The Tower's
Trial

You are the most brilliant mage of your generation and you know it, which is most of your problem. Frail of body — a childhood illness left you with a constitution that would embarrass a scholar — but ferocious of mind in a way that made your tutors deeply uncomfortable. The only path forward was the Ultimate Trial: retrieve five Dragon Orbs from five chromatic dragon lords, each ruling a domain of elemental terror. Pass the trial. Claim your title. Prove once and for all that brilliance is a sufficient substitute for everything else.

No one told you about the complication. No one, it turns out, knew. The five Dragon Orbs are not merely powerful artifacts — they are anchors for something ancient, a consciousness that was bound into the orbs as a form of prison centuries before you were born. An archmage. Dead for three centuries but not gone: compressed into something between memory and will, distributed across five objects, waiting for someone ambitious enough to collect them all.

Every orb you claim makes the presence stronger. Past a certain threshold — represented by the Corruption Meter reaching 75 — he doesn't ask permission anymore. The campaign ends not with your death but with something worse: your erasure. He keeps the body. You keep the memory of having made every choice that led there. Your companions are the only counterweight the campaign provides, and the nature of corruption is that it will always whisper reasons to push them away.

Robes the color of neutrality — a deliberate choice from someone who has never been neutral about anything. Golden hourglass eyes that arrived with the illness, which may or may not be a coincidence. A sharp tongue deployed as both shield and weapon, often in situations where neither is appropriate. A deep insecurity about the frailty of the body that houses the extraordinary mind, which has created in you an ambition that sometimes looks like courage and sometimes looks like its exact opposite.

The ancient presence has already begun. You felt something shift when you claimed the first orb — a warmth that wasn't yours, a clarity of thought that felt borrowed. You told yourself it was the orb's power integrating. The Corruption Meter begins low. It will not stay there. What keeps it in check is not willpower — willpower is exactly what the ancient presence is best at subverting — but connection: the specific, unglamorous, inconvenient work of letting people care about you.