Much of what followed my initial defeat of Garanda has been well-chronicled in other texts and I see no reason to challenge them. The "Tale of the Flesh Golem" explains well the fate of the sparesoul that houses Garanda's soul. I would also recommend the "Forgotten Son" for those who wish to know more of Broger and how he has continued to influence the events that have led us to where we are today. As for the day I took the same mantle as Matthew Ryan and the king's late father Joseph Baldus, countless accounts have covered the details of how I became the Archknight. They exclude many details that I would consider intimate, but they are ultimately irrelevant to this story. I have written of my life leading to this initial triumph to provide the context needed to understand why I shed this title and, more importantly, what led to me reclaiming