Earnest Lyschtager

Earnest was a Human scion of the Lyschtager family, one of the wealthiest names around Cliffsunder. He grew up with everything money could buy but almost no attention from the people who gave it to him. His father Everard Lyschtager was an Angelborn and held an executive seat within the Fayan Trading Company, a position that kept him away from the Lyschtager Estate for most of Earnest's childhood. No one in the household spoke of Earnest's mother: Everard never mentioned her, and staff were forbidden to speak about the subject. Earnest grew up not knowing her name, whether she was alive, or whether he and his older brother, Everard Lyschtager II, shared a mother.

Earnest left the estate grounds only a handful of times before he was grown, raised by a rotating staff of nannies and butlers in place of his parents. They dressed him well and taught him manners, and he grew into a handsome young man for it, but the attention never made up for the isolation. Everard had decided early that his elder son would inherit his place at the Fayan Trade Company; once the brothers' shared schooling ended, Everard Jr. began working alongside their father there. Part of the reason was birth order, but more of it, Earnest came to understand, was that his brother carried the family's Angelic blood as visibly as their father did, and Earnest did not. Both boys were raised by the finest private tutors money could buy, but the tutors gave their real attention to his father's favorite.

He was regularly watched over by his father's guards, led by the fearsome blue Dragonborn Andurax Rasdaar. This lead to Earnest to studying the history of Dragons in the Pre-Unified Age more than any other subject, but the boy had no real peers to share his studies with. Earnest was deeply lonely, and over time this loneliness hardened into an intense chip on his shoulder. Left alone in the estate's enormous and ever-shifting halls, he took solace in the illusory statues of knights and paintings of heroes and monsters that lined the walls. He had no one to explain these legends to him, so for years he could not tell which of these changing magical scenes depicted real events and which were myth.

Unlike Everard II, Earnest was never taught the secret to navigating the Lyschstager Estate, whether from the same cruelty that shaped the rest of his upbringing or to keep him from whatever the deeper rooms held. He could move freely through the estate's ordinary wings, but the warded section stayed, for him, exactly the maze it looked like to anyone without the key. As a boy he spent a long stretch of time trying to find his way to his father's study, wandering the shifting halls on nothing but persistence, and eventually found a real painting. It was there, among Everard's things, that he first saw the painting of a woman he was never able to identify.

When his tutelage ended, Earnest received something that was entirely his own for the first time: a private account with a large sum of gold. The dream had never left him, and he set his caretakers to assembling a company of Adventurers, the kind of people he had spent years imagining from the artwork around him. It took considerable time and expense, but "Earnest's Own" had finally come together: the Orc Brute Argbar Magma-Arm, green dragonborn Druid Bealthissath Galdis, human Adept Allric, and Crossborn Elf-human Wizard Sylvain Mistivant. These seasoned veterans of dungeon-delving joined Earnest as hirelings, each promised a yearly pay of 5,000 gold pieces, half up front and the rest at year's end; by the terms of their hire, Earnest retained ownership of any relics or treasure the company recovered.

Together they took on a string of jobs, most of them unremarkable, though the work did turn up a Spell Scroll and a Fan Feather Token along the way. Earnest, however, sought more than that. He sought to find a forgotten relic, something that matched the scale of the paintings he grew up with. Rumors reached him of a temple of glowing light buried deep underground, and a lead eventually had Earnest's Own blazing through the northern Sea of Trees. They found a hidden temple south of the Ashen Ring, but nothing about it matched the rumors: its stone was carved black and swallowed torchlight, so dark the crew could barely tell the walls from shadow or the floor from a drop.

The party crept through the tunnels carefully, avoiding a string of traps, and reached a final chamber: a wide, pitch-black round room with a pedestal at its center. The rest of the party warned Earnest again not to touch anything as they checked the walls for traps and sigils, while Sylvain, sensing a staggering magical presence, began attempting to detect the disturbance. Before they came to a conclusion, Earnest went to the pedestal anyway. Set into the black stone at its center was a sliver of gleaming gold, and to him its light was unmistakably what he had been looking for. He reached out and touched it.

A colossal mechanism woke somewhere in the walls. The pedestal sank into the floor, the floor itself split and turned, and light broke through the widening cracks until the chamber was blinding. At the same moment something enormous crashed through the temple beyond, roaring. Allric saw Earnest standing at the center of it and shouted "What did you do?" before the floor beneath Earnest gave way and dropped him into the pit below. From the bottom, Earnest watched the light above fade back to black stone, and listened. What followed lasted hours: his company's screams, and the sounds of a creature that did not seem to want them to die quickly. When it finally went quiet, the only sound left was blood dripping down from the sealed opening above, and Earnest was alone again.

Groping through the dark, he made out a faint light against the far wall; it shimmered when he reached for it and let his hand pass straight through. Behind it was a chamber built from white stone, lit by sunlight despite being far underground, its walls running with a thin golden ichor. A sword stood sheathed on an altar at its center. The moment Earnest took up the blade, a voice spoke inside his own mind, calm and clearly coming from the weapon itself. It named itself the "Blade of Holy Vengeance," congratulated him on finding it, and asked him to become its champion:

"Will you bring the light to the darkest reaches of this world? Will you cut down those who act to snuff it out? Will you praise those who stoke its flame? You will be my champion, my prophet, the one who shall save the world."

Earnest walked out of the temple thinking himself the only survivor of Earnest's Own, and did not wish to assemble another company. He traveled alone, armed with the blade and guided by the presence inside it, a guidance he came to call the "Light". He began to live by its word, thinking himself a bringer of its glory, and preached the following tenets:

• Let none stand before the Light, lest their shadow fall upon the world and stay its radiance from reaching all who would behold it.
• The Light shall be held above all things and made to shine unveiled, its glory dimmed by no one.
• Darkness cloaks the hearts of those the Light has never touched, and their intentions cannot be known. Place no trust in those who dwell in shadow.
• Those who delight in darkness shall ever seek to snuff out the Light. When they come with such designs, let its flames be stoked anew with their blood.
• Brighter still the Light shall burn for those who follow its radiance; he who places his trust in its messages shall receive its gifts.
• None may grasp the true nature of the Light, for it is older than knowing. Those who would attempt to peer toward its source shall find only blindness, undone by a radiance no mortal eye was made to behold.