Excerpted from "Histories of the Manjiitarei Heirs, Vol. CXVII" In the days after the coronation of the KING ZOSS, before the time of the Pendakkar Autarch and the Wars of the Fifteen Thousand Lotus Petals, there lived a warrior maid by the name of Jom. A low birth slattern from the backwater of the Jjojos Reach, Jom was unremarkably by birth and blood, but even at her birth those few present trembled in fear and awe, for they realized that it was within one such as this that the touch of YISUN worked its mighty wonders. As Jom grew in squalor and wretched poverty, it seemed every aspect of her being rejected her surroundings, and from the squalid earth of destitution and disease grew a flower that the Universe is seldom wont to germinate more than once in a thousand generations. She grew into a woman of maddening beauty, so fair it was said that Rosovoro the Watcher, whose unblinking gaze had not faltered since the birth of creation itself, blinked in mild surprise upon meeting her. Her skills as a warrior were unparralled among her people - by the time she finished her training at the age of 20, she had mastered all nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of the Imperishable Techniques of Annihilation, and some claimed that with no more than her famed spear and the span of her two arms she was able to flip the great Urum Bell, which had been toppled on its side after the First Heavenly Schism and proved immovable to no less than twenty gods of strength and war. Her intellect was a towering fortress, like a sword that cut through the blades of grass that surrounded her, and all but the most drunken and lecherous of mages and priests could see the great flame of her aura from more than a thousand leagues away. For those who gave but a cursory glance, it seemed the Universe had birthed the sort of soul that is only spoken of in tales and hushed words, whispered into the embers of a dying fire or the desolate loneliness of the night just before a sunrise. The soul of a King. Jom, however, had a singular flaw which was, to the great sorrow of a multitude of heavenly observers, the ultimate of all sins - humility. She was polite, graceful, and courteous to a fault, and was the first to admit her own faults and concede her mistakes - all of which, of course, filled the watching deities with maddening rage. They gnashed their teeth and ground their knuckles into dust and lashed out in their multitudes of war forms at each other, for the great and imperishable flame Jom, whose coming had been fortold by the Gibbering Monks of Illus for a thousand lifetimes, had been cooled by the insipid arrogance of kindness and generosity. "How," cried the gods, "can one whose Flame seems to burn at the wicker frame of the World itself restrain itself with civility? Surely this is a sign of ruination!" And indeed the gods were correct, for although the fruits of such ruination would not ripen for many years, Jom planted the seeds of such a fruit when she first visited the accursed city, that source of all great evil - Throne. Now in those days the waters of Throne still ran with some of the healing energy gifted by the gods, and the corpse-towers of Throne were bright and unmarked with age and grime, but it was no less dangerous then as it is today, and the stench of foul Art, demon trickery, and the arrogance of Man stuck to the city like flies around a sickly dog. Jom had decided to visit Throne after finishing her tutelage under the great master Vretka of Oum Lhaska, who was said to be able to pluck a single hair from his head and wield it like another might wield a sword - she had learned all she could from her teacher, and though she was modest and demure even she could not surpress the great hunger of the Flame that lurked within her, and so she sought to learn what she could from the Red City. Upon her arrival those who saw her recoiled in awe and terror, such was her grace and majesty, and it was said that the stones beneath her feet transformed into solid gold where she stepped - some few of these stones still remain in a thin, ragged line known as Jom's Current, but most were looted during the Widderkan Rebellions. It was here along this path that Jom's curiosity was first piqued, to the sorrow of all, for she noticed that there was a singular group who did not recoil at her presence, or prostrate themselves in dumb worship: the dead. Even in those days, the beggar-dead of Throne were a constant presence in the city. Their behavior was irksome at best and nefarious at worst, for they teemed in the underways of the city like a osseus tide, ebbing and flowing throughout the corpse of Throne in their chittering way. They alone strode to Jom and thrust forward bony hands, begging for coin, gossip, or anything else worth clinging to from a previous life, and it was this that gave Jom pause. As she spent the next few years wandering the streets of Throne, fliting from master to master and accomplishing impossible feat after impossible feat, only the dead were her constant companions, and it was not long before some called her Jom the Bone Queen. She was