User blog:Doctor Ibrahim/After Such Knowledge

 After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?

              'Take this down, Asja. Use the diction parchment, please, and date it for today. This will be an entry for the sanctioned chronicle, not my personal one. ' ''            What day draws near that I hold these thoughts now?              Perhaps it is not often that I prove myself wrong, but even less so am I by others. When I announced my ascendancy to the city-state of Whitemarch, they said that it would be impossible; they said it would fail. Stories of infighting and vice within the city flew about the Demon Lord’s court from lips that knew no candor, and I had borne them long enough. I confess that I believed some, if not most of them. I was not deterred. I knew that something enduring could come of it; that the success of the task lay not in its ends, but in its execution. If I failed in the experiment that was Whitemarch, others might follow in my wake, and learn from my mistakes---I only had the faintest hope that the Elves and Dwarves and Centaurs would survive long enough to see such times, and daily my doubts grew. Even then, years ago, I felt that the choice was not mine to make, and within my hopes for the city, the shadows grew long.              Imagine my wonder, then, when I actually was proven wrong by a single man.              I had watched him since he had arrived at Etrugia, just when it was starting to succeed in its defense against Nilhasse. He arrived there suddenly, his broken Golem on his back, and without so much as a week’s rest, set about his work in that shattered city with a passion I can only describe as dauntless. My agents watched him for several weeks, and that was when I found out he was a Doctor; I also found out that he was the long-rumored pupil of Melandil of Arenesse. His history I was to discover later. What thoughts drove him with such fervor I could not then remotely guess, but I quickly realized I had to get him to Whitemarch before he died in that pointless, unending civil war.              By the time my agents found him, he had succeeded in establishing himself as something of a local saint. Despite the grievous state of his Golem betrothed, he worked tirelessly with that miserable, war-wracked population, healing them, helping them find food, sheltering them. His tiny shanty became both hospital and hostel to a dozen people at a time. It was only with enormous difficulty that my agents were able to convince him to leave; only after the assurances that his charges would be well taken care of did he decide to depart for Whitemarch.  <span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            I spoke with him at length personally upon his arrival. He was fatigued from too little sleep and food, made apparent by the unceasing worry I read in his face; no doubt his wife’s care was utmost on his mind. I told him that though I knew of some of his endeavors, it mattered not what dark ends he had achieved to save her, and after I assured him that he would have a fair practice in Whitemarch, I offered him the unlimited resources at my disposal so that he might heal her fully. I admit, in my many years in the world, rarely have I been so deeply touched as with his gratitude, even as he attempted to subdue it. So genuine was he that I personally saw to it that he was supplied with his starting materials at first light. That was how I won his confidence, and fairly.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            It was after that I asked him to account her discovery, a request that he reluctantly fulfilled, but fulfilled nonetheless, perhaps as much as for his own conscience as for my curiosity. Beyond the fell halls in which he found her I knew not what he had done, and I allowed him to come to his terms with it and tell me in his own time, which he did. The shattered Golem that would later become his beautiful wife knew nothing, but when I saw that he protected her with a ferocity unbecoming of his character, I guessed that he had come to more than he had sought within those shambling Ruins. I was correct, but loathe to be so, when I discovered the price of his success.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            He never knew that I had watched his pursuit of the Ruins of Thure since he had crossed the wind-scoured Habareks as a stripling, but he confided in me what he had faced there, alone, within the depths of that city. It was there that he discovered the Golem, and fell in love, and the Glyph, which bonded to him. And it was thus I learned of Ibrahim’s great test within the Ruins, one that no being, no mortal nor eternal, would pass but he. It was not the terrible Lich, that keeper of the old graves, the old lord of the barrows, that dreadful remnant of the Past Days, that was his test. Vile was Victivius, to be sure, and a cold terror in his might. Ibrahim ultimately succeeded, but at a price most dear, one that would take him years to comprehend. He passed the Glyph to the wrecked Golem as she lay dying in his arms, that she would live, and not be the last victim of Victivius. To surrender the Glyph, as he did---he had no idea what he had relinquished.