The Atlantean Chronicles

Chapter 1: Remembrance

“So much…so much time is gone, so many things said and done.  Time is a harsh master, unrelenting and cruel beyond any common standards…I suppose that I should recount this tale from the beginning…”


Several hundred thousand years ago, a culture of humanoids, known as the Seraphim, had fallen on hard times, their planet was dying, and all plant and animal life was gone save the Seraphim.

The Seraphim were once a great and educated society, sages and artisans were not uncommon, and they possessed more knowledge than any other race at the time.  This was their flaw; they knew far too much for their own good.  Over the ages, the Seraphim became capable of manipulating the forces of life energy, in either nature or beings.

They discovered that they could sap the life right out of anything they touched.  They saw this as a divine blessing; they built a belief out of their new found power and taught this principle to all of the younger generations.  They believed that life is like a candle, with the body being the wax, the soul being the wick, and the grinding force of time being the flame at the candle’s tip.  They figured that as time goes on, it subtracts from the soul and flesh till the day you die, or rather when the candle reached it’s end.  With this new power they figured that they could take other living organisms remaining time and add it to their own, extending their life indefinitely if enough prey is available.

They did have some restraints on the usage of this power, those who practiced it were forbidden from assaulting the living organisms, only the dead were marked as viable energy sources.  But eventually, some of the practitioners got curious about how long a living thing would increase their life.  Around this time, several Seraphim began to notice an increase in their overall powers to manipulate the environment with each new addition to their life giving properties.

Now, a dead organism only grants a person 10 years of extended life and an infinitesimal increase in power.  But when the youth of their society decided to drain a living organism, they became hooked on a high that came from absorbing the life of a living being.  In contrast to a dead thing, a living one grants around 125 to 180 years to a Seraphim and an exponential increase in overall power.

  Of course after this was leaked to the other tribes and clans, war broke out and the entire civilization was divided between those who thought that using the power to drain life from the living was good and those who thought it evil.  This disagreement raged on for several years, claiming many of the Seraphim.  Of course, this meant that those that were left were of tremendous power and skill.  Around the last few years of the conflict, a small group of orphans came into the picture.  They had long since lost there parents and families and seek the retribution of their families destroyed by those who would ravage their world for power and life.  This group was led by me and my two sworn brothers, Bith and Vorban.  

We were once normal, simple children who lived for fun and games; but the war had changed us.  We soon became nothing more than scavengers; we would go from village to village, draining the lives of those who had survived.  I and my brothers were the most powerful of this group; we had to be to maintain order.  

One day, while locating a new place to feed from, we were assaulted by one of the hunter groups.  Only I and my brothers were spared, to watch our friends and companions are drained of their lives and tossed aside like trash.  We were furious; so much so in fact that we killed our assailants just from pure unbridled wrath.  We tore them to shreds and drained their lives in retribution for our friend’s deaths.

But we noticed a change as we sat there with our precious friend’s corpses.  We noticed a new hunger, not of material things; but of the soul.  We tore through the remaining camps of scavengers, sharing equally the power and strength.  And with this strength we would crush those who tormented us; crush them and be free!

Alas, their deaths would mean little to us.  We soon noticed that now that the last of the Devourers had been disposed of, there was nothing left on this world.  Our power now surpassed even our own imaginations.   We came to the conclusion that there must be other worlds, other worlds that will eventually need our guidance so that a tragedy such as ours will never have to be repeated.  

I believe we can stop here for now.  There is so much more to tell, but alas I think you do not have the same stamina that I do for such things.