Before speaking of Zora, one must first understand Brockern—not as a place of residence, but as an institution. Brockern was a monastery in name only: a fortress of doctrine and ritual, raised not to shelter the faithful, but to produce mastery over forces most cultures feared to name. It was not designed for comfort, nor for reflection. It existed for one purpose alone: the pursuit and application of forbidden knowledge.

Brockern stood upon a frozen mountaintop, so remote and inhospitable that its isolation served as its first line of defense. The ascent was lethal to the untrained. Winds howled without pause through jagged spires of black stone, driving ice like shards of glass into exposed flesh. Snow did not settle gently there; it was torn apart by the gales, forced into every seam of stone and skin alike. The sun appeared rarely, pale and distant, offering illumination without warmth—a reminder that Brockern had been deliberately placed beyond the mercy of the world below.

The monastery itself was carved directly into the mountain, its vast halls hewn from ancient rock and etched with sigils predating the surrounding kingdoms. No banners marked its gates. No crests proclaimed allegiance. Brockern did not announce its presence, nor did it seek recognition. It endured in silence. Its corridors were perpetually cold, as though the stone rejected heat by principle. Iron braziers burned with alchemical fire that gave light but little comfort, their flames shifting in hue—amber, sickly green, or void-black—according to the rites being conducted within.

At the heart of Brockern lay the great hall, a cavernous chamber whose ceiling vanished into darkness. It was here that the Black Order convened, and here that their true work was done. The Order dealt openly in the dark arts: necromancy, spirit binding, angelic and infernal invocation, demonology, and the coercion of entities that existed beyond mortal hierarchies. These practices were not framed as transgression, but as science—disciplines governed by law, precision, and authority.

Central to all of this was the invocation of the Bornless One, an absolute principle the Order claimed existed before gods, before heaven and hell, before life and death were divided. The Bornless One was never depicted, never represented by idol or image. Such acts were considered blasphemous reductions. Instead, His authority was accessed through His thousand names, spoken aloud in ritual cadence until sound itself seemed to fracture.

Adonaie.
Tsabao.
El-Shaddaye.

The names echoed endlessly against the stone, layered atop one another until language collapsed into vibration. Initiates learned them before they learned mercy. Precision was enforced through punishment; mispronunciation was met with blows, not out of cruelty, but because the Order believed pain refined obedience. The rites were long, merciless, and exhaustive. Flesh numbed, lips split and bled, knees froze to the floor as invocations continued for hours without rest.

Brockern did not cultivate belief. It demanded submission to hierarchy, to ritual, and to power itself. Faith was irrelevant. Results were all that mattered.

Suffice it to mention Zora’s arrival, for even that single moment carried the weight of prophecy and betrayal enough to shape a lifetime.

She was brought to Brockern in the dead of night, wrapped in coarse wool already stiff with frost. Her mother made the ascent alone, driven not by faith but by terror. Below the mountain lay a lord’s court steeped in paranoia and incense, where seers were consulted as readily as generals. One such diviner—half-mad, half-revered—had spoken a single sentence that sealed Zora’s fate: the lord’s demise would come from his own seed, in the shadow of the Black Mountain. From that moment, Zora’s father ceased to see children as heirs. He saw only threats yet to mature.

Her mother understood this before the guards did. She understood it before the knives were ordered sharpened, before the quiet “accidents” that befell inconvenient infants in noble houses. Whether out of love, guilt, or sheer instinct for survival, she chose exile over bloodshed. Brockern, with all its cruelty and finality, offered one thing the court could not: obscurity. What was given to the mountain was considered lost forever.

There were no farewells. No names were spoken aloud. At Brockern’s gate—an unadorned slab of black stone sealed with sigils—Zora’s mother surrendered her child without protest, without plea. The Order did not ask questions. They never did. Infants arrived rarely, but when they did, they were accepted with the same cold certainty as corpses delivered for study. A life offered was a resource, nothing more.

