Iskari

Most bloodlines across this world trace back to a father with too many sons. Arodrin had twelve. Not enough patience left in him to keep them from tearing each other apart. Twelve, and from those twelve came most of the peoples you'll meet between here and the Council of Kings. Not all. Whatever the older tribes like to claim.

That's not a bedtime story. That's a headache with a name.

But it's the youngest of the twelve I keep coming back to. The favorite, if the old accounts are honest, which is exactly the kind of detail that gets a man killed by his own brothers in most families I've documented. He looked at the mess his father left him and decided the correct response was to bond himself, permanently, to a piece of living Creation. Some men inherit a title. Iskari inherited a heartbeat that wasn't his.

The Youngest Son

Iskari was not chosen because he was strongest. Every record I trust agrees on that much. He was wise. Measured. He'd inherited whatever purity of thought let his father commune with the Lanthya crystal in the first place, back before it told anyone its name was Ithari.

Arodrin died still trying to reunite twelve warring tribes into one people. He failed. And it was his youngest son, not his eldest, not the one custom would have handed the ceremonial robes to, who stood up wearing them anyway and did the one thing his father never managed.

He gave the tribes something to actually divide.

Eleven shards of Lanthya, one to each of the other tribes, by covenant. Fair, by the standards of a man trying to stop a civil war with what's left in a dead father's pockets. But he kept the heart stone for himself. Not out of greed. I'd have written him off as another gnome playing king if it were greed. He kept it because someone had to, and the alternative was letting it fall into hands that would use it for something considerably worse than keeping a peace.

The Covenant

What happened next is the part the Archive still argues about. None of us were there. Iskari isn't answering questions anymore.

Ithari embedded herself in his chest. Not metaphor. Not ceremony. An actual second heartbeat, sitting alongside his own for the rest of his life. By the terms of whatever agreement they struck, that bond doesn't end with him.

Only Iskari's direct bloodline can ever tap the full measure of what Ithari can do. Every generation since inherits the privilege. Alongside it comes an obligation nobody gets to skip. Each bloodline member must make a sacrifice of their own before the gift means anything. And Ithari herself agreed to something she can never take back. She can never go home. I don't know what home was, for a being like that. I know it cost her something to give it up anyway.

I bring all this up because I keep meeting people who talk about "the Hero of the Gem" like the boy fell out of the sky and got lucky. He didn't get lucky. He got born, generations downstream of an Iskari who made a bargain he couldn't renegotiate, and passed the terms of it down like a family debt nobody remembers signing for. Wendell is the latest name on that ledger.

He isn't the first to carry it. If the fragments I've pieced together about what happened when Iskari finally faced Mahan directly are even half accurate, that collision split the world itself. I'm still, to my considerable frustration, unable to fully document how. Someday I'll finish that chapter. Today isn't that day.