The Ever-Burning Ember

Kharon

Kharon. The sudden harshness of this name softens at the end, when spoken. Yet seldom do we speak the name Kharon, and the hardening of the once-living Amurtu Kharon happened in the later decades of life. At the beginning, the child, the youth and young man, was--not quite soft; rather, let us say, tender. He was, by many accounts, a pioneer of virtue who forged his own way out of a decadent family line. And then, after long years away from home, he returned. Some say he was merely heartbroken, unlucky in love. Those tales, I contend, are charmingly reductive; romantic glossings-over of a more complex story of variegated paths to power, the emotional dynamics of sapient relationships, and a convergence of three remarkable figures. A paladin, a seer, and a witch--a tale for another time.
Many tales for other times lay raveled within the name Kharon. For those of us undaunted by the complexities of being and relating, for those willing even to gaze into the realms of shadow and undeath, the spiralling stories of the Kharon name, bloodline, and darkly-intriguing factions sprawl in webs of influence through the corridors of time. This is the tantalization of history: choices lead to more choices, and all these choices are, at root, the simple consequences of sapient beings. Period. Simply by being, we shape the world.
I digress into philosophy, again. I intend this to be a more succinct account of lost-and-found faith; yet, I am, as my students know too well, endlessly distracted and fascinated by intricate divergences, by the complexities woven over time through the consequence of simply being. Bear with me.

Faith and Desecration

Sapient willfulness may know no bounds. We are falliable beings prone to excess. Kharon's excesses were many. In this story, we are focused on his arrogance and ambition. I believe that Kharon's arrogance and ambition led him to willingly invite corruption into his body. We know well that he imposed this corruption of shadow--namely, vampirism--onto countless others.
Vampirism is a particular kind of contagion of shadow that thrives in hosts who will themselves to be seperate. Indeed, some believe that community and interdependence are great wards against vampirism, and that's an interesting conversation to have. Likewise, faith. As faith in gods, nature, and/or the holographic nature of the cosmos gives rise to feelings of connection and security, then faith too may act as a ward against vampirism.
When we recognize this, we then can easily recognize the sensibility, the reasoning, that drives acts of desecration. Let us examine this word, "desecration": it is, in essence the denial (de) of the sacred (secration). When Kharon and his followers commited the desecration of the Seven Holy Temples of Niook, they were motivated by this drive toward separation. They chose to break bonds, to create vast spaces between sapient relationships with the divine and with nature. And so we arrive at what, to me, is the iconic event in this cluster of acts of desecration: the extinguishing of the Eternal Flame of Pallasia.

Extinguished, But Not

Ah, but you cannot extinguish what is eternal. Only arrogance or ignorance (here I avoid the temptation to digress into the linguistic connections between these two words, as well as the underlying philosophical connection--but, see me about this) would lead someone to believe that they can extinguish what is eternal (interesting, as well, to look into how this relates to the undeniability of existence, of divinity and sapience--but again, see me later).
Pallasia is the sun; the Sun. She is undeniable, the closest bit of the eternal and the infinite that any of us can see and experience. She is the mother of all we see, breathe, and pretend to know. To attempt to extinguish the sun is futile and insane. And this is exactly what Amurtu Kharon did. It was his last act on this side of the Shadow Veil. So the story goes: as Kharon personally slaughtered the templars of the Palace of Light and extinguished the Eternal Flame, he became fully consumed by shadows of his own creation. He consumed himself in this act of denial, fading--impoding perhaps--into dimensions of unlife that are hideous to imagine.

The Ever-Burning Ember of Pallasia

Could it be that the Eternal Flame has returned to Niook? As we enter into the 104th year of the Fifth Era, a bizzare and ragtag band of misfits have come forward with an ember that cannot be extinguished. Improbable as this is, it is less improbable than the sacred flame of divinity being extinguished by shadow. Many will simply tell you that such a thing cannot be.
Many questions arise, and perhaps the loudest, most persistent question we are hearing and asking is: "Where?" Where did they find this ember? Their answer is the Fae Noir. The Faen, the realm of shadow that runs--what? Parallel? Counter? Against? The realm of shadow that, let us say, coexists with our reality. And so we receive this information and marvel: how an ember of the Sun, a thread of the Eternal Flame of divinity, smoldered for centuries within the folds of shadow. The dimensional explorers who returned this Ember to us tell a remarkable tale of how a centuries-old seer, with visible veins of shadow spread in webs under translucent skin, stared for an uncomfortably long minute at one of them--a kobold also visibly touched by shadow--and then led them deep within damp, crystalline tunnels. There, in a small subterannean shrine, rested a black iron lantern.
"Pick it up," the seer said. And the kobold did. "Open it," the seer said. And the kobold did. Inside, they saw cold ash and cinders. They waited in silence--not long, though it felt long. The flame woke. With a whispering exhale, the cold coals, dormant for centuries, were suddenly alight.