Part II – The Amorosi
Chapter 4 – The Blight
Location: Arbola Forest
Timeline: Sixth Age, 45th Year, Spring
I must confess, slogging through this tedious tale of Nathily and her saccharine Amorosi kin is a chore I endure with gritted teeth—surely as agonizing for me to recount as it must be for you to wade through, when every moment pales beside the grandeur of my own exploits. But who are you to question the demands of our God, eh?
But that’s the irony of it all. You mortals, in your boundless foolishness, believe that history is a straight line, a neat series of causes and effects. You write their little books and pretend you know the grand, magnificent tapestry of you existence. You see war and tragedy and call it a Blight, a plague on your precious world, something that simply happens to you. Yet you have no idea that the blight is not a curse of nature, but a gift from the gods. From me. The glorious, terrifying handiwork of a mind far older and more cunning than your own.
Arbola Forest, in a fit of absurd beauty, had burst into full bloom. The air, thick with the scent of wild orchids and moist earth, was a testament to the lie they lived. It was all a mask. I could feel the tension, the lingering residue of the council’s chaos, still hanging in the humid air. The Blight was not in the trees; it was in their souls.
As Summer draped the forest in its humid embrace, Nathily couldn’t resist poring over Dallegheri’s many scrolls —her people’s History of the Ages revealing, to her growing unease, how I, the God of Death, thrived as time marched on. A perceptive elfess, she turned to Dallegheri one rainy day, the faint patter on the thatch roof a fitting backdrop to her query: “But what happened to the Mylars, Nonni?”
The old lore master looked up from a scroll that dwarfed his lap and set aside his magnifying lenses—a clever trick he’d devised to defy age’s blur. He paused a moment as he listened to the rain before answering softly. “Countless Mylars perished when The Cauldron erupted into our world – for It’s was a violent birth.” A stray droplet slipped through the thatch, glinting on his parchment as thunder rumbled distantly, a low growl underscoring his words. “Having known only innocence, The Mylars seemed ill-equipped to fathom such a cataclysm.”
“But didn’t many Amorosi die too?” Nathily pressed. “Why did the Mylars fade while we endured?”
“An astute question, my dear, yet one even I cannot fully unravel,” Dallegheri admitted, laying his scroll aside to face her. “Perhaps the Amorosi bore our losses with greater adaptability than our older kin. Whatever the cause, the Mylars retreated into shadow, their perception of this new evil proving too alien for their fragile spirits to resist.”
[The old fool is wrong there. The Mylars – aka The Children of Mu – didn’t have fragile spirits or fear that drove them away, instead they chose privacy over submission – building themselves a giant ice wall around the flat earth in order to separate themselves. Yet I had the last laugh on them when I used my magic to lock them inside their self-made prison!]
The dim light filtered through the woven walls, casting long shadows and flickering as a gust stirred the oil lamp’s flame. Nathily reached over to clasp her grandfather’s withered hand, her empathy palpable. “Oh, that’s so sad, Nonni. Can’t we help the Mylars?”
Brushing a tear from his eye, Dallegheri smiled. “Little one, I believe the Mylars thrive still, in their own secluded way. They shun all but their beasts and arbols, emerging only in dire need. Is that so terrible a fate?”
“Were there no happy times in the Second Age?” Nathily asked, fear tingeing her voice.
“Hmm,” Dallegheri mused. “The Mylar Recessions early in that age were lamentable, yet our people found solace amid the gloom – for we enjoyed nearly a millennium of what our historians named The Epoch of Peace.” The stillness after the storm lent his words a fragile hope, sunlight piercing the clouds to gild the wet leaves beyond their door.
“Oh, yes!” Nathily interjected. “But it lasted only a thousand years, while the Second Age stretched five hundred more. What filled the rest?”
Folding his hands into his robes, Dallegheri sighed. “With the Mylars’ retreat, we Amorosi rose to prominence—a period also known as The Golden Season.”
“That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?” Nathily ventured.
