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//Author’s Notes: Written in 2014. This was a requested “character background” for a player character I had in a friend’s D&D campaign. Vanik was an Elf Warlock who seemed consumed by a quest for knowledge, no matter how forbidden, but never spoke of his people, who, by all accounts, had been wiped out generations ago. The DM wanted to know more about the character in order to provide potential plot hooks and storylines for him and the party down the road; sadly the campaign ended before there was much more exploration in that vein.
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Just under a century ago, in the mountain village of Kavagh (southwest of the Old Sarum Fields), a bastard elf was born. This was a rarity – most of the Lunar Elves of Kavagh practiced abstinence until their Joining Day – those that did not would almost always quickly wed when a female became with child. Yet this was not the case with Aba’Kin’Av. She carried her child, her burden and scandal, to term by herself. She gave her life for the child, as no village mid-wife would assist her with the cursed birth.

That would have been the end of this bastard but for the kindness of Y’An’Viid, sage of the Kavagh Scriptorium. Desperate for more help dusting and organizing the archive’s many texts, he took the child in, and named him Aba’Ma’Shuur, honoring the bastard’s mother in spite of the disapproval of the village.

For many years, the precocious elf child fought with his peers, constantly reminded of his mother’s death and his father’s absence. At least once a season, An’Viid would have to apologize to the school’s headmaster for his ward’s tendency to threaten other students with “bastard magic”, an entirely fictional but convincingly terrifying school of powerful evocation.

When he wasn’t seeking revenge on his bullies, young Ma’Shuur spent all of his free time in An’Viid’s library, more often reading the texts than putting them on their proper shelves. It was with both joy and relief that An’Viid was able to ’employ’ Ma’Shuur into the scriptorium at the record setting age of forty. Never had a bastard been appointed to duty within the stacks, nor any elf as young as Ma’Shuur, but An’Viid knew his young charge’s thirst for knowledge wouldn’t be slaked anywhere else in the village.

Ma’Shuur worked dutifully for twenty-three years in the Archives before finding the tome that would change not just his life, but all of Kavagh, and quite possibly the very fabric of reality.

He found the book in one of his favorite areas of the library, reserved for untranslatable texts, and was surprised to have not seen it before. There was no writing on the black binding or the cover, only a small symbol carved on the front by what seemed too rough to be a dagger, but too large to be a claw or talon of anything but a dragon. Ma’Shuur traced his fingers over the eight pointed star and felt, no, knew, that this was not a book… this was his book.

That first night, he learned nothing beyond the fact that the book was there – he heard an apprentice sage approaching and was afraid someone else might see his prize, so he tucked it back into the pile. But the next night, he made sure he was alone and opened the tome.

The cover was shiny and scaled like abalone, but charred so black that Ma’Shuur was surprised no ash rubbed off on the tips of his fingers. The pages felt like vellum, though thinner than most calfskin. Most shocking was that despite its obvious age, the book did not have the musty smell he’d expect, but rather, smelled like a coinpurse of the copper pieces that human tourists liked to spend when they visited the village.

Each letter on the inside was inscribed twice in immaculate script, one laid over the other. Below was what appeared to be a root language of Primordial, which Ma’Shuur spoke and read, but not this ancient dialect. Above appeared a slightly more recent dialect of Old Fey. What little Fey An’Viid had taught Ma’Shuur did not help with the translation of this book at all – the Fey dialect must have pre-dated Elven civilization by a millennium or more, and though the stylization of the symbols was familiar, he couldn’t translate a single letter.

More notable still was that while the older root text appeared as though a dark grey shadow on the page, the old Fey appeared to be written in a different, brown, ink, and more recently. The book was full of letters, designs, and thangkas of what seemed, perhaps, to be arcane rituals. His curiosity piqued, Ma’Shuur pored over the book every night after completing his duties.

An’Viid only noticed that the younger sage was being extra attentive to his work, and paid no mind to the long stretches the orphan was spending in the darkened corner of abandoned texts. For months, Ma’Shuur simply flipped the pages and studied the words and diagrams, trying to find any chink of translation that could begin to give him insight into the work, but every night was as fruitless as all the nights before. There was nothing to be gleamed from the pages as he saw them.

It was on one of these nights, nearly a year later, that Ma’Shuur was falling asleep when he thought he had hallucinated the words translating themselves. As he was nodding off, his mouth half open, his chin slipped from his palm and he bit his lip. As the blood splashed onto the page, he saw the Fey letters reforming. They first shifted to match the shadows underneath, then formed into Elven script – the local Kavagh dialect, no less!

