The arcanist focused intently on the black bauble suspended in the space before him. The lightless oddity was the size of an infant's fist or blawber's egg, stained the deepest black any human eye had likely ever beheld. Inkier than the ocean's lowest fathoms or the cruelest sandman's heart or the umbral womb of Night herself. Void of all hue or luminosity, the thing, a font of stark and cold oblivion. It was an object metaphysical, a beautiful cosmic rupture, a tear in the epidermis of reality, an unhealing wound in spacetime. The faintest glimmer of wire unmasked the illusion that the wondrous bauble levitated in the very air, revealing it to truly be a lightless gemstone that hung like an onyx spider, sable and patient, on fine taut strands of metallic wire.

The gifted thaumaturgist Amarant, who presently peered into that pitch hole, wore metal goggles with lenses fashioned from radiant stones that had been horned from the sockets of a long-dead archmage's moldy skull. The pilfered scintillating orbs were shaved down into precise slivers by the Workshop's master gearsmiths and immaculately polished and laced with minute runery. The headgear allowed Amarant and his fellows to better scry the inner workings of arcane crystals and still be shielded from the madstone's entropic emanations, for a single unwarded glance was to risk an uncoupling of the offender's body and soul. To stare too long into the once-lost relic was to have it quite literally stare back into you with a thousand-thousand phantasmal eyes. Amarant felt the powerful confluence of minds within the abyssal stone attempt to tractor his inner being into some unreal doomland for the ethereal shredding. The jet black artifact had clearly done so to countless other unfortunates for the soulsucking crystal swam with multitudinous schools of dead consciousnesses darting about in its inky depths. When looking at the thing Amarant often forgot where he was. Who he was. Why he was. But the instruments and wards were there to protect him. His employers took every conceivable measure to maintain the safety of those who handled these powerful things of wonder and woe—or so they resolutely assured.

Amarant conducted his work with a smattering of other brilliant arcanists in a room far below the uneasy streets of Camshire. The very existence of the 'Workshop,' where thaumaturgists of every known school and discipline toiled, was a direct violation of the international treaty formally known as the Maedrum Covenant. The multinational Arcanum's ironclad armistice banned all active practice of sorcery no matter how righteous or paramount the cause. 'Let the monsters slumber,' it had always been wisely and forcibly advised. But an unknown cabal of highmen—or one sole and powerful architect—ordered the commission of these secret studies outside the knowledge of their own chiefs in the name of the Nation's survival and interests. Unless that obfuscation, too, was a deceit and the High Ministers Three were fully aware of their own hypocrisy by letting this dangerous work carry on under the feet of the very people they were charged with protecting, in conscious defiance of the Arcanum's unwavering mandates. Amarant had no inkling of the truth on such matters. Those at his level were only told what they needed to know. Still, despite the opaque and unsung nature of his role, the arcanist was glad to have the opportunity to labor in the Workshop. Many exciting breakthroughs had been made in those tunnels and vaults, ones which Amarant and his peers would never have been shown outside that place. A buzz hung in the stale subterranean air. The clandestine efforts of the thaumaturgical order were bearing glorious fruits, quietly ushering in a thrilling new age of Enlightenment, as the world above marched on in mindless and bloody inertia. The great Gnaeus Egon—whom Amarant once heard a rich and engaging lecture from in the Halls of Theory (Egon's side mutterings and unraveling thoughts aside, for genius often came at such costs)—was said to be furiously at work distilling the theorems and models into a lovely and elegant set of formulas that described the underpinnings of reality and sorcery and revealed the universe to be a simulacrum emergent from some strange cosmic cauldron of leylines and impossibly small motes of energy and phantasmal waves of pure probability. Reflecting the old myths of chains of worlds devouring one another, the emerging model of All could be viewed as holograms within holograms, an infinity of manifolds and tesseracts. Unseen lattices upon which reality itself was draped like a glorious and miraculous tapestry. Everything from the impossibly blistering hearts of the stars to the mole roosting on Amarant's big left toe—if Egon's theories were true, was all fractal geometry all the way up and down. An invisible web of leyline 'strings' that formed the backbone of the material world. These forces had been manipulated and studied for untold ages but those magi who walked before the Workshop's elite thinkers were adrift in the dark, playing with fire they did not intellectually grasp or deeply comprehend. Only by building on the knowledge of those before them and piecing together the scattered lessons of the ancients could the thaumaturgists of today achieve the levels of mastery at their fingertips. The Workshop was poised to rescue the world from its troubles, so long as the emerging knowledge was restricted to those who could be trusted not to abuse its theoretically limitless power—for the dark aspects of sorcery also made themselves woefully known to those great thinkers as they went deep into its mysteries. As thrilling as their groundbreaking progress had been, the theorists and observers had also come to better understand the ominous link between sorcery and the essence of life itself. If a mage did not sap and exploit the orderly energies of other lifeforms to power his undoings of the natural order, intrinsic entropic forces would instead leech and twist his own body and mind. While the ancient masters and some modern rogue magi had learned to vampirically steal the energies from others to fuel their craft or protect themselves with runes, the majority of sorcerers who operated in secret were literally draining their own selves away to work their art, corrupting their bodies and sawing at their minds. Beyond the damage they did to themselves, those misguided and reckless outside practitioners threatened to unleash nightmares into the world if they opened the wrong doorways. Studies hinted at alien dimensions and abstract planes as real as their own, where entire other unfathomable realities were believed to thrive, and that they could sometimes spill into their own world, fueling the legendry of old. Superstitions and fears of daemons lurking in the spaces between. While some of those astral reaches promised unimaginable secrets and altered states of being to those who accessed them, other more hostile zones potentially hosted malicious forces. Pure and sentient entropy. Living shadows of awful and endless appetite.

