The Wizards of Wonder and the War for the Eye

A Bombastic Beginning The Antecean Empire will forever be remembered as humanity's triumph and the civilization that cemented them as the dominant species in Archaios. The empire lasted for over a thousand years and stretched its influence to the archipelagos of Lapis Taris to the south, the frozen, jagged mountains of Horizon to the north, to the glittering Sea of Embers of Requiem to the east, and ended in the shade of the ancient jungles of the Sylvanlands to the west; all interconnected by a trans-planar Nexus. It's crown jewel was the Arcanium: the premiere magical institute of the realm and veritable assembly line for the empire's future mage-lords, arcane advisors, generals, and alchemists.
And it was also home to three boisterous youngsters who would go on to influence the very fate of Antecea.
Brynn was a shy, studious elf and scion of a dynasty of elves that sided with Antecea during its early expansion and became a prominent influence throughout its history. With little say in the matter, Brynn was shipped off to the Arcanium as soon as he had completed his preliminary studies. Young, even for an elf, Brynn was something of a loner until he found himself adopted by who would quickly become his two best friends.
Tovenaar was something of an anomaly among the apprentices at the Arcanium. He did not come from wealth or influence. Indeed, he had little idea as to where he came from at all. He was found as an infant by a middling wizard in Castellum and brought to the Arcanium where he was effectively raised by the wizards. Brilliant but reckless, without any true parental figures to guide him, Tovenaar often found himself as the instigator of many magically-imbued shenanigans.
Benevolence was a tiefling with a troubled past, having been shipped off to the Arcanium in the hopes that she would bring be a source of wealth for her uncaring mother. Her infernal heritage was constantly a source of resistance in her journeys, but she always made the effort to present herself as an upstanding, kind, and patient individual.
The trio had made quite a name for themselves as troublemakers within the Arcanium, but it wasn't until one fateful day that they took things too far. Through means he was reticent to disclose, Tovenaar had "retrieved" a wand of unknown purpose from the headmaster's chambers. When attempting to discern its purpose, they seriously injured a fellow student. Tovenaar and Benevolence were subsequently expelled for the offense, as was Brynn when he named himself as an accomplice, much to the surprise of both the other two as well as the headmaster.
The headmaster, however, was fond of the trio, and was loathe to see such promising careers snuffed out before they could truly blossom. And so, in secret, he devised a way that the trio could amiably return. Not long after they had departed the Arcanium and had some success as wandering adventurers, the headmaster contacted them and revealed that the school was searching for an artifact of great power, but the search was mired down by political red tape. If they were able to retrieve the artifact and "gift" it to the Arcanium, they would likely be welcomed back with open arms…
A Sinister Secret Unleashed With their new group of adventuring companions, the trio, through a convoluted treasure-hunt styled adventure, located the artifact deep within the untamed Liminean Wilds, a forest regarded with mystical reverence with a dark reputation for keeping all who enter. The artifact in question was a statuette depicting a strange, draconic creature held within what appeared to be a fortress formed by the surrounding trees. However, the group was misled. The statuette was no artifact, but a prison containing an ancient and extraordinarily powerful entity, and the careless touch of an unknowing adventurer was all that was needed to unleash it from its prison. Cataclysm was free.
The embodiment of chaos took the form of a semi-corporeal, shadowy serpent. It taunted and vexed the party; goading them into attacking it. The resulting battle was a disaster. All but Brynn were brought to death's door, with Cataclysm choosing Benevolence as a suitable "host" to see what's become of the world in his absence. Brynn, on his last legs, demanded that Cataclysm take him instead. Amused, the creature acquiesced. However, before he could fully merge with Brynn, the cavalry arrived. The headmaster, along with a contingent of battlemages, teleported onto the scene and engaged with Cataclysm. Even with their combined might, the battle was hard fought. The entity was destroyed, but at the cost of the headmaster's life.
And with the headmaster dead, so too died the trio's hopes of returning to the Arcanium, as the remaining archmages had no personal connection to them nor saw any reason to reinstate them considering the outcome of their adventure. Despite this, the trio had become adventurers in their own right and had a wide open world to explore and make a name for themselves.
Little did they know, though, that beings like Cataclysm weren't so easily slain, and even as they celebrated his defeat, he was already coalescing his essence in order to wreak havoc on the world at large…
A Wrathful Resurgence Cataclysm would not resurface for close to a year later, but when he did, the whole world felt it. In the interim, while Brynn, Tovenaar, and Benevolence were off becoming seasoned adventurers and expanding their arcane knowledge, Cataclysm wormed his way into the ears of several prominent members of Antecea's aristocracy as well as those of a number of currently dormant rebel groups that still lamented the Empire's abandonment of their gods. With but a few whispered words, Cataclysm set them on a collision course that resulted in an all out civil war; a bloody sequel to the first civil war that nearly sundered the empire 80 years prior.