Convinced his mind was finally snapping, Ma’Shuur closed the well-worn tome and walked outside. He woke himself up in the cool night air, sipped from a fresh mug of cider, and smoked half of his pipe leaf before returning to the archives. He walked straight back to the book and opened it to the page he’d been falling asleep over, expecting to see the old Fey he’d pointlessly studied for months. Instead, he saw the Elven letters as they’d appeared before his brief respite.

He was as excited as he was terrified. He’d heard of but never actually seen any kind of enchanted tome. Worse, he had heard of dark magics involving the use of blood for fuel, and they were almost never ‘good’ or pleasant for those who encountered them. Still, his curiosity was stronger than his caution, so he found a quill and nib, and pricked his finger. He flipped to the first page of the book, and traced the pre-Primordial letters in his blood. As he did, they reformed as the others had, and each letter in Fey was replaced with fresh red letters in Elven that he could read, the shadows underneath them growing darker as the meaning became more clear. He finally could read the title:

The First and Last Tome of Azathoth

Mana-Yood-Sushai

Eternally Sleeping

Nucleus of Chaos

Sultan of the Dark Tapestry

The Blind Formless Chaos Beyond The Stars

The Unknowing God

Father of the Seugathi and Neothelid

Mother of Rovagug

The Anticipation of Creation

The Herald of Destruction

Though Ma’Shuur had not lost enough blood to explain the sensation, he found himself drained from only translating the first page. Though his heart was pumping fast and quick, his brain seemed foggy, and he felt an unconquerable urge to put the book away and go rest. He did so, and when his head touched the pillow in his loggia, he found himself trying to understand just what it was he had found.

He’d never heard of this ‘Azathoth’, and though the number of titles the being seemed to hold impressed him, he couldn’t help but wonder if this was some elaborate joke on behalf of some old Fey scribe who ensorcelled the book. His mind was enchanted with the idea of discovering more, and he felt his mouth wordlessly whispering ‘Azathoth’ as he drifted off to sleep.

He dreamt that night, not of his mother or of books that would sort themselves, but of flying. He first thought he was in the night sky, the stars above him, but then he looked down and saw that the stars surrounded him – he was no longer bound to the terra firma, but among the stars themselves.

Among the dots in this endless expanse he saw darkness – but not the moonlit glow of the night sky, a true black darker than fresh ink. That was what Ma’Shuur wanted to know more about. He strained to look, to see the unseeable. He felt as though the stars shuddered at his attempt, and awoke.

Ma’Shuur spent the next few weeks translating the first chapter in this manner. The book spoke of a… he didn’t want to call it a ‘being’ so much as perhaps an entity – known as Azathoth. Though it described this thing as being purely unknowable like most religious texts, the book defined this ‘god’ as being the very nexus of the cosmos, a void so maddeningly expansive that Ma’Shuur felt weaker and smaller just for reading it. He was tired from draining his own blood, yes, but… he knew himself well enough to know that he was giving more than just his replenishable life force.

Unwilling to risk himself more than he already was, Ma’Shuur stopped his translation for a few days, until he had the idea to try one of the village’s pigs. He crept into the pens late one night and sliced open the back leg of one of the larger hogs, and filled a vial with the swine’s blood. He walked back to the library, then into the scriptorium, pulled the tome from its hiding place, and went to work.

Or he would have, had the quill not started immediately smoking in his hand. The pig’s blood sizzled and evaporated as quickly as he put it onto the page, and even after he dropped the plume his flesh still burned. The rejection was clear, and painful beyond the peeling of the skin on his palm.

Azathoth wasn’t going to be satisfied with his offering. Ma’Shuur wracked his mind. He finally settled on a human prisoner – a trespasser that had been caught by one of the village’s remote farmers. After waiting a few days to make sure no one connected him to the pig, he went to the stockades before his shift one late evening, and weaved the sound of whispers in the common tongue to distract the prisoner.

When Ma’Shuur brought out the blade, he’d only thought to nick the vein in the human’s neck from behind, making sure to be unseen, but as his hand reached up with the dagger, he felt an impulse not his own take control. Instead of a small cut, he plunged the dagger through the human’s throat, quickly bringing a wineskin to the stream to catch as much blood as he could. Ma’Shuur felt disgusted with himself – he had just taken a life – but he felt his hand trembling not in shame, but anticipation. Surely, he thought, this would work to translate the pages in his tome.