Years ago Amarant was rounded up with many other students of thaumaturgy at the Academy and whisked away into the night. He feared the Diluvians or the mobs (which were arguably the same aside from some minor distinctions such as armor and pay and station) had finally worked themselves into a fever pitch of hysterical anti-sorcery and come to exterminate him and his fellow students. The Academy forbade sorcerous practice, allowing only study, but the masses and their rulers had little trust in the fidelity of those who plied such profane secrets. Those users who were caught by the Inquisitors and the Nation's soldiers were either destroyed or brought down here to the Workshop and thrown into cells for study of the entropy's effects on their beings. Amarant did not have access to those halls, the so-called 'Fiend Pits' just a few floors down, nor had he any desire to. The arcanist had heard stories of the horrors that entropy had wrought on the subjects within. The bodies of captive 'botched,' twisted by mad sorcery and butchered by fearful man, their minds unhinged by damnable truth.

Amarant was isolated for weeks during his imprisonment by the Inquisitors. Figures masked by shadow and runery posed nonsense questions meant to trick him into revealing any secret agendas or ambitions or loyalties locked in his heart. He could feel them probe his skull but knew techniques to resist, taught him by the Academy's grandsires. When Amarant finally emerged he was astonished to find his keepers wanted to appoint him as a researcher in the Workshop. The whole ordeal had been a test of him. After the gauntlet the arcanist's new masters had put him through, they had deemed him trustworthy and competent enough to make it to the next rung. Amarant would not give them any reason to regret their confidence in him. He devoted himself to his work and never saw any of his classmates again. Some of those other students went on to serve the Nation in other ways, he'd heard. A couple had become officers in the army. Some even went on to be Reapers, so it was rumored.

Amarant, however, was not a man of action. He was a man of the mind. He once studied the sky as an astronomer, looking through telescopes at the moons and their strange orbits, before he was locked away from the upper world. He missed those nights spent gazing from Camshire's rooftops with his mentor and lover Hitch at far-away clusters of stars and bodies that might astonishingly be whole other worlds, as some scholars surmised. Once things unbelievably large were under Amarant's purview. But now he looked the other way, scrutinizing things unbelievably small where lurked the very fabrics from which reality was spun and all things were emergent, including sorcery itself. Hobgoblins believed runes were the literal words of their sun god. Ylfs called them songs of nature. Amarant and his peers saw sorcery as a modern science, just as medicine or alchemy were. And their practiced methodologies were now paying dividends for the Nation. Though his work was done far under Camshire (a risk that had been mitigated, the staff was assured, thanks to the extreme depth of the facility and the use of other precautions such as runic wards), it was rumored there were other thaumaturgists out in the remote desert who had devised and were perfecting a runed artifact that would have the power to level an entire city. Such apocalyptic leverage in the Nation's hand could possibly guarantee the security of its people and interests forever. An arcane explosion at such a mythical scale was certainly possible in theory. There were old stories of entire civilizations wiped away thanks to sorcery's might. Amarant had proof of that disturbing truth right in front of his goggled eyes. For the artifact the thaumaturgist peered into was the God Eye itself.

