RE: The Smith

Thanks! My original idea was going to be something along those lines honestly, and then I realized halfway through that I was writing about the death of the first Emperor of Trothguard - which in my prior history was always "something went weird with the ritual to grant him immortality via his Throne". I'd never really bothered to consider what might have gone wrong. I had established that he'd sacrificed an untold number of Elves to create the relic with the goal being to have eternal life and an ability to command loyalty from everyone on the continent, and as I was writing this piece I felt everything click into place.

When she traded Everything She Was she traded her people. And since the Tribes had united which bound authority to their fifteen chosen, and since she was the last... that extended out from her tribe to all of the represented elven tribes.

So the weapon became something intangible. A weapon made out of spirit and purpose, to cut the threads of a ritual in progress and drive a dagger into the heart of it all. To everyone else it would have looked like the Emperor sacrificed thousands... but the Smith knew otherwise.

And so the First Emperor, the Tyrant, died. That didn't end the Empire by any means, and it'd take thousands of years and 9 more Emperors before that finally burned itself out... but such was the wording of the deal.

I probably could have added this context into the story better, but I didn't want to Worldbuilding-Dump on the fiction just because I had an "ah-HA!" moment lol