And surely, it did. Though it seemed less effective than when he was using his own blood, the letters began reforming again, and his learning continued. He sometimes had to heat the blood to keep it from building up in the nib of his pen, but he was delighted that it no longer pained him to trace over the letters and reveal their secrets. The dreams of stars returned, only now, they reacted more readily to his will.

Within the month, he’d gone through the blood he took from the human prisoner. Most people in the village assumed it was a revenge killing from the farmer who’s land he’d trespassed on – Ma’Shuur was happy to help their presumption. His next victim was that very farmer, his wrists slashed in a manner that suggested the old hermit couldn’t live with his crimes, and Ma’Shuur had fresh blood and no reason to be a suspect. The farmer’s blood didn’t work as well as the human’s, though the young sage had no real explanation as to why. He thought it could be a matter of age, and his next victim proved his fallacious theory probable.

The night after Ma’Shuur ran out of the farmer’s blood, he thought to try an experiment – he wanted to test to see if younger blood and or fresher blood seemed to matter to the tome. He asked an apprentice scribe to join him in the translation, and as the younger elf listened to Ma’Shuur and flipped through the pages of the tome, his eyes grew wide in horror. He turned to question just what ‘help’ his superior wanted, when the answer came in the form of a needle dipped in a paralytic agent.

The blood of the apprentice worked amazingly. Ma’Shuur translated an entire chapter in a single night, and made sure to carefully secure the younger scribe in a cabinet with an intravenous feed of the scorpicore venom. The next day passed quickly, and Ma’Shuur had more bounce in his step than ever when returning to the scriptorium that evening.

The other scribe was still secured, so Ma’Shuur set to work. He was just getting to the first thangka when he heard a clatter at the entrance to the archives.

An’Viid was always quiet when he explored the library; Ma’Shuur expected him to be at a council meeting all night and hadn’t anticipated that he would make the long trek to the candlelit untranslatable section. Yet there he stood, his board fallen on the ground and his whole body shaking at the sight before him.

Ma’Shuur was taking a fresh vial from the younger elf, who was giving An’Viid a panicked, pleading stare. The bastard elf knew there was no explanation that could turn this around, that could undo what his mentor saw him become, yet he opened his mouth all the same. As he did, his lips formed not the desperate objection he was thinking, but the dark ritual he needed to survive.

He felt the call of the Dark Hunger from all around him. The shadows on the floor pooled around him, and then grew until they were dark tentacles acting in his defense – the Arms of Hadar. They lashed out suddenly and silently, and Ma’Shuur could no more stop them than he could stop the sun: he watched his mentor struggle against them in vain as they cracked his limbs, his back, and finally, his neck. The only sounds were the snaps of bones and the rending of flesh. The tentacles receded as quickly as they had appeared, and Ma’Shuur expelled his dinner.

Feeling he’d gone too far, Ma’Shuur reached for the tome, but as his hand neared the page, the blood of his ‘father’ streamed off the tips of his fingers and into the letters – the thangka translated instantly, the most effective magic per volume he’d yet seen. It dawned on him: it was not the blood itself, but the knowledge it contained. In the case of the four hundred year old An’Viid, that was a lot of knowledge, and by extension, very powerful blood.

Guilt washed away in a fresh wave of knowledge. Ma’Shuur had gone too far, and there was no point in going back. He flipped to a new chapter, and traced thin lines of An’Viid’s blood on the page, struggling to contain his giggling as the words reformed into his own language. He carried on like this for near an hour before he heard people approaching.

It was the village elder and two of the town’s guardsmen, looking for An’Viid after he’d failed to appear at the tribal meeting. Ma’Shuur feared the tips of their spears more than the disapproval of a people who never loved him, and so he raised his hand. Focusing on the archway of the scriptorium, he tried to channel his thoughts as he had in his dreams; the stones were feathers to the mass of a star, and he heard a loud thunderclap as the energy he released collapsed the doorway under the weight of the archway above. It would take them at least a few hours to reach him – he hoped to be gone by then.

The timing was perfect – he’d just landed on another new thangka, this one titled ‘The Forbidden Path’, and the preceding pages implied it to be an escape from ‘current reality’. Aba’Ma’Shuur smeared both his hands in the blood of An’Viid, and as he wiped them on the page in front of him, he blacked out.

