A Competing Power
The feeling of elation was pure as the patience of 500 years bore macabre fruit.
In a small village, a fledgling healer had become known for treating the bites of poisonous animals, and news of this skill had traveled far to a local academy. With the mission to assess this healer's skills and ensure their veracity- a dean had been sent to observe.
The skill and alchemy the doctor wielded were undeniable, the dean affirmed easily after speaking with villagers. He learned that the local had produced an alchemical product, an anti-venom, that was nearly panacea and could treat a variety of poisonous wounds. The dean (a skilled doctor in his own right,) was understandably envious of the results and gave way to wickedness. Being a man of healing, he could not bring himself to harm the inventor but instead snuck into his home and managed to copy many notes by way of calligraphic magic.
While the books reproduced, he set to the task of finding any ingredients and samples that might prove helpful. Finding and examining a rack of several compounds, the dean absently failed to note and correct the capsule's order in the darkroom of his espionage. With the copies complete, he departed the village post-haste; without ever actually speaking with the healer. He would go on to produce and self-credit for the creation, unbeknownst to the true inventor who would go on to face a very different kind of life altogether.
Returning to his work later, the young healer knew not their imminent doom. Through alterations in the alchemy caused by the mistake of ingredients, he was consumed in a cloud of magic. When the villagers entered the study to investigate the healer's disappearance (and ultimately declare an assassination,) they found the presumed cause of death: a red snake that fled the now-open door.
The Snake would spend the next 500 years in a state of undeath- unable to die from poison, regenerating freely, and advancing their theories of necromantic and healing magicks. The mistake of the dean both cursed and blessed the healer.. but without a suitable body, there would be little to do over eternity.
In another life, the Sacred Flame came to the attention of the Stellar Mage Gunthor, whose pursuit of flame and light magic had become obsessive, risky, and now led them to darker experiments. After months of stalking the insane, proud Gunthor, the Snake interfered in the Mage's final moments...holding his skull between life and death as the fire and the phantasm realm converted the body and affects of the Mage.
With the skull unyielding to the Quantum Shadow as long as the Immortal Snake resides within, the old healer has a body to command, seated at the gate-throne of the skull, whose roots reach into Phantasmagoria.
Entered by: 0x10DC…1855 and preserved on chain (see transaction)
