Arantham stared at death. The being was as black as night laced with a webwork of blood-red fissures. It was the antithesis of life, a construct built to destroy the universe. It was Timesus, the Black Star.
The Gods didn’t know what to do with it when they found it. The Dawn War was over. The Primordials were entombed and imprisoned across the cosmos. But this, how could they bind it? How could they hold it?
They didn’t know. So they set forward a plan to wait until they did. It was a simple concept. Time was their enemy in this matter. Leaving it to its own devices, who knows what would become of it. Eventually it would break free and follow the path for which it had been built. They couldn’t imprison it like they had the others. They needed a different sort of vault.
A Time Vault.
Ao had the magic. She twisted the fabric of space-time in a cylinder in the center of the chamber. No time would pass within the vault itself while a million years might pass on the outside. The other gods had poured their magics into the vault, strengthening it and reinforcing it. Moradin himself had built the chamber to last for a million years.
Arantham had watched this. Though it had happened 500,000 years earlier, he saw their reflections within the time vault. He had seen them build it.
Arantham reached into the worn leather bag at his side and pulled out the orb. It was black with a tiny red light deep in the center of it. It was quite possibly the most valuable object to sit in a mortal’s hand. The glass itself was pure black diamond encased around the speck of red in the center. The red speck was smaller than the tip of a child’s finger yet held unimaginable power. It was one of only three known pieces of the chaos stone, the massive stone that sat at the bottom layer of the Abyss, separating the known multi-verse from the Far Realm. Arantham could not imagine the amount of time it took to bring forth just this one tiny shard, or how many lives it cost.
It was one of the few things powerful enough to disrupt the Time Vault of the Gods.
Yet time was not on his side. The Shieldbashers were coming too soon. He had planned to awaken Timesus in this very vault and set it on its course. But now he could not do so. It would have to be done elsewhere. They had three weeks to draw Timesus’s inanimate body forth, break it up, and ship it out to the White Kingdom. Doresain would have the honor Arantham had fought for for so long, but it was of no matter. The result was the same.
Arantham turned to the door where he had left the Death Emperor to guard the chamber. He had weakened the bonds holding the massive primordial, Codricuhn. Looking into the one weeping eye of the terrible wretched beast, Arantham had sympathized. The two of them both were souls tortured by time but soon they would both find an end to their pain.
Arantham looked back to the massive black primordial in the Time Vault and smiled.
Soon there would be an end to everything and it would be as though nothing had ever existed at all.
- Not knowing how to deal with Timesus, the Black Star, the Gods entombed it in a vault where time didn’t change. While the rest of the world moved on 500,000 years, the time vault, and the Black Star wtihin, stayed completely the same.
- Arantham possesses a shard of the Chaos Stone sealed in a black diamond sphere. It is a piece of the stone that separates the universe from the Far Realm. Arantham used this to disrupt the Time Vault and remove the Black Star.
- Not having time to reanimate the Black Star here, Arantham broke it up and smuggled it out of the Reliquary.
- Arantham had used an acid to weaken the bonds of Codricuhn, the chained primordial. He felt sympathy for the wretched beast as they were both equally tortured.
- Arantham believes the release of the Black Star will destroy the entire multiverse, leaving nothing but the void of the Far Realm behind. This is the end he seeks.