Father of the Spire

Beneath the endless sky, the world is fractured—Spire by Spire, each a lone island above the Green, a writhing mass of fungal corruption that devours all in its path. It was said that no force could withstand its relentless spread, that all things would one day be consumed. But then, something changed. The Ruined Spire, long thought lost, stood defiant, its surface scrubbed clean of corruption, followed closely by Foolsgrave. Whispers traveled on the winds—of an elder dragon alchemist, Tabernaculus, hidden in his ruined fortress, seeking a cure for the Green -- for which there was now evidence it was possible -- and of his daughter, Audrey, who was no mere girl, but a Tree of Life wrapped in human form. And also of something more—something locked away, something waiting.

Three parties came to uncover the truth. The first reached Foolsgrave, a place of impossible order, where the terracotta servants of the Alchemist, Jug and Pot, greeted them with riddles and trials. The Gauntlet tested their wisdom, manifesting old sayings into terrible reality.

"They say that beauty is in the eye of the Beholder... so, uh, which one is it?" and a Behold would appear and attack. "They say, you should never lose your head -- but sometimes two heads are better than one." -- that one didn't end well... -- that sort of thing.

They endured and emerged victorious, only to then be turned away by Tabernaculus himself. He did not seek warriors—he sought knowledge. He gave them crystal spheres and sent them forth to capture the essence of pristine forests untouched by the Green in hopes of finding a permanent cure.

The second party returned with a sample. Their trials earned them entrance to the Ruined Spire, where they found Audrey, drifting in a pool of water among other floating spheres, other samples. But little did they know that her heart was bound to only one. Inside it, Gaius a son of Gaia, the spirit of the local forest, corrupted, caught unknown, whispered to her. She longed for him, and when her father denied her, she fled, plunging into the abyss of the Green.

In her absence, the second party made a choice—freeing Gaius. But Tabernaculus knew that releasing him was no simple act. Through his alchemical craft, the corruption was exchanged -- this was the limit of his power -- cleansed, but bound elsewhere, before the sphere shattered and Gaius stood reborn -- longing for his love.

The third party descended into the abyss, armored in terracotta -- resistant to the Green -- their only weapons words and hope -- and... lots of Blight spells. The Green had twisted Audrey into something monstrous, a creature of mindless hunger, of Life and Death, strengthened tenfold. But they did not seek to slay her —they sought to bring her home. Weakening the Green around her, they captured her in a crystal sphere (gotta catch'em all?) and brought her back to her father.

CONCLUSION NOTES: #

Stay tuned for a one-off to conclude this scenario. 🙂

Artist's Statement: #

Most artwork created for this scenario was created using a workflow that incorporates stable diffusion image generation with a model that was trained on Steve's own corpus of artwork, including photographs, sketches, and paintings. Initial sketches and drawings were done by hand digitally, and iterated over with AI image generation to flesh out some details before being finished more or less "traditionally" at lower resolution, and then upscaled with a final continuity pass. Such work meets the definition of "human authorship" under US Copyright Law. Despite that, all artwork for this run is released under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license and is Public Domain.

The only exceptions to that pipeline were the images of Gaius and the Lab which were generated on the fly during the convention without enough human input or guidance to constitute "human authorship" under US Copyright Law and therefore cannot be copyrighted.

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