I wasn’t always what I am now. I was once a courier rat—a small, pale creature bred and bound to the endless tunnels beneath Bazagon City. My life was nothing but parchment, ink, and the rhythm of my own heartbeat as I carried gilded scrolls through vents and crypts and the forgotten floors beneath the Tower of One Hundred Eyes.

I learned every rat-road, every forgotten stairwell, every shadowy underpass where sunlight never breathed. I was good at my work. Too good, maybe.

Then came the wish that changed everything.

A powerful client paid Frontwill Gildecorte’s price—far above what most could afford—to retrieve something simple: a thing lost long ago, nothing remarkable but dear to its owner. The scroll shimmered with promise. I took it, as I always did, and set out on the delivery.

But the magic was flawed.

When the scroll attempted to fulfil the wish, the condition became embedded in its magic, writing itself into existence on the scroll’s own surface. The magic realized that the object might be lost forever, so it warped its directive, “Retrieve what was lost, by any means necessary.”
But the scroll could not manifest intelligence on its own, so the magic bound itself to the closest carrier: me.

Now the scroll is me, and the quest never ends.

I woke as something else.

Humanoid. Burdened with language and impossible memory. The scroll—no longer parchment but a brand of gilded script across my flesh—anchored me to its purpose: retrieve that lost thing at all costs.

I have walked the Middle Isles for years. I have crawled into tombs revered and reviled. I have asked in bazaars, bargained with thieves, and read every scrap of rumour that whispers about a thing lost forever.

Yet the compulsion will not let me rest. The scroll grants me power only so long as I pursue the retrieval. It does not care if the item is impossible to find. It only cares that I keep looking. So, I search.

I remember tunnels.

I keep searching.

And searching.