Like dominos, more and more rebel sects were spurred out of hiding by the resurgence of their comrades, until the entire Empire was thrown into a guerilla-style war of attrition, one that quickly found the trio thrown into the thick of it. Their discovery that Cataclysm was behind this happened quite on accident. The party had stumbled across the remains of a bandit ambush gone horribly awry, where a sole survivor recounted the horrifying order of events in which his small band had intended to waylay refugees or small supply chains, but were rebuffed by a man who conjured "an unimaginably powerful serpent of smoke and shadow;" the spitting image of the form Cataclysm took to fight the trio back in the Liminean Wilds.
Horrified at the implications, the trio set out to find the entity and deal with it once and for all. Assuming Cataclysm was behind the rebel attacks, the trio and their party became specialist agents of the Empire and worked their way up the intelligence chain, constantly scouring field reports and intelligence briefings for even the slightest indication of where the creature was hiding. Simultaneously, they also began searching for means of permanently putting down Cataclysm. The going on both fronts was slow, and during their work as specialists, they were privy to all manners of atrocities and tragedies of war. For Benevolence, the only thing she took solace in was knowing that this was all happening because an embodiment of chaos was pulling the strings.
In time, Brynn learned of an artifact locked away in a secure vault called a Harmonic Disruptor: a weapon said to have been used during the fabled Abyssal War that could bridge the connection between a celestial or fiendish entity's physical avatar on the material plane and the extraplanar realm in which it's true essence resides. With quite a deal of smooth-talking, subterfuge, and good, old-fashioned heisting, the party was able to retrieve the blade. Unfortunately, they had made precious little gains on actually finding Cataclysm. But as it turned out, this was a problem that would rectify itself.
The trio's exploits had not gone totally without notice, and it soon became clear that someone from very high-up the chain of command had taken an interest in what they discovered. When a platoon of Imperial soldiers attempted to arrest the party and confiscated the Disrupter, they suddenly realized that Cataclysm had been hiding with the Empire this entire time.
Officially labeled as traitors, the party was forced to go on the run and infiltrate a fortress renowned for its impregnability, a reputation that succumbed to the tenacity of the trio. Finally, they found Cataclysm at the top of the tower, having possessed, to their surprise, the body of a lowly servant within the tower. By his own volition, Cataclysm had done nothing more than whisper in the ears of those in power. The gross atrocities that the party had witnessed throughout their campaign were wrought by mortals alone. This particularly shook Benevolence, who until now had clung to the belief that such things would not have happened without Cataclysm's influence. With that, the party attacked, and while the battle was by far the most challenging thing they had ever faced, a killing blow was landed with the Disrupter, which disintegrated with the impact.
But unbeknownst to the others, Tovenaar had different plans for the ancient entity…
A Dastardly Deception Over the three years in which the party sought Cataclysm, Tovenaar could not help but ponder how much lost knowledge and lore the entity had access to. Theoretically, this was a being that has existed since the dawn of time, surely simply destroying it would be a waste. Driven by curiosity, Tovenaar came to the conclusion that if Cataclysm could be trapped within that idol once, it could be done so again. With his newly granted clearances, it was a simple matter to retrieve the idol, and when the time came, Tovenaar subtly sabotaged the Disruptor and coaxed Cataclysm's shattered essence back into the idol.
With Cataclysm ostensibly gone, the trio was able to convince the general who had ordered their arrest of what had truly transpired and were subsequently reinstated with honors. The civil war soon sputtered out with news of a primordial being pulling the strings from the shadows, and ironically, the trio was welcomed back to the Arcanium.
While experience had taught Brynn, Benevolence, and Tovenaar far more than a classroom ever could, they did accept the offer for access to their research facilities, as a new idea had consumed them, specifically for Tovenaar and Benevolence. Troubled by the worst of humanity that they bore witness to during the war, the pair wished to find a way to "correct" a misguided world. Even though Cataclysm was gone, there were still any number of unknown threats out there just waiting for the opportunity to disrupt the delicate peace that had been so painstakingly achieved.
And all the while, Tovenaar whispered with Cataclysm; probing him for lost secrets and forgotten lore. He learned of the long-lost Sorcerers of the Age of Awakening and their Gems of Power. He learned of the People's First and their mastery of the Foci and of long-lost ways of improving on magical artifacts. Armed with this knowledge, the trio again set out with their adventuring party to track down suitable "template" items for a new concept Tovenaar and Benevolence had conceived: the Oculus Infinium. The amulet, which would be comprised of two halves, would allow them to tap into the Weave of magic directly, like a mobile Foci, and allow them to stretch their influence across the Weave's entirety. This, of course, would never come to pass…
On the evening that the pair had finally gotten the enchantments on their respective halves to "stick," uniting the amulets revealed to Benevolence that Cataclysm had been influencing Tovenaar. Dumbfounded that the man she thought she could trust above all else was secretly conspiring with an embodiment of evil that had orchestrated the deaths of so, so many, she struck out with blind rage. Brynn, stumbling across the altercation, attempted to put a stop to it, but was accidentally struck down in the attempt, and in the chaos, Tovenaar fled.
Overcome with grief and rage, Benevolence took on the moniker of Rapture, becoming hellbent on forcing the world to conform to her concept of peace and goodness or die. Meanwhile, Tovenaar, who quickly earned the nickname Shepherd from his followers, designed to placate the masses through magical subjugation, effectively removing the choice to be evil.