It is said her mother lingered for a moment after the handover, long enough for the wind to steal tears from her eyes and freeze them against her lashes. Then she turned back down the mountain, knowing she could never return. To look back, Brockern taught, was a form of weakness.

Zora would never know her mother’s face. She would never hear her name. The Order erased such things deliberately. Identity, lineage, and blood were distractions from purpose. Yet the irony endured: Zora was hidden from a father who feared prophecy, only to be raised by a place that manufactured it. Brockern did not deny fate. It refined it.

Thus Zora’s life began—not with nurture, but with abandonment; not with warmth, but with ice; not with choice, but with inevitability. A child concealed from a terrified lord, entrusted to a mountain that believed destiny could be invoked, commanded, and, in time, wielded.

The specialization of magic in Brockern followed no gentle curriculum, nor did it pretend to educate in the manner of academies or courts. Instruction there was a process of attrition, designed as much to discard the unworthy as to refine the capable.

At the age of six, any newcomer who had not already perished from exposure, illness, or neglect was introduced to what Brockern disdainfully called magia naturalis. This was the study of the mundane: the sympathetic properties of herbs and stones, the influence of lunar cycles on blood and sap, the binding of minor forces through breath, gesture, and sigil. Fire coaxed from resin and friction, wounds closed through poultices enhanced by whispered formulae, spirits of place placated with offerings and names half-remembered from older tongues.

To the outside world, such practices would have seemed impressive—witchcraft, hedge sorcery, the stuff of folklore and fearful peasants. To Brockern, they were nothing more than preparatory exercises. Crutches for the unimaginative. The masters spoke of them with open contempt, referring to them as intrascendental tricks, useful only insofar as they revealed discipline, memory, and the capacity to obey instruction without understanding. Children who lingered too long in these studies were quietly reassigned to labor, experimentation, or sacrificial duty. To rely on magia naturalis was to admit one’s mind could not grasp what lay beyond nature.

Survival itself was the first examination. Brockern did not separate learning from danger. Spells miscast were not corrected; they were endured. Those who burned themselves learned the cost of imprecision. Those who poisoned themselves learned restraint—or died. By the time a child reached nine years of age, their continued existence was considered proof of minimal suitability.

Only then did true instruction begin.

At nine, the surviving children were inducted into what Brockern called the pure science—magic stripped of superstition, morality, and comfort. This was not sorcery as art, nor faith as power, but invocation as law. They were taught that reality was negotiable only if addressed correctly, and that spirits, angels, and demons alike responded not to devotion, but to authority. Names were no longer metaphors. Names were weapons.

Here the Bornless One ceased to be a distant abstraction and became a framework: the axis upon which all invocation turned. Children memorized the thousand names not as prayers, but as coordinates—Adonaie, Tsabao, El-Shaddaye, each syllable a key that unlocked specific obediences in the unseen. To mispronounce was to invite correction, often violent. Brockern considered such lessons efficient.

Where magia naturalis dealt with influence, this science dealt with command. Circles were no longer drawn for protection, but for containment. Spirits were not asked, but constrained. The young were taught early that mercy had no place in accurate ritual work. Hesitation corrupted outcomes.

It was here that Brockern’s true philosophy revealed itself: magic was not meant to coexist with the world. It was meant to supersede it.

By the time a child completed their ninth year, they no longer thought in terms of wonder or fear. They thought in structures, correspondences, hierarchies. They understood that survival was provisional, granted only so long as they continued to justify the resources spent on them. Brockern did not produce mystics or scholars. It produced instruments.

And Zora, having endured both the cold of the mountain and the cruelty of its teachings, stepped into this second stage not as a frightened child—but as one already shaped by silence, loss, and inevitability.

From this rigid system of specialization there was no deviation. Once a child passed from magia naturalis into the so-called pure science, Brockern ceased to tolerate hesitation or preference. Aptitude was not a matter of choice; it was identified, imposed, and enforced. Those who showed even the slightest resistance to the deeper disciplines were either broken until compliant or quietly removed from instruction altogether.

