February 27,
2009
The Legend and
Lore of Aion: The Tower of Eternity – Chapter 8
The back
story involving the principle races of NCsoft’s upcoming MMO continues to evolve
in the developers’ journals
The land of
Atreia is a beautiful and mysterious place, peopled by disparate races with
unique perspectives of the shattered lands they call home.
The peoples of
this land have no love for the other, a fact that colors their individual
histories and the lore about the origins of the world. Harken now as the two
races, the Asmodians and the Elyos, tell – as each perceives it – of the origin
of the world and peoples of Aion: The Tower of Eternity, the upcoming massively
multiplayer online role-playing game from NCsoft.
The
first five chapters of the lore were published in mid-January.
Chapter 6 was published at the end of January,
Chapter 7 arrived in mid-February and this is Chapter 8 in the
lore of the land
A New Enemy, an Old Enemy (Asmodian)
We returned to Pandaemonium that day, and straight away set about gathering our
forces for a war against these Elyos. The very next day we met in combat again,
and full-scale war broke out between our people.
Soon, a further test would present
itself as the Balaur, long exiled inside the Abyss, found a way out from their
prison. Their thirst for blood was just as insatiable as before, and with their
old allies by their side again their power should not be underestimated.
Now, though, we have discovered that
which has given our mission a true sense of urgency. With every passing breath,
our planet hemorrhages Aether out of our atmosphere. We spent many months
searching for the source of this bleed, searching throughout the Abyss, and
Asmodae, when it was right in front of us.
It’s the two towers. A mighty
resonance still exists between them, vibrating invisibly between the two halves
of our sundered world. As if in memory of the lost Tower of Eternity, they cry
out to each other across the void, and it is this reverberation that has created
the Abyss.
The Abyss absorbs Aether, draining
it away like water pouring into a crevasse. Now the Aether is spread thinner and
thinner with each passing day, and will soon start affecting our Daevas, and our
planet. Atreia is still only held together by the Aetheric ties Siel and
Israphel created when they drained their own ethereal bodies of Aether, a
process which effectively ended their own lives. Soon the Abyss will start to
weaken these ties, and if they were to break, our atmosphere would collapse, and
everyone on this planet would perish.
There remains one viable tactic. The
resonance cannot continue if only one stump of the tower survives. Our path is
clear: we must destroy the Tower of Light. Only then will we end this bleed and
safeguard the lives of the Asmodian people from the arrogant tyranny the Elyos
threaten us with.
We will not hesitate this time. There will be no staying of our blades, only a
brutal and irresistible wave of destruction that will finally rid our home of
the arrogant and naïve fools which still infest our lands.
Our fate is once again in our own
hands. This time, we will not fail.
– Kineas, Praefectus Castrorum
of the Asmodian Archons
A New Enemy, an Old Enemy (Elyos)
We were stunned. Stunned that anyone had managed to survive on that desolate,
frozen wasteland above us, stunned at what these Asmodians had been turned into.
Quickly we mobilized our legions, and prepared for war.
Aion had a further test for our
resolve, though, as a third stable portal opened and brought forth a horror we
hoped to never see again – the Balaur. Quickly they consolidated their forces,
summoning the Krall and Mau back to their side, as well as forcing other weaker
races into submission. Their fury was greater than ever before, and it is us who
now bear the brunt of their anger.
Our world, this land in which we
live, was given the slightest and most fragile of lifelines by Siel and Israphel.
We believed that this lifeline would sustain us, allow us the opportunity to
savor and enjoy our victory over the Asmodian fiends that once dared to call us
brothers. However, that all changed, when we learned, completely by accident, of
something terrifying…
Atreia is dying. Our world bleeds
Aether continually through the Grand Abyss, and unless this bleed is controlled,
stemmed, then this life source will be exhausted. Our world, only held together
by Siel and Israphel’s final sacrificial act, will simply fall apart, and the
empty halves which once made this great planet will drift through space forever.
All that lives here will be extinguished in the blink of an eye, and all that we
have achieved, all that we have worked for, will be lost.
Panicked, our priests and our
theorists began researching possible solutions. It was only then that we found a
solution.
The Abyss is an echo of the great
Tower of Eternity that once stood in the midst of our world. It exists only
because of the immense arcane forces that still resonate between the two tower
stumps… a field of unnatural energy, like that which would arise between the
poles of a titanic magnet. Were we to destroy the Asmodian Tower of Darkness,
that field would collapse, closing the Abyss forever. Not only would we finally
rid this world of their dark and ugly scar, we would save our world from
destruction, and deliver our people to the eternal paradise granted to us by
Aion!
This is our final test, our final
hurdle before we are able to reap our reward. We must destroy the Asmodians and
their pathetic world: we must save Atreia.
– Rafaela Semperti.