A Wearisome War The two friends-turned-bitter-rivals raised followers to their cause, finding purchase with many who had grown wearisome of the Empire's endless machinations and disenfranchised with the civil war. During this time though, Tovenaar approached his old adventuring friends. He confided in them that he had learned a troublesome fact in regards to Brynn's demise (though he did not reveal his source). He discovered that long ago, during their first encounter with Cataclysm, the entity had partially bound Brynn's soul to him, so when he was killed, his spirit was drawn to Cataclysm's domain in Elemental Chaos. He beseeched his old friends to find a way onto that plane and recover his spirit. If they were successful, they may even be able to resurrect him.
Ultimately, the party succeeded, believing that their victory was possible because Cataclysm was "dead" and therefore unable to actually defend his prize. Despite the lack of a proper host, though, Brynn endured an unknowable amount of time in tortuous conditions. When he returned to the material world, he was not the same man he was before.
Hardened, Brynn soon realized that the two he once considered his closest friends were no more. He saw that their conflict threatened to irreversibly send Antecea into a death spiral, and it needed to be stopped. He knew that adding a third army to the mix would only draw out hostilities, and so he gathered a small team of his closest allies, who came to call themselves Night Blades. They vowed that they would protect humanity from the edge of oblivion and began doing all in their power to push the flow of battle away from population centers, disrupt supply lines, interrupt communications, and chip away at the fringes of both armies without ever revealing themselves as an organized force.
Brynn knew this would not be enough, however, and sought a means to annul both Shepherd's and Rapture's Oculus halves, which he considered the driving force behind the conflict. His solution was the Rod of Neutralization. The rod took some time to build, however, and in that time, the fighting only became more fierce. Shepherd had begun bolstering his forces with necromancy: reanimating fallen soldiers and bestowing undeath upon his more powerful lieutenants. In the final days of the conflict, he had even beguiled a bestial white dragon into his forces. Despite this, Rapture was able to slowly route his forces, pushing him back to his mountain fortress: the ruins of an old dwarven outpost seized and subsequently abandoned long ago by the Anteceans.
It was at this final battle at Shepherd's lair that Brynn was finally able to act. Infiltrating the battle and waiting for the opportune moment, Brynn watched from the shadows as Rapture and Shepherd battled face to face on the subterranean bridge in front of the main keep. The two clashed with their Oculus halves, and when the two energy beams were about to collide, Brynn and his team acted; nullifying the blasts and reflecting them back on their wielders. At the last possible minute though, Brynn could not bring himself to destroy Rapture. He cast a simple spell, deflecting just a fraction of the blow. While Shepherd was wholly disintegrated, Rapture's body was left intact.
The Aftermath With the battle concluded with the apparent death of their commanders, Brynn faced a difficult decision. The Oculus was undoubtedly dangerous, and allowing them to fall into the wrong hands could prove disastrous. And yet, he found it difficult to simply destroy his old friends' legacy, even if they could be destroyed by conventional means. Instead, Brynn opted to seal away Shepherd's half within his lair, using Rapture's half to invert the protection spells Shepherd had put in place previously. He then went with Rapture's followers and saw her interred along with her amulet within her own base of operations: a fortress she built over the original location of Cataclysm's prison within the Liminean Wilds. Satisfied with the location of both halves of the Oculus and believing them safely out of reach (but still accessible should they ever be required in the future), Brynn left to mourn his friends, taking the name Lonelei as his "adult" elven name.
Little did he know though, that both his friends had survived the blast. In secret, Shepherd had learned the means to achieve lichdom from Cataclysm (at least partially achieved by destroying the Arcanium during the war), and had reformed within his lair mere days after his defeat. However, he found himself unable to breach the magical defenses that had been turned against him. And thus he was trapped until that fateful day over a millennium later. Rapture, on the other hand, had been placed into some sort of magical coma that preserved her through the ages, likely due in part to the bizarre, otherworldly magics at play within the Liminean Wilds.
As for Brynn, he did his best to dedicate his life to rebuilding Antecea. He hid away the Rod of Neutralization within a Gauntlet beneath the ruins of the Arcanium. For 40-odd years, Brynn battled with the embroiled politics of the Antecean Empire, eventually realizing that it was beyond saving. Too many cracks had emerged from the recent turmoil, and those in charge were too obsessed with consolidating power to truly enact the change needed to keep it afloat. The point of no return for him was when an assassination attempt ended up killing his wife, Numeria, whom he had met in the senate shortly after the war. No longer seeing the point in attempting to resuscitate the society that had failed his friends, he said his goodbyes to his remaining family and joined his old adventuring friends for one last adventure. His goal was to locate a mystical island that had long since been a point of curiosity for him. Old elvish lore spoke of an island that sat out of time and was a sanctuary of peace and respite for all who could find it. Ultimately, he was successful. There he established a monastery dedicated to his particular Arcane Philosophy. And there he has remained ever since, slowly making peace with the events of his life and believing that he alone remained of that fateful trio, at least until one day, when a surprise visitor washed up on shore…