Introduction

As the empyrean gods drew their final breaths, a treacherous and ambitious being, of whom no one took notice, stood by with a cup in his hand. The cutthroat of a man was the feeble servant of the evil queen of faeries, and the all-powerful goddess Andraste. His name was Dastor.

While Andraste stepped to her doom, Dastor saw an opportunity that no one else did. Once the fateful heroes Hayden and Vintus emerged from the cave atop Thaerin Cliff, the dastardly Dastor entered. And in his hand was a goblet of pure black obsidian, carved out of the mountains of the mythic realm of Arkwyn.

He had heard a tale that a man would battle for the future of all life in Væum. That a man who had drunk from a black and bloody vessel would fight alongside another whose blood was pure. And the men would have lived for thousands of years, waiting to meet.

Certainly, Dastor had chosen the right cup to make ungodly, and when he stepped into the tomb where the corpses of four great gods lay dead, he plunged the grail into their pools of blood. First he scooped up that of his queen and mistress, and then into Gor’s, then the malevolent Durlis’ blood, and finally into the blood of the great goddess Kartak’s blood.

Dastor mixed the blood well but fortunately, before he could even place his lips on the brim, he was killed. Most likely by Hayden herself. His body along with the mug, tumbled all the way down the cliff where they would smash into a million pieces and slip into a crevasse, never to be seen again.

However, the grail did not break. And though lost for hundreds of years, it was eventually recovered by a wise and righteous man called Evander. Evander recognised the power the beaker possessed when he looked over, and the divine substance caked inside. Evander kept the chalice secret, and he kept it hidden. In a city of men called Ashfael.