![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bastionmods
| Mementos |
| This page is for all of the mementos found within the game. Every memento listed here is related to one of the NPCs within the game. Clicking on the memento leads to a short story about that NPC's past, before the Calamity. All knowledge on this page is considered IC knowledge. Once a character has touched the memento, they have access to all of the information related to that memento. This can be handwaved as well: once a memento has been released for a character, you can assume that your characters know everything contained within that item. As of right now, we are not allowing PCs to make mementos. However, in the future, this option will be available. Please check back in the future for information on how to make a memento for your characters. |
| Current Mementos |
| Worn Journal Silver Malachite Choker |
| profile codes |
Worn Journal
Date: 2013-12-08 05:37 am (UTC)Eventually his talents caught the attention of the Mancers, and the rest is history. He easily passed any test they threw at him, and he learned so quickly that the Mancers placed him with one of the best masters they had, so that he might become one of their best and brightest in the near future. They had plans, they told him, and once he was done with his apprenticeship he would join the prized few allowed in on those plans.
He was going to change the world, he said. He was going to invent something to make everyone's lives easier, something that would bring true peace to the world. And in that peace, the world could continue to build and advance. His mother and father and five younger siblings would have a world where they could truly thrive.
Maybe it's for the best, that the Calamity happened before then. He was always a sensitive kid, not one for fighting. If he had known the true scope of what the Mancers did, he may not have joined up in the first place.
No, that isn't completely truthful. See, nobody ever told him about the secret projects of the Mancers, but he knew. It was impossible for him not to know. Every year there were new weapons being made for the Marshalls, new forms of shielding and armor, new upgrades to the walls. But he told himself sweet lies, that they were to protect the city from monsters, that they were a last line of defense, that they weren't to be used except in extreme circumstances.
When the Calamity happened, he had known it was the Mancer's fault. He didn't know the how or the why, but he had known that those answers would be found in the Mancer Observatory.
He had hoped to leave an impressive legacy that would last for generations to come, but all he has now is the weight of the sins his fellow Mancers left behind for him.
Silver Malachite Necklace
Date: 2014-02-16 10:21 pm (UTC)Malachite was one of the less common materials, a good vein only found every couple of years, and often with much less production results than the often silver and iron veins. It made it a rare, but beautiful commodity, often crafted in to jewlery more than anything else. It's green glassy look made it ideal for such a thing, set against pale gold or sterling silver, and it was something the richer merchant Caels came to regard as one of the best items they could ever hope to trade for given its beauty and rarity.
Zayna never could bring herself to sell the patterned silver and malachite choker that once belonged to her mother.
She thought about it a lot. The money it would have brought in would have been enough to feed her, her sisters, their husbands, their children and her father for a year with something to spare. It would have been easy, to let go of that one final belonging, but try as she might, she could never justify parting with it.
Why? There was more pain than happiness attached to it. She never had an answer for that, even if the memories haunted her more than she cared to admit.
Her and Zahi had both been soldiers, and good ones at that. Respected, praised, often emulated but hardly ever surpassed by their juniors. She had been a good woman, a strong woman, as beautiful as she was fearful. As a mother she ruled her house proudly, taking no flack from her children, even the youngest which was Zayna. But she loved her children, each and every one of them, and she loved her grandchildren just as much. She loved her son in laws, and she loved their families just as much. Her strength came not from power or physical force, but just how radiant of a person she was. She could be commanding and loving all in one breath, and she was wonderful.
It had once been said by some of her superiors that if she decided one day to lead them all in to battle, they would have followed her to the bitter end. That was the woman Zahi loved.
Not the woman she became.
Zayna remembered the day so clearly, when she received the news. A soldier, young of face and eyes, burst in to the small class she shared with a handful of other Ura teenagers that were attempting to gain entrance in to the ranks. He was covered in dirt and blood, though none of it his, and his eyes were wild. He pulled her aside out of the room and explained that the Caels had been carelessly drilling above them again, in one of the outlying tunnels where only patrols regularly went to stop underground smuggling and illegal selling. The ceiling of the tunnel had collapsed, and her mother had pushed Zahi out of the way, only to be crushed beneath it.
She survived. Barely. But she was never the same. Her mind had been affected by the impact, and it was if the very light had gone out of her. She became bitter, paranoid, angry. Zayna was the only child still living at home, not yet married and not yet recruited, and for the next several years she and Zahi received the brunt of that anger.
That woman was not her mother. That woman was not the woman Zahi loved. That woman had been taken away. That woman had died in the tunnel, crushed by careless, thoughtless Caels. There was not a trace of love left within her, not a trace of that radiance, that charisma that could have and would have led a thousand soldiers in to battle at the drop of a word.
She was forced to retire, which only made her angrier, and Zayna couldn't get out of there fast enough. It hurt, to leave her father behind to deal with such a cruel person, to deal with a stranger he had once cared for so much, but the moment Zayna was recruited she left to live at the barracks, taking only the barest possessions with her.
Some months before the Calamity, that woman wandered off in the middle of the night. Missing for days, she turned up along the merchant's route in to the Terminals, dead by some unknown cause.
Really, Zayna could have sold that choker at any time. Zahi had already cleared their home of her possessions, saying under his breath that there was no need to cling to the past when the Mother had finally taken her where she should have gone years ago. She didn't know why she kept it. She just... did.
But maybe it had nothing to do with who she had become, and everything to do with who she had been.
Maybe it had everything to do with the kind of woman Zayna had wanted to be.
Maybe it had everything to do with the fact that once upon a time, her mother had shone almost as brightly as that simple piece of jewelery.
And that was something she wanted so desperately to remember.