unique in her relationship with these dead, for her grace and humility was so infectious that she was the only thing in all of Throne that did not simply smack them in the head and shoo them away, and so she and the dead lived together in silent company. It was only after the fifth year of her training in Throne that the imperishable Flame that raged against itself inside her finally reared its head once more. One day Jom was eating her lunch in silence while the great throngs of dead surrounded her, Jom's curiosity finally got the better of her. Standing to her feet, she said - in a quiet voice so pure that some say every window in Throne shattered - "Why do you flock to me so? I am not your master, nor do I wish it." There was silence for a while, but then a great rasping laugh was heard from somewhere within the throng of dead. "You are not our master," the voice from the dead croaked. "We follow on the urge of another." At this Jom was curious, for she was no stranger to those wishing to meet her and thought it queer that someone with such interest would not simply seek Jom in person, as countless others had already. "I wish to meet your master," she asked politely as the waters of throne boiled with each syllable. The dead, amazingly, obliged, and bade Jom to follow her into the cracked and blasted Rattle-Paths that the dead crawled to reach the surface of Throne. Deeper and deeper they wormed their way into the bowels of the great city until at last they arrived at their destination - the Court of the Ebon Monarch. Within the bowels of Throne the Great Court of the Dead still holds session to this day. From innumerable streams all over Throne the dead swarm, tossing the fruits of their begging into a great heap. When Jom visited the Ebon Court it had been in existence for only a few hundred generations, and already the great mountain of coin in the center of the court was so large and so high that even great Jom herself shielded her eyes from its golden brilliance. But Jom was not swayed by lust for gold, and it was another sight that caught the eyes of Jom - she saw that two great lines of dead, one on either side of the room, marched in slow procession up a great black staircase that jutted out of this heap of gold. Stretching her eyes further upward she saw the lines of dead meet at the top of the stairs flanking a great spike, carved of black stone, upon which a tiny figure was impaled, and the dead whispered words into the figure's ear on either side of him. "Who is that?" quietly asked the demure Jom, shaking the entire court and the firmament of Throne above it. "That," whispered back the dead who ran to join the great procession, "is the master. He would wish to meet you." Jom made her way up the great mountain of gold and onto the black staircase, where she patiently made her way to the top. When she finally crossed the final step, she came face to face with a shriveled figure. Its black skin was wrapped in thick chains of vines and thorns that bound it to the great black spike, holding back a gaunt figure covered in rags. It wore a mask, skull-like in shape, with two long curled horns where the eyes might be, and a great forked tongue stuck out obscenely between jagged teeth as it silently listened to the words of the dead being whispered into each ear. It was unquestionably a demon, and while Jom had fought and slain innumerable demons during her training as a great warrior there was something about this one that gave her pause. "My name is Jom," she whispered, cracking the great Sun of Zoss which remains stationary in the sky to this day. "I have heard you seek me, and I am pleased to make your acquaintance. What might I call you?" "I am called many names," the figure rasped in a voice like a grinding glacier. "I am called many names and I am masked many times, for I have lived this cycle of colors many times over - pale, blue, red, purple, green, orange, gold, silver, black, all the way around and around."* The figure straightened itself as much as it could on the great spike with a horrid cracking noise, and the thorny chains seemed to only grow tighter as it did so. "I am called King of the Dead, the Great Taker, the Richerman, Lady of Whispers, Old Skratch, and so many more I have forgotten. But there is one name above all of these that I prefer you call me, and that is Acha-Devarque." And when this name was said the water in Throne grew cold and a thousand thousand children were rendered blind, and even great Jom felt a shiver down her spine. * Author's note: in those days the great Book of Colors had not been written, and the extinct devils - capricious purple, sensual orange, and terrifying silver - still roamed the cosmos with glee.
