crusades with a ragtag mercenary horde at their gates.

<p align="LEFT">-.-.-

<p align="LEFT">You are in another vision. Following its victory over Ahemat, the blade Nakish is being placed back into its pedestal in the Chamber of Heroes at Lazar. A priest in gilded robes of the Third Synod gently slides it tip-first into the solid stone. It glows a deep, bloody purple, before darkening to reveal a new stanza of runes along its spine. The priest releases his grasp on the hilt, and sighs to the scribes behind him.

<p align="LEFT"> “It will rest, now. The blade will not be drawn again until an even greater shadow lays upon this land.”

<p align="LEFT">He closes his eyes for a moment, and then turns to leave before his scribes have finished taking down his words.