You have been asleep for centuries. It has been a low sleep, a deep sleep, the slumber of ages, yet now at last it comes to a close. You have dreamed for millennia, but something within you demands that the dream must end. Wake, it pulses. Wake, and walk wide the waking world.
You are not sure exactly when you wake, but there is a moment when you become perfectly aware that you are standing on a cold stone floor in utter darkness. When your eyes adjust, you can just make out the shape of a door a few feet beyond you.
Your first steps are plodding, weary things as your long-atrophied muscles struggle to remember exactly how to work.
The door shifts open beneath the weight of your fingers. Weighted with the dust of eons, it slides open with a mournful groan, opening into a vast hallway that must have been majestic once. Tattered banners long rotted to string line the walls, and great runes are carved in swirling patterns along the floor. With every step you take, memories flash through your mind.
You remember fire and gold and trumpets in the night. You remember armies so vast their marching shook the earth, and dark ships that blackened the waves, with sails that blotted the sky. You remember being born. You remember screams, and dirt, and your first gasping moments as you rose, fully formed, from the beating earth. And beyond--snippets of the life before, all those centuries ago.
You are a golem, a thing of mud and earth, given form and shape by a human soul, or Animus. Your strength comes from theirs, and their skill, image, and strength are yours. It was their life that shaped you, and has made you who you are. The sorcerers who made you chose only the finest for your Animus, as was custom.
If you think, you can remember their screams.
The Crow [] Born into drudgery and misery in the bowels of a vast city, the woman who would become your Animus learned to survive and defend for herself in darkened slave pits and mines. She was possessed of some small skill with magick, and managed to enact her escape from the mines. Her freedom was short-lived, and when the soldiers came for her, she fought for her life, but to no avail. She was enslaved by first one master, then another, and finally sold to the cabal of sorcerers you would later know as your Creators. Though she is long dead, in you survived her will to persevere above any odds, and, perhaps, her last wish--to be free one last time.
(Gain Animus: The Crow)
The Eagle [] Raised to fight from a young age, your Animus became one of the most skilled warriors of his era. He fought in countless wars as the empire expanded it's vast domains and spread it's reach across the world. Though he was trained to be without emotion or compassion, he came to love the beauty of the far-off lands he encountered in his campaigns. Ever-loyal, he fell fighting at the walls of an ancient city whose name is lost to history, and his maimed form was carried back home. Instead of the laurels and victory he expected, he was sold by his former commanders to the highest bidder like a piece of meat. You remember his rage at betrayal, his staunch resolution, and his final, yearning desire to see the far lands of his youth.
(Gain Animus: The Eagle)
The Raven [] Born a child of one of the empire's leading elite many centuries ago, your Animus defied the will of his father, a prominent general. As a youth, he threw himself to books instead of sparring, and dreamed of the far-away lands of which he often read. He became a studious man, an apprentice in the arts of sorcery and magick. In time, he might have been a great sorcerer, one of the greatest of that Age or any other. But the sorcerer under whom he trained grew distrustful of his growing might, and so betrayed him and murdered him. His last thoughts were of the far-off lands of his childhood.
(Gain Animus: The Raven)
The Hawk [] He was a proud warrior who came from a foreign land to the Far East. His childhood was one of shifting deserts and great flowering cities in the scorching sand. He became a favored friend and companion of the King of his land, yet in so doing gathered innumerable foes. His enemies arranged for his capture and enslavement, and though he fought bravely, he found himself bound in chains and sold to strangers from the west. His life ended far from the land and lord he loved, and his last thoughts were of home.
(Gain Animus: The Hawk)
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The hallway slopes into a great passage, with winding curves and designs that obviously signify some great ritualistic purpose. The runes on the floor spread slowly to the walls, and at last to the ceiling. Behind your eyeballs, something burns as you look at them, and drives you to find your way out of this place. At last, the passage winds upwards, and you feel a cool breeze in your face.
You emerge from the tunnel into the top of a great hill. Above you, the sun shines in a great blue sky, and below, the world rolls away in all directions. Westward, it rises into great mountains that, ever-soaring, snap at the sky, while to the south the earth flattens into a vast plain that, boundless, touches the horizon. To the east, a vast forest rolls away from the mountains, and a single, massive oak, visible for miles, towers above the canopy. Northwards, there is only flat, cracked earth that rises grudgingly into the great hill on which you now stand.
Wake, and walk wide the waking world.
Questions roll through your mind, each more pressing than the last. Where is this place? Why do your memories slip away, fleeting? Where are your masters? Where are you?
Wake, and walk wide the waking world.
Feelings stir in your gut, fear and anxiety and an urgent sense of loss, a craving for something you do not know. You must...
You must...
Wake, and walk wide the waking world.
Pick a direction.
[] North
[] West
[] South
[] East