It was at this point that Jom's great sin once more doomed the Universe, for any other being in her place would have recoiled in horror at the wrechedity of the beast before her, or perhaps smite it with heavenly thunder. But Jom, in her insipid empathy, wondered what had warranted such a cruel punishment - impaled, chained, buried deep in the bowels of Throne where there was neither light nor sound. Despite her divine intellect, Jom was ultimately a very stupid girl, for she saw good in even the blackest of hearts, and never doubted the ability for a person to reshape their nature. "Why are you imprisoned here so?" asked Jom to the devil, who alone of all her foes did not shrink at the imperishable clarity of her voice. The beast slowly writhed in pain on the spike as it spoke; thorny vines dug into black fur and bled slow, thickened blood, soaking the dirty rags that clung to the King of the Dead like maggots to a dog's corpse. "I earned these chains long ago, child," it croaked, "in a squabble with some few deities over certain...property rights. Suffice it to say in my younger days I was impetuous and prone to nicking the trinkets of others...I was a precocious little scamp." The devil's bones cracked and its spine twirled as he spoke, but his masked face was motionless, forked tongue leering between long fangs. "But that was long before, and I am a different sort of late. My friends here -" motioning to the dead around him as he spoke "-tell me of the great city that grows above me while I languish in starvation and thirst. When once I was a king, now I am a beggar, and once when I craved violence and elegance, now I wish only for a crumb of bread. A drop of water." And indeed, pitiful the King did look, emaciated and weak upon the spike of black rock, and Jom's heart began to break on behalf of this most wicked of devils - for such is the nature of the sympathetic and charitable, and such is the power of a devil so great. "I will help you, wretched thing," she said, straightening herself and planting her foot with such force it cracked the firmament of Throne itself. "If you have hunger, then name your meal and I shall bring it. Thirst, too, and even then you may ask me another favor, for even one as wicked as you does not deserve a prison as lifeless and empty as this." And beneath the devil's lifeless mask it grinned, for it was then that it knew Jom was doomed. "I thank you, girl, for pitying one such as me that has faced little else but derision and pain." His eyes gleamed with manic light. "There are but three gifts I would ask you bring me, O Merciful Jom, and it should be easy for one as skilled as you, for they are but humble memories from my former life above. The first is a fruit from the top of Mount Jiin, where I frolicked so much as a young scamp. The second is a cup of tea from the House of Eight Leaves, where I met my true love. And finally a songbird from the Ibben Vale, where I last saw the sun before I was put in these wretched chains." To this Jom agreed, and the throngs of dead lead her through the Rattle-Ways back to the surface, where she set off on the King's road through the cosmos. Her first stop was to Voros to the legendary Mount Jiin, the place that the devil seemed to enjoy so much. When Jom arrived she found the mountain a curious sight, for it was an impossibly high, skinny pillar that soared high into the clouds. As she began to summit the sheer face of the high mountain, throngs of priests began to scramble from holes in the mountain, and they flocked to Jom with staves held in shaking hands. "Why do you come to this mountain?" the head priest said with quavering voice, such was the power of Jom's presence. "I seek the fruit at the top of this mountain," she said, and half of the priests were instantly struck dead. The other half, forced to obey their sacred oath to defend the fruit from all seekers, rose their staves at Jom in violence, but with a single sweep of her spear the remaining clerics were smote upon the mountainside. Displeased at having offended the poor clerics, Jom continued up the mountain in silence until she reached the top, where in the howling winds and bitter cold grew a single dark plum that seemed to draw all the light around it inside. Plucking the fruit and placing it in her bag, she turned to the horizon once more to find the second gift for the Ebon Monarch. Exiting the gate once more, Jom found herself at the House of Eight Leaves, the renowned tea house where the devil met his love. When she arrived she was surprised to find that the House was in some disarray, for the great wooden beams were rotten and old with age, and thick swampy reeds choked the grounds where tea leaves once grew freely. Stranger still, the devil had neglected to mention that his love still lived at the tea house, for when she arrived she was greeted by a towering beast with thick black skin and a heavy golden mask. "Hah! Seems this so-called 'King' is too much a coward to come crawling back to me!" it bellowed, and Jom flinched at the devil's foul breath. "Ye've come to fetch some tea for the little wretch, then? Have a try!" The fight that followed was so fierce and thunderous that pilgrims in the nearest fifteen realms could see the sparks flying across the horizon and feel the quaking of the earth for the next year and a day. On the dawn of the year and the second day Jom wiped the sweat from her brow as the devil lay dead beneath her. Marching into the heart of the temple, she found a single cask of