Hi Folks,

Today's contribution will be a different one: the narrative due to come along the painted minis for the "Knives in the Shadows" challenge. An exercice I am not very familiar with.

Let's see how it sorts out:

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The master of the Esdainchii was carefully watching at the stage. The troop was jumping and flipping around, dancing a Masque very few had seen played, even among the near immortal Asuryanii. As far as time and age might have any meaning. The plot looked so archaic and old that it depicted a storyline older than the Fall. Older than the war in Heaven. Older than his of race or its gods. A secret story.

It set a cosmogonic theme, revealing the preexistence of the Black Library to anything else and giving a small and very limited insight on the true nature of its darkest guardians. Everything else around and inside the Library of Chaos came later. Even Cegorach. It might make uneasy even the most hardened Solitaire. But not the Shadowseer of the Esdainchii. He already knew that some darker places and secrets may exist beyond the darkest known ones. He knew, because he felt, saw, and lived it in his flesh and in his soul once having been touched by the guardians. A nearly meta-empirical experience. Not even the most powerful Farseers of Ulthwee could imagine the depth of his true secret without being consumed.

The Dance was not really telling any story. No one could pretend understanding the meaning of the ballet, its cabalistic nature. While pretending depicting a Masque about the genesis of the Black Library and its discovery by the Old Ones, it was in fact a ritual. A forgotten, and somehow forbidden one, which purpose is to trap new Dancers for the Troupe. The potential recruits should connect with the secret, without being aware of this connection. This is the Shadowseer’s task for today: trapping recruits. For more than ten millennia now he was filling his Troupe’s ranks with souls that were not even aware that their lifes and decisions did not belong to them anymore. He embraced this quest on purpose of maintaining alive the secret and, someday, finding his successor. Millennias ago he had to overcome his own disgust at the idea of being at the manoeuvre in the process of confiscation of freewill of his blood brothers in order to reshape them as members of his Troupe. He went though the very same process. He knew it meant crossing an ocean of infinite darkness, until eventually being touched and reborn as a Shadowseer.

The psychoharpist sat on the edge of the stage was reacting to the Dance. He could see it in his glaze. Soon this soul will stand up and join the Dance. The Aeldar did not control his fate anymore. Should he survive the Dance he will become one among the Harlequins of the Esdainchii. And the Troupe will then leave the Craftworld while its new member will walk his first steps on a one-way trip to his true fate.

The Esdanchii are a mysterious Troupe even under Harlequins standards. They appear very punctually, less than once per millennia or even lesser. They play a Dance that always see members from the assistance joining the stage and eventually dying on it. They then disappear until a next performance but most of the time no one ever hear about them again. They seem to live a secret life deep in the Webway, beyond the mortal dimension. Since the event called by the Mon’Keig “the opening of the great rift”, the Troupe started however being seen in the real world more frequently. Though it looks it holds its own agenda and it is not that clear if they fight with, along or coincidentally at the same place as the Aeldarii hosts or the Drukharii raiding parties they might join. This agenda of them looke like being more focused on a specific aspect of the battlefield than any thing else. Physically and litterally. It looks like they are harvesting some stuff, not even being really interested in killing the enemies of the Asuryanii. Yet most of the time, their apparition is more likely to be reported by non-Elder races, telling about the Troupe coming to their place and performing its ballet even under the direst battle circumstances. Some among the observers of this Troupe’s actions reported some strange behaviors, witnessing that apparent objective of the Troupe was just to collect a single piece of gravel or a fistful of sand from the battlefield. Once this task completed, they just vanish as ghosts, their objectives, whatever it used to be, fulfilled. What for and why?

The Master of the Esdainchii do not even know himself how the nature of the offering is defined: why harvesting such a specific grain of dust matters more than another one? Yet he is fully aware that this duty his Troupe completes is the only tithe that satisfy the primal guardians of the Library of Chaos and keep them contained in the deepest and darkest keeps of the Black Library. This is the mission they received from Cegorach himself: acting as intermediaries between the current reality and the reality of old, that predated anything, so that the latter does not overflow the dimensions the children of Asur settled in. The Esdainchii guard the dam and keep its vanes closed. A curse among the curses.

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And... that's it.

See you folks.