Eternal

Year 566

You lie on your bed struggling to remain conscious, but this is it. You aren’t winning this battle and with as much as you hurt, it’ll be a relief.

Your bed is surrounded by those loyal to you like Sightmaster Crowley. Indeed he’s the only one left of your old staff that managed to survive the plague. The Empire still survives, but just barely.

Jennifer’s message of fanatic loyalty to you lives on. Dissidents are no longer a problem mainly because they’ve either all been killed or died of the plague. Crowley has expressed that while initially these vigilantes were useful when chaos threatened to take over they are now bordering on making the Empire unstable again with their increasingly fanatical faith. They’ve gone so far as to start accusing Empire officials and soldiers of not being loyal enough.

This isn’t your concern anymore however; this will be Crowley’s problem. Your life long struggles about making the hard choices and decisions are over. Maybe you didn’t make all the right ones, but as the past flashes briefly in your head, you take solace in the fact that you tried your best in an unforgiving world.

In your final moments a wave of peace washes over you and for a brief second your body ceases to feel pain. You also see a clear image of Alison in your mind looking just as she did when you first met her. She seems so real right now; that you almost think you can touch her…

Everything goes black.

Your body is kept entombed in a simple mausoleum in Apex. Crowley doesn’t want to play up your death too much as he has enough problems keeping the cult that’s formed around you in line. In fact as soon as he takes power the first thing he does is have Jennifer assassinated in the hopes that her death will cut off a major source of the problem.

It doesn’t. It only allows another fanatic to take over and then another, and then another…

Eventually the Empire is in chaos again when there simply isn’t enough military to keep order anymore. Crowley has all his Eyes relocate to Apex and threatens bombardment of any city that doesn’t stay in line.

This works for a little while, but the “True Believers” on the orders of Jennifer’s son, Marcus, hijack an airship and fly it into Apex. Lacking the engineers to upkeep the flying city at the best of times (due to the plague), the damage is not repairable and the city spectacularly crashes into the heartland of Nalin killing thousands as well as Crowley and the Eyes.

With no proper ruler and mass devastation to a good chunk of Nalin, the Empire begins to fragment. Rask breaks off on its own consisting mostly of the orc tribes that fled there during the plague. Quala and what little territory the Empire held on to in Arat become lawless wastelands again.

Nalin is where the real change takes place however.

Taking full advantage, Marcus and the True Believers quickly establish dominance in the region and within a few years a new government is born. A theocracy dedicated to you.

At first you were just revered as the defender of the Empire and its citizens, but in time the message became twisted and changed to suit the purposes of the clergy power structure.

You became the destroyer. A symbol of annihilation and what happens to societies that don’t follow a “certain path” (whatever that may be to whoever is telling the story) Tales of how you destroyed the first Empire because it failed to live up to its greatness and then the Nalin Republic when it grew too weak, and then the second Empire’s plague when its citizens turned against it, and then Apex when its leader attempted to suppress the people…

If a massive catastrophe or upheaval occurred then somehow you were responsible, even decades and centuries later when other nations eventually emerged, you were still somehow linked when they inevitably suffered their own downfalls. At times individuals who were directly responsible for such things ran around claiming that they were you “reborn” or an “avatar.”

Your legacy is one of destruction and perhaps in some ways it is appropriate, but one thing is certain; you were and always shall be ETERNAL.