wood and a tiny wooden cup, and she poured out a cup of sweet golden tea before setting off for the final gift. Arriving at Ibben, she beheld the great Vale stretching far beyond the horizon in every direction, a sea of blue and purple trees that sung in the swaying wind. It was a beautiful realm, and Jom's mind raced at the majesty of it. She was stopped from her appreciation when before her a great mass of feathers and talons appeared, and Jom beheld the songbird of the devil's story, which appeared to be far larger in reality. Its plumage stretched across the firmament of heaven and its talons dug massive trenches into the earth, and wicked eyes the size of moons stared at Jom with lethal intent. At this Jom faced her greatest challenge yet, for the devil had asked for this bird brought back alive, and so Jom began her task to wrestle the bird back to Throne. The path of destruction that the songbird wrought as Jom dragged it back to throne was so great that no less than twenty gates were destroyed, and countless hundreds of worlds thusly severed from the rest of the Wheel for all time. By the time Jom finally wrestled it back to Throne it was too tired to struggle, and over several months the loyal dead squeezed it into the Ebon Court with some consternation. At last, Jom stood before the devil once more, her eyes bright with the satisfaction of a good deed. But she felt something strange within her, for at this a part of Jom began to urge her to strike at this foul thing, to deliver it the death that no other deserved more. Within her the Flame imperishable raged and struggled against its golden cage, but the insidious kindness that had infected Jom cooled her burning heart, and she reached into her bag for the fruit. "Here is the fruit you asked for," she said, handing the chained one the plum, and when the devil took a bite all of Throne quaked. "Oh, Jom," the devil croaked, as the black fur swelled and the chains around its spindly frame began to strain at its new growth. "It is more delicious than I ever could remember. Might I have that tea?" Again the voice inside Jom begged her to stop, to cry out, "Foul thing! You are a pale and insipid thing, begging for scraps from the hands of the mighty!" But Jom's flame was quelled by her humility once more, and instead she uncapped the lid of the golden tea. "And here is the tea you asked for," she said, handing the chained one the tea, and when the devil took a sip all of the Heavens were set ablaze. "Oh Jom," the devil croaked, as the rags strained and bulged and the horns on its skull-like mask lengthened and twisted. "It is sweeter than I possibly could have wished for. And might I have that sweet songbird sing me its tune?" Once more the voice inside Jom howled in fury, and the heavenly observers raged in their far-away towers and the devilish court below cackled with glee, and the Flame within Jom seemed to burn brighter than the Sun of Koss itself. But alas, the doom fortold was true indeed, for the kindness in Jom's heart smote the fire in her heart one final time. She yanked the great chain that bound the bird, and the thing rose into the air with sluggish majesty. "And here," she whispered, the last words of pitiful, wonderful Jom ever said in this realm, "is the songbird you asked for. Let it ease your sad and lonely prison."
The songbird shrieked a hideous note so foul that even the silent dead recoiled in horror, and the viny chains binding the great devil withered into dust. "Oh, Jom!" the devil roared, horns scraping the ceiling of the cavern and thick drool running from its outstretched tongue. "It is a more beautiful song than the one I heard that fateful chaining-day, naming-day, cursing-day! Only fittingful then that it sings true on my freeing-day, eh?" And before precious, accursed Jom could speak another word the devil snapped its viny chains, snatched up Jom in one great fist, and gobbled her up. The devil's rampage through Throne lasted the next ten generations. A thousand thousand warriors of unparalleled skill and grace fell before its terror, and in the end it was only the power of the KING ZOSS that subdued the beast, and even then the battle was so fierce that it called to doubt the KING's power. When it was over the King of the Dead was returned to its foul tomb, impaled ten times further down the spike and bound with chains so tight and so thick that escape would never be possible again. Some say the Lady of Whispers still live, that the begging dead of Throne still remember their ancient Rattle-Paths and forgotten master. Some say the great golden heap is still there, just grimy and dull, and the great Court still holds session in the bowels of throne, whispered words teaching a silent Monarch lessons of a forgotten world. And some say, in hushed nights and darkened corners, that Acha-Devarque will come once more, to take and take and take again until there is none left in all of creation to take. For the tale of Jom proves that although the sin of humility is terrible indeed, it is a powerful one, and there is but one force in all the Wheel that can break it. Desire.