Zora was not given that luxury.

By the time her training advanced beyond foundational invocations, the masters of Brockern determined that her mind was suited—dangerously suited—for the darkest strata of their knowledge. Where others faltered under the strain of abstraction or recoiled from the implications of what they were taught, Zora endured. She did not flinch at contradiction, nor balk at blasphemy. This marked her, irrevocably, for further descent.

She was therefore compelled to study the tomes Brockern reserved for its most severe instruction: texts not meant to enlighten, but to reorder the will of those who read them.

The Grand Grimoire was among the first. Bound in cracked leather and reinforced with iron clasps, it was less a book than a catalog of dominion. Its pages detailed the summoning and binding of infernal entities not through bargaining or worship, but through compulsion—names, seals, geometries that reduced demons to functions within a ritual equation. To read it was to internalize the principle that no being, however ancient or malignant, was beyond subjugation if addressed correctly.

Then came La Véritable Magie Noire, a work Brockern regarded as essential rather than forbidden. It rejected moral framing entirely, presenting magic as a neutral force distorted only by sentiment. Life, death, corruption, and sanctity were treated as interchangeable states, differentiated solely by method and outcome. The text demanded its reader abandon the illusion of ethical boundaries, replacing them with a single metric: efficacy. Zora was required not merely to memorize its contents, but to defend its theses under interrogation, even as punishments followed any sign of doubt.

More esoteric still was The Red and the Black Dragon, a treatise on duality and annihilation—creation through destruction, order imposed through deliberate imbalance. Its metaphors were violent, its rituals unstable, and its conclusions unsettling even to Brockern’s instructors. The dragon it described was not a creature, but a model: red for blood, impulse, revolution; black for void, death, and absolute negation. Together, they formed a system of magical praxis that embraced collapse as a tool rather than a failure.

These books were not studied in isolation. Brockern ensured that Zora’s education was immersive and unrelenting. She copied sigils until her fingers cramped and bled. She recited conjurations until her voice failed. She was forced to perform rituals whose outcomes were intentionally unpredictable, then punished for not adapting quickly enough. Sleep deprivation was routine. Silence was enforced. Observation replaced explanation.

The intent was clear: Brockern did not wish to teach her what to think, but to strip away the capacity to refuse what she was taught.

When Zora reached the age of fourteen, she stood at the threshold Brockern reserved for only a handful of its initiates. Survival to that age alone marked her as exceptional. Endurance beyond it promised something rarer still. She was deemed ready for initiation into the Order’s most guarded inheritance: the texts they referred to, without irony, as their Magnus Opus.


This final stage of instruction centered on a trinity of works the Black Order revered as the writings of their “saints,” not for holiness, but for mastery. Each book represented a pillar of absolute authority over the unseen.


The first was the Liber Iuratus of Honorius. To Brockern, it was the purest articulation of command ever set to parchment. It taught the magician not merely to summon, but to stand as a juridical authority over angels and spirits alike, invoking celestial hierarchies as binding law rather than objects of worship. The rituals it described were exhaustive and merciless, designed to erase the practitioner’s individuality until only office remained: the magician as function, as living seal.


The second was the Testament of Solomon, a text Brockern treated with equal reverence and caution. It was studied not for its myths, but for its taxonomy—an exhaustive catalog of demons, their offices, weaknesses, and compulsions. To read it properly was to accept a radical premise: that even chaos had structure, and that knowledge of that structure conferred dominion. Brockern taught that Solomon’s greatness lay not in divine favor, but in his willingness to use it without restraint.

The third was the book attributed to Saint Cyprian, the final synthesis. Where Honorius provided authority and Solomon provided classification, Cyprian offered transformation. His text chronicled the passage from orthodox belief into deliberate apostasy, treating the abandonment of spiritual safety as a necessary step toward true power. Brockern regarded it as the most dangerous of the three, not because it corrupted the soul, but because it required the conscious rejection of fear.