The ancient sage raised a cautioning finger and, as if on cue was heard the distant croak of a raven, as he replied “In spite of its glories, our historians insist those days paled beside the harmony we once shared with the Mylars.”
Then it was that the old elf grew tired of further conversation, leaving Nathily to her books as the day’s warmth settled into a drowsy haze.
As summer deepened, Nathily delved further into The History, her fascination warring with dread as she traced the details around my crafting of new races – all chronicled with surprising accuracy by her elvish scribes. She learned about the Ogres – first hewn by me from The Cauldron’s stone, with some I later forced underwater where they evolved into the Octeti that spread across TerrVerde’s seas. Next she read about the Morati – the walking dead I birthed from a captured Amorosi’s defiled bones. Nathily read these horrors by daylight, for she was wise enough to know the subject was too timid for night’s shadows, but when she learned how the Morati’s victims later themselves rose to join the ranks of the undead, the elfess fled to her friends’ carefree company for weeks to escape the nightmares the tale caused her.
Even still, The Histories pull was relentless. Eventually she was back beneath the Grand Oaks, while her peers swam the Eld or plucked berries, reading…always reading.
Soon she learned how I birthed the Pyrhalli – creating them with Mylars I melded with The Cauldron’s bats and spiders to create a breakthrough race capable of self-reproduction. [It was in fact an important leap in my genetic mastery]. Nathily read how The Amorosi Golden Season crumbled under the Morati’s blight, and how my minions—Ogres, Octeti, Pyrhalli—swept east to the Stax, west to Kra, south to Gor, bending a those lands to serve Baal-Zebub’s grand plans.
[That’s not correct —my goals were my own, a point those shortsighted scribes missed].
The midday sun beat down, casting stark shadows that danced with the wind, and Nathily’s growing unease forced her to search out her grandfather with more questions.
“How could we let Azazel do this, Nonni?” she demanded, finding Dallegheri at his desk. “Couldn’t we stop him?”
Pausing over his page, the withered scribe sighed, the flicker of a beeswax candle illuminating dust motes in the cramped study. “Because of Death, child, our people learned to kill—a necessity that stripped away our innocence. I pray you never face such a loss.” Tears welled in his myopic eyes, his hand stroking her face, for he foresaw her Azora path and the death it would bring her to know. And again he could say no more on the day.
A week later, it was Dallegheri who sought Nathily – finding her outside watching the sunset as the twilight sky was still streaked with crimson. “Sit, raggamina, and hear some hope. Not every new races was created by Azazel. For Destiny aided us against his evil minions with the Pietromi—stone men, or dwarves, as some call them, but they call themselves ‘drokka’— and you have roll the ‘r,’ dear.”
“Drrraawlka?” Nathily giggled, mangling it, her voice mingling with the evening chorus of crickets.
“Close enough,” he grinned, before going into more details about their allies – claiming the dwarves were created by Promesius (the Amorosi’s name for the lumearc Rhokki – the ‘god’ of their people).
[The entire tale was a fallacy – surely you remember that the Drokka were merely a human lineage from Adam’s line that migrated to TerrVerde with their father Kane and later escaped slavery by seeking refuge in the Rhokki Mountains – where centuries underground warped them into the squat monsters they became].
Oblivious to the truth, Dallegheri droned on. “These Pietromi curbed Death’s hordes, though not as your ‘Defenders of the Light’ like our people. Instead they fought from vengeance, not virtue eager for revenge against their rivals – The Boogiti goblins whom they were once slaves to.”
“That’s awful,” she gasped. “Wasn’t there another way?”
“Who can say?” Dallegheri shrugged. “War’s ways elude me. The drokka’s purpose, or so they believed, was to erase Death’s creations, yet they’ve been locked in a forever war with their rivals – for the Boogiti goblins are a fearsome bunch and control nigh the entire western portion of our world.”
Nathily shuddered, “A forever war? That sounds terrible indeed.”