When he came to, he was in a library not unlike his own, just… bigger. The stacks reached up to the ceiling, which appeared to be twice as high as it was in Kavagh. There were no windows, just like in the real scriptorium, but as Ma’Shuur explored his familiar wing, he noticed it was now the entire library.

Every book was in another language he didn’t know. Some shared similar curved or straight characters, some pages were full of patterned arrangements of dots, yet others still were bizarre varying gradients of color. None of it even remotely resembled any language Ma’Shuur had ever studied.

Yet he could read all of it. He could no sooner pronounce any of their words as written as he could spell his name in the language of muted rainbows. Still, as he flipped through the pages, he could understand their meaning. He read grand histories, moving fictions, tales of great beasts and rituals of even greater magics. He never felt hungry, or tired. He tried to count the time he spent consuming more knowledge than he’d ever imagined existing, but he gave up around what he considered to be a decade’s time.

Eventually, Ma’Shuur found a book he had seen before – the very tome that brought him to this plane. He opened the familiar scaled cover to find every letter written in fresh blood. It was in Elven no longer, but in the original proto-Primordial shadow language. Only now, there was a sanguine scarlet on the pages in place of the faded grey.

Ma’Shuur couldn’t begin to contain his excitement. He skipped through the chapters he’d translated with the ‘assistance’ of the people of Kavagh, and went on to the fresh material he now mystically understood. The young elf felt his veins burning with the maddening concept of the void that was Azathoth. Each word, every letter, made his face sear with pain. Still, the sage pressed on, until his vision fully succumbed when he reached the thangka of The Forbidden Path. Ma’Shuur felt the warm stickiness of An’Viid’s blood as his head fell forward and he passed out on the open page.

It was morning when he awoke. He knew this from the sound of birds chirping and the stream of sunlight burning his eyes as he opened them. But he was in the Kavagh scriptorium… he didn’t remember any windows. He blinked away the pain from the daystar he hadn’t missed, and looked up. What he saw was not a window, but a collapsed section of the roof.

Dew covered the desks and shelves, as did moss. Wild deer roamed between the stacks. Ma’Shuur looked behind the chair he woke up in, and saw the desiccated corpse of his mentor, his bones still broken from where the eldritch appendages snapped his body like a bundle of twigs. Years had clearly passed since Ma’Shuur last was here.

He left the library to find the entire village in a similar state – there were bodies everywhere, only they were mostly skeletal by this point. Buildings were in ruin, and there wasn’t a single sentient within his sights. He walked to his old loggia, and was shocked when he saw himself in a hazy mirror.

His skin was mottled like burnt pipe leaf, traces of his pale lunar heritage barely visible under the smears of greys and blacks. His hair had gone white and thin, and the moon tattoo on his right eye had faded – over top of it was the brand of an eight pointed star. When he raised his fingers to it, it felt both raw to the senses but healed to the touch. Most notably, where his veins had previously been a barely visible bluish green under his pallid flesh, they were now black. Similarly, traces of what almost looked like charcoal lightning mapped out his entire nervous system.

He hunted down a meal of rabbit and left the village. In two days’ time he was at a small human hamlet at the foot of the mountains. When he approached, two children screamed at his appearance and ran to fetch the town guards. Aware of how he must have appeared, he retreated to Kavagh to rectify the issue.

He found makeup in the ruins of the old general store, and spent the better part of a day covering his skin in powder, giving himself his old appearance again. He practiced his diction, relearning the functions of his throat and lips for communication with other sentients. When he got back to the humans’ town, they received him as they would any guest – quietly and with great suspicion. He found the local tavern and settled in, and put his performance skills to use: he inquired as to the fate of Kavagh, claiming to be a lunar elf of a distant tribe come to make pilgrimage to the library.

He learned that it had been nearly a century since anyone in the village had even heard of ‘lunar’ elves, let alone seen any – Kavagh had been destroyed in some arcane disaster that legend ascribed to a mad librarian – An’Viid. Rumor was that he must have been consorting with some fiend or demon, because the epicenter of the devastation was the library he was in charge of, and his corpse had been found (and left) at the scene. Everyone, even scavengers and looters, avoided the village.

Aba’Ma’Shuur thanked them for their stories and got up to leave – he realized he felt nothing for the destruction he had caused, only pride in the knowledge he had gained. As he walked out of the door and on the path to somewhere far away, the proprietor asked his name.

The ashen elf warlock pondered this, and decided on the inversion of his mother’s given name.

“Call me Vanik.”