Initiation into these works was not symbolic. It involved isolation, prolonged fasting, and ritual exposure to forces that had broken lesser initiates outright. Zora was scheduled to begin this final instruction within the great hall itself, under the direct supervision of the Order’s highest authorities.

She never did.

The raid came without warning. Whether guided by rival orders, zealots, or a power threatened by Brockern’s accumulation of forbidden knowledge, no definitive account survived. What is known is that the mountain burned.

The ascent that once killed the unprepared was conquered by force. Wards failed. Sigils shattered. The winds that had long protected Brockern carried screams instead of invocations. The great hall—where the Bornless One had been called by a thousand names—ran red with blood. Grimoires were torn apart or consumed by fire, their contents lost or unleashed in uncontrolled bursts of sorcery. Masters who had commanded spirits for decades died begging for mercy they had never taught.

By dawn, the Black Order was effectively destroyed.

Brockern, the fortress that had endured centuries of isolation and cruelty, was reduced to a ruin of ash, ice, and broken stone. Its Magnus Opus was scattered, its hierarchy annihilated, its doctrine silenced.

And Zora, standing at the edge of initiation, survived the collapse of the very system that had forged her—carrying with her fragments of a knowledge never meant to leave that cursed mountain.

In the years that followed the fall of Brockern, Zora did not find refuge, nor redemption. She survived instead on the fringes of civilization, drifting along the outskirts of society where desperation outweighed scruples and danger was a form of currency. The knowledge she carried—fragmentary, half-forbidden, and poorly understood by others—made her useful, but never welcome.

She took work with adventuring companies that needed what she could do but recoiled from what she was. Her role was always conditional. Clerics either refused to acknowledge her presence or treated her as a blasphemy made flesh, a walking reminder of doctrines they pretended did not exist. Some muttered prayers when she passed. Others made signs of warding and pretended not to see her at all. Warriors, for their part, feared her openly. They watched her hands more closely than the enemy, flinched at her incantations, and only relaxed once a battle was finished and her share of the loot—always modest, always taken without complaint—was handed over and she stepped away.

Trust never followed her. Gratitude rarely lasted beyond the next sunrise.

Zora understood this arrangement and did not contest it. She had been raised without illusion about affection or loyalty. To her, cooperation was transactional, and companionship a temporary alignment of needs. If her presence unsettled others, that was their weakness to manage. Brockern had taught her long ago that approval was irrelevant to survival.

Only one exception endured.

Tino, a half-elf ranger, met her when she was still little more than a hardened adolescent—too sharp-eyed to be a child, too stripped of softness to be anything else. Where others saw a danger to be endured, Tino saw a person shaped by forces beyond her choosing. Out of a sense of mercy rather than obligation, he watched over her in those early years, sharing food, offering guidance, and occasionally placing himself between her and the worst consequences of her own severity.

He tried, in his quiet way, to temper her. To teach her restraint where Brockern had taught dominance. To show her that not every problem required force or control. His efforts met limited success. Zora listened, sometimes. She never softened. Compassion, when it appeared at all, was filtered through calculation rather than instinct. Still, what existed between them came closer to friendship than anything else she had known—a fragile, uneven bond built on endurance rather than trust.

Through all of it, Zora remained focused on a single purpose.

She was searching for what the raiders had taken from her—not gold, not shelter, but her true inheritance: the unfinished legacy of Brockern. The grimoires scattered or stolen during the raid. The fragments of doctrine, ritual, and method that formed the monastery’s science of dominion. Without them, her education remained incomplete, her potential constrained by loss.

She did not seek vengeance for Brockern itself. The Order had been cruel, and its fall was not mourned. What she sought was restoration—not of the institution, but of the knowledge it had hoarded. Once she reclaimed the science that had been denied to her, she believed the rest would follow naturally.

After that—only after that—would she decide what place, if any, the rest of the world deserved in her plans.

Mortals, after all, could wait.