“Indeed,” Dallegheri nodded. “But Time passed and the Third and Fourth Ages birthed new races—The Cavalli and The Myz. With them came the gods Inanna and Gwar to help Azazel and Mannah to do the work of El-Aba. All these shaped Terra’s chaos.” His eyes narrowing as dusk deepened outside, the old storyteller continued. “And the simplicity of life continued to fade. Eventually the Pietromi’s War of the Ghast saw decades of bloodshed on such a grand sale that Death’s stranglehold seemed that it might overwhelm the entire flat earth. It was a futile mess – proving that the sole victor of war is only Death Himself.” And once more exhausted, Nathily was force to let him rest – e’en though the elfess yearned to know more.
“Tell me of the Myz, Nonni,” Nathily stood in the doorway of her grandfather’s cottage – her Azora destiny still stalled by Rian’s delays.
The night air was thick behind the elfess, buzzing with the hum of unseen life.
Dallegheri winced. “‘Wish not without knowing,’ child—you may get more than you seek. The Myz, bloodthirsty fiends, turned The War of the Ghast upside down, eventually leading to the idea of your Azoras.”
“Speak on!” she urged, closing the door behind her as the starlight glinted off the Eld beyond the room’s sole window.
Reluctantly, the ancient one obliged. “Before the Myz, before Azoras, our people fought with sticks and hands, clueless against Pyrhalli and Morati. The drokka’s combat knowledge eventually taught us the forgecraft for bows and rapiers—more graceful tools. Our Protectorates formed and I will attest that even I joined one. It was The Oak Brigade—‘Sturdy and strong, we Oaks right any wrong!’” They both laughed at the thought of Dallegheri as a fighter and he quickly admitted. “I’ve never killed mind you and that’s a legacy I cherish.”
“Why the wars, Nonni?” she asked. “Why can’t the people of the world just be content?”
“That’s a difficult questions, my love.” Dallegheri faltered at the thought of such waste of life. Yet he rallied as moonlight silvered the room. “On a positive note, after The War of the Ghast, a half-millennium of peace graced the Fifth Age. Yet, perhaps because we could see the future of where the world was headed, we Amorosi withdrew to the Forests of Arbola, Regalis, and Meridia – seeking Alyssa’s solace. For our innocence, like the Mylars’, had long since slipped away.”
Tears brimmed in Nathily’s eyes, prompting Dallegheri to pluck a tome from a nearby shelf, its leather creaking in the stillness. “A sidebar, raggamina—the rise of mankind. Madra, El-Aba’s mate, sparked it, causing El-Aba to subtly bless an ape to evolve over three million years into the Pecora.”
[All Nonsense—Adam and Eve were my design, not some ape’s ascent].
“Pecora means ‘sheep,’ not ‘ape’!” Nathily crowed, thinking she’d trapped him, her voice cutting through the night’s quiet.
“True,” he conceded coyly. “We call them ‘sheep’ for their folly—Free Will, El-Aba’s Giftcurse, lets them chase any god which then lands souls in Illyria or Illusia. A flaw we Amorosi, bound to Alyssa, thankfully escape.”
[Oh, you are so wrong old one. It is I who gets your souls in the end!]
“I’m glad for that, and the Mylars’ watch,” Nathily sighed, hugging him as an owl’s call pierced the dark.
“Indeed,” he twinkled. “Wherever they may linger.”
But then the elfess looked up at her grandfather, her eyes suddenly swimming with tears. “One thing I can’t understand – this world, it’s filled with so much… grief,” she whispered, her voice heavy with the weight of her ancestors’ pain. “How can a world so beautiful have a history so… violent?”
Dallegheri reached out and gently closed the book. “The past is a heavy burden, child,” he said, his voice thick with a sorrow that was both personal and generational. “But we must not let it define us. We must choose to be better. To live in peace. To choose a different path.”
[A beautiful sentiment, Dallegheri, but complete and utter lie].
It was a fitting close to their discussions even as the forest whispered its own secrets around them…
The Apocrypha of Azazel 