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            Or, perhaps he did. For love, to give a second chance to a being who was but a mere construct, whose original purpose was to be used and then abandoned. Before, he was a sorcerer of no small talent, but with the Glyph, what was within his grasp was to be measured beyond mere power… '' <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;">''<span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            I then had no doubts that I would find him to become the the one that would truly mend Whitemarch.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            And he did not disappoint. After receiving his stipend, almost immediately he opened his practice on 8th and Cross, recruiting his help from local women. He hired an Arachne as a barber-surgeon, and a Holstaur as an apothecist. Night was when he worked the hardest; toiling ceaselessly at the task of building his wife a new body, rarely sleeping. He eventually did, of course, but it took him a year, and she was indeed one of the finest examples of the craft I have witnessed, followed closely by their four daughters in the following years. They are his every joy, and having met them myself, I am inclined to agree to their charms.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            In my years of knowing Ibrahim, I have come to understand him as few do. He is a difficult man to take at face value. To the casual observer he is equal parts anxious and aloof, eager to observe the world around him while maintaining as much distance between it and himself as is possible. He appears often as being overly serious, a chronic killjoy with little else than self-preservation in mind, worry looming over him like a storm-draped curse. He seems quick to take offense and slow to accept new ideas, cautiously poring over every detail until the threat of danger is all but eliminated.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            I will put to rest these lies. Asja, write down all that I say, and accurately. I will review this later. (Docket #23-1: The scrivener wishes to note that the following opinions are the speaker’s own, and do not reflect that of the scrivener.  This note to be stricken from the record after the record is complete.  Doing so will take time.  Close docket.)  '' <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;">''<span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">           To know the Doctor is to understand that he is the sum of a contrasting life, fragmented, short, but extraordinarily blessed. I had to piece together what I already knew with a history I paid dearly to see third-hand. I knew of his biological family when he was young and they still in Ettinall, before it was appropriated by Nilhasse, but it was only after he left the Elves at Arenesse that I learned of his story. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, a gate to the depths of the arcane and a sorcerer born. His family lusted for a position within the Order’s papacy, and did their utmost to have his sorcery clandestinely trained in Nilhasse, back when it still allowed Mamono citizenry. His education was an immense failure. Ibrahim was a brilliant but inadequate student; his teachers believed him to be a mere mage, and forced him to learn subjects he did not need nor want, and thus, with no guidance, he fared poorly. He was heckled endlessly, and it eventually came to great peril; in a blind rage he lashed out, the fury of his arcanum destroying half of the school and very nearly killing an adolescent Hellhound. In the end it took the entire staff and seven of the Order’s most powerful regional mages to subdue him. It was the single most prominent incident that led to Nilhasse’s ruling cabinet to adopt the Papal Bull of 866 banning all magic and Mamono within its borders, and all this while the boy was still only fourteen.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            His family immediately disavowed him, but by then the toll was taken; their machinations were uncovered by Order inquisitors and they were summarily executed to a member, along with extended family, that the bloodline of immeasurable power be extinguished and leave Ibrahim with nothing but his first name. By the time this trial had passed and Melandil of Arenesse had personally shielded him from the Order inquisition by the sole power of his influence, Ibrahim knew nothing of what happened to them and only learned of it after he departed as a young man. And, owing to the testament that is Melandil’s instruction, he accepted it. Perhaps that itself is evidence to how he was placed within the family’s considerations; such an auspicious birthing is no coincidence, as it takes little stretch of the imagination to know what the promise of power will drive men to do. But he took the news of their deaths as a man takes news of the passing weather, and with the Order no longer a presence in the surrounding lands due to the war of ascension between Etrugia and Nilhasse, he left to find the Ruins, and thus began his descent into the inevitable.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">             Though the events of his life are who he was, they do not define him. I have watched him work. I have been with him as he has healed the sick, as he has held the hands of the penniless dying. I have watched him birthing children, both human and Mamono, and seen him treat mother and child as if they were his own, and ease the hearts of the young fathers with pats and comforting words. I have seen him work for days without sleep, poring over procedural minutiae for a patient’s delicate surgery. He has starved so that he may feed others and gone without that others may have, and rare is the coin that rings in his pocket long before finding the palm of the needy. He is friend to the Dwarves, mediator to the Elves, and would be hard pressed to find a stranger in the dells. He has about him a warmth and mercy that is unflagging, even in the face of the worst imaginable to the commoner, to which such kindnesses are esteemed. And I have seen his other side---the side he never truly tore free from the Ruins.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            To that end, I can say that he is a singular man, and utterly bereft of personal fear. I consider these things before the shadows fall upon my mind.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            I know of the expeditions he took after settling here. I funded them. I knew that beneath that generous, worthy exterior roiled an agony that would have no rest until it had possession of what he sought. His passions did not change him; rather, they drive him back to depths trodden by those who left nothing but memories, or less. There are places outside the unwoken world unknown even to one such as I, and there has he been, and seen, and drank deep from those wells of bitter truth. Whether he chooses to chronicle what he saw is unknown to me, but I know he has walked paths that shake even my resolve, and he has been places beyond those still. Of these he will not speak; only he grows a sullen expression, grim and drawn, and I can see that to even think of it blackens his very bearing. To know of such things is a matter, but to be there and back again, and unchanged, is inconceivable. I myself have traveled the plain of the ether and its vast roads afar, but the Doctor’s shadow has darkened the dim palaces long locked away, spiraling and forbidden, even to the Gods. It is knowledge he seeks and it was there he found it, and finds it yet, and stills it beneath his quiet mien, held tight to his breast until the dire moment of his wrath---and woe unto the one who bids him use it in his hour.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">             Of these things I have already spoken, and will say no more, but instead, this. Now, the tongues of the Demon Lord’s court are still when I enter the hall of the Obelisk; my eyes are met with averted gazes and meaningful silence. They have come to know what I already did know. This is why.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            Once, when the Demon Lord summoned me, and wanted to meet this Doctor who had so changed the fate of Whitemarch, he accompanied me, unmoved. All in the attending chamber knew of his trials; there were no secrets he held. I listened as the Demon Lord greeted him, and to the things of which they spoke for a time, but I watched him.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            And I watched, and listened, as she asked him if he desired any favors, that she offered freely, and without bargain. He said he did not, but one: he said that she knew of the Glyph of Thure within his gentle, beloved wife’s breast, and how it kept her and their children alive, and how it was now failing, for all things are known to the Demon Lord. And to this she said, yes. And he asked what would become of them, and what he must do. And she was silent, and still, until it filled the hall. And she spoke, her voice beautiful and sad and the truth.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            And I watched as he listened. In the silence after, the attending Lilim said nothing, but even in the dusk, I could see their glistening faces; we are all Mamono, and our hearts broke as one as we heard her answer, as I watched Ibrahim through my own blurred vision and my body shook. I watched as her gentle words tore him like knives, and how he stepped back, and fell to the steps, and put his trembling hands to his face. No sound echoed within that vaulted chamber save the grief of a man who had learned he could do nothing.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            Utterly bereft of all personal fear but one.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            I understood then the order in which Ibrahim obtains what he desires; it is with the sheer resolve of the Human, that fragile being, who does not waver in the face of eternity, but confronts its stare, and endures, defiant. Soon comes the trial that will be passed upon those here. The ordeal they face is binding and more than mere alliance, where all peoples who have gathered under its banner must face the impossible task of persevering against a fate that will not cease against them until they are gone. I will lead them; that is my cause.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            But among them is the man who will lose everything, and knows, and stand with them regardless.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            And he will find a way.  <p style="margin:0in0in10pt;"><span style="font-family:"BookAntiqua","serif"">            He must. ''

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