The room around you glows with the soft light of a fire. This place is warm, it feels like home. You look at the table in front of you and find a piece of paper, folded and wrinkled. It seems to have been ripped from a book. Something about it calls to you. You cannot help but open it and read.
The First
-------She was once a sorceress, a timid but powerful mage. A woman of blood and bone and magic, feeling and breathing. She was once alive.
-------Long ago, before the Dungeons, she was a scholar for a now-long-dead kingdom. A kingdom wrought with peril and wrong. The constant wars had grown to separate the kingdom. The men of the mountains became the Dwarves. The men of the forest became the Elves. The men of the sea became the Orcs. The men of the desert became the Humans. The men of true magic, her people, became the Dead.
Smudges and smears ruin some of the text. You continue on where you can.
-------She had been injured in a battle and as she searched for safety, she found a cave. She stayed inside that cave for three nights, attempting to heal herself. With little success, she withered, slowly dying from her wounds.
-------The fourth night, it rained and she journeyed farther into the cave. Her spells, that kept her warm and bathed in light, began to falter. She was lost inside the darkness and cold around her.
-------But she continued farther, feeling her way through the depths until she stumbled upon a grotto with glowing water. She drank from the pool and became the first of the Dead. That is when she learned to read time backwards, to see the end before the beginning.
-------And when she saw the end, she left the cave and found her people, who thought her forever gone. She told them of the grotto and of the end. They listened and followed her, journeying into the caves. She lead them to the pool and had them drink. And the rest of the Dead were born.
-------They built a home inside the cave and carefully carved out more, letting the light of the pool guide them. They created many exits, all over the land, places that the First’s visions marked as important. For as the nexus of the Dead, only the First could read time backwards. The gift had not been bestowed upon the others of her new kind. But this, in fact, saved the Dead, they would not be eaten by the prophecies and magics that would later take over the First. They were allowed to live as they had above ground.
-------When they built the final room inside the cave, the First told them of a final prophecy, a prophecy forgotten to all but the Dead themselves, before vanishing into the depths of the cave…
Hastily scrawled writing is legible at the bottom of the paper.
