Talk:Darklord

Quoting Meredoth?

So, in the Fraternity of Shadow's netbook "Survey of the Nocturnal Sea Expedition", there's a sequence where our viewpoint protagonist comes off the short end of an encounter with Meredoth, the epic-level Mystaran necromancer who is Darklord of Todstein Island. To cement his victory, Meredoth leaves our protagonist a little "gift"; a mental torrent of issues showcasing Meredoth's home of Glantri, which almost drives him mad with the scope of how high a magocracy can climb outside of the Demiplane of Dread, followed by him mocking the Fraternity of Shadows for how weak and pathetic they are compared to him. I've quoted the sequence here, but I was wondering if it belongs in a Meredoth segment for this page?--QuietBrowser (talk) 08:31, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Fuming, I drew my spectacles from my waistcoat to peruse the damage and see what might yet be salvaged from this calamity. I donned the tinted lenses....

Soaring on air, miles high, amidst tremendous drifting masses of levitating rock, each great floating monolith crowned with ornate mansions, towers, gardens...

Rugged snowscapes glittering under sapphire skies, across which a liquid ribbon of fire arched impossibly from peak to peak, between smoldering twin volcanoes…

Banner-draped vessels, bows engraved with the proud crests of noble houses and carven into the likeness of fantastic beasts, gliding like swallows in an aerial regatta…

The brightly-shimmering curve, glimpsed greenly through seawater, of a crystalline dome enclosing a city of men, built far beneath the waves…

An open-air arena overlooking a vast sphere of scintillating force, within which two figures in flowing robes hurled fire and thunder at one another in lethal contention…

Another city, vast enough to swallow Pont-a-Museau in but a single neighborhood, streets arrayed like the facet-lines of a jewel, its grand vistas a-swirl with flying carpets, chained elementals, architectural impossibilities and works of arcane artifice…

A tiered assembly-hall, its very air saturated with concentrated power, in which dozens of stately, self-important men and women sat in sober council, each clad in the ornate robes of an arcane master, as hundreds of additional seats stood vacant, awaiting further arrivals…

An orb of blues and greens and wispy whites - could it be a world, as they exist beyond the Mists? - shattering like blown glass, coruscating magma glowing redly along gaping fracture-lines, till its fragments split asunder to drift outward in silence through the star-flecked depths of an unfathomable black void…

And all along, as visions of unbound magic's wonders and terrors unfolded, the grating voice of Miklos' killer jeered in my mind:

Call yourselves "wizards", do you? 'Esteemed Brother', yet? HAH! Cringing cowards, the lot of you, hiding your power from ignorant drudges who rightly should BEG to lick your boots! Aping science in your practices, of all fool things: are you ASHAMED of your magic?

Look upon MY' world, dabbler, and behold how arcane might TRULY rules! Not craven conspiracies lurking in shadow, but POWER! Not wheedling schemers' paltry dreams of usurpation, but CONQUEST! A real wizard doesn't let reality frighten him away from true power, he frightens REALITY into heeding his bidding! The power to bend worlds, to own them, to destroy them, is his to TAKE, not covet in impotent envy.

So timid a will does not deserve magic's full bounty. I have relieved you of what you never earned, pretender; flimsy spells of falsehood are all you deserve to keep.

Tell your spineless masters your turncoat "friend" is not here. If he were, rest assured that I would have leashed him by now: he, at least, had the courage to seek power worthy of a mage's effort, and might have made a useful tool.

The dead of Nebligtode do as they're told. The living emulate or join them.

Learn from their wisdom, mageling …

and

LEAVE

ME

ALONE!!!

And with that final, shrieking insult, and that cataclysmic image of a world fracturing like crystal, my mind and senses became my own again … and the paired, tinted lenses of my spectacles and the signet-etched silver buttons of my waistcoat burst, as one, into dust.