The talisman had been extracted from the ancient ruins of Balmbalpor years before by the renowned archaeologist Evvius and then immediately seized by the Diluvians upon the scholar's exit from the complex's broken mouth. Evvius was able to slip from the Nation's grasp but the God Eye was lost to him. The Diluvian thieves brought the prize to this secret vault for study. Its rich life energies now even helped to power many of the Workshop's operations, giving light to the azure globes that lined the halls and powering the protective wards and sorcerous bindings that kept the botched Fiends secured further below. Amarant still found it difficult to believe that the tales he'd heard of the God Eye in his studies were actually rooted in truth. Of course the legends had been cluttered and adorned with many embellishments—the Impossible Riddle, the Bitch of Ninety Winters, the walking-on-clouds nonsense—but there seemed to always be a seed of actuality in the old yarns, some hint of where to look for the hidden history tucked within the lies. And this was only one of a handful of such mythical artifacts and records that might lie undiscovered in forgotten ruins and hillsides across the world. Those relics and arcana were dangerous weapons in any hands. Thus the Nation's mad fervor to unearth them before anyone else, or snatch them away from others by force and trickery.

Amarant had been staring at the God Eye for hours on end this night, as he often did. Those layered lenses and mirrors allowed him to see the tiny movements of actual consciousnesses trapped within the lightless thing. Their movements were mesmerizing. The souls darted around like phosphorescent tadpoles, or spermatozoa in an obsidian egg. Incredibly, a whole civilization was now locked up in that cosmic rock. Millions of shackled souls, possibly. Trapped there by their own pharoah. Hekto was believed to be a god-king by his people. The theory among modern scholars was that the despot only played the role of deity, and was truly merely a sorcerous charlatan in divine clothes—a story played out over the course of history untold times. It was believed that in some final bid for ultimate power and immortality Hekto sacrificed the entire population of his great templed city Balmbalpor to create the beautiful and potent God Eye. As for the fate of Hekto himself, no one knew. Perhaps he had somehow truly achieved a form of godhood in the mass sacrifice and achieved his mighty goal. Perhaps he was simply disintegrated in the powerful event. Or maybe Hekto was himself stuck in the pitch-black gem along with all the rest of his people, and remained there to this day.

The arcanist had noticed something unusual in recent days. The God Eye seemed to be increasing in density, as if it somehow were being fed more souls. Amarant was now in the process of double-checking those observations. Perhaps there had been a miscalculation of some kind. The theorist turned the dials on his goggles and peered closely within the unholy gem. This was as much an exercise of the mind as it was the eye. Once the arcane instrumentation allowed one to glimpse into the astral world it took a strong and skilled psyche to delve any deeper into the otherworld's secrets.

Amarant realized that as his mind was consumed with his work he had been running his tongue over a tiny lump on his gum. It was sore and hard to the touch. A disturbing development. He was well aware of the effects entropy had on the body. But he was shielded from such effects, or so he had been told. The researcher excused himself and went to the privy where he examined his reflection in a mirror. To his horror he found that an extra tooth was breaking from his gum above his natural ivories and at an angle askew. Amarant's heart pounded sickly as the implications dawned on him. If his colleagues were to discover the growth he would be sent to the Pits with the other corrupted magi. The other 'botched.' He had to be sure no one could see this mutation. Luckily he had little cause to smile. But how long before a random inspection revealed his secret? And beyond all that, what would become of his body now? Threat of discovery aside, Amarant was still doomed if he continued to further expose himself to these nefarious forces. That gemstone had to be the cause of the aberrant tooth. All that time spent looking into the Eye of God. Amarant had to get out somehow. But was there no escaping that fortified place. It was said there were no physical doors into or out of the Workshop. Amarant himself had never seen one. The labs and the quarters were connected to nothing else, so far as he knew. His masters used unknown means to communicate with their own superiors above. And even if Amarant could escape, there was a mile or more of earth riddled with ancient sunken ruins and networks of sewers he would have to climb through before reaching the city above. And even that could be a lie. Perhaps they weren't under Camshire at all. It was possible the Workshop was under some field or fort far from the capital. He had nothing upon which to rely other than words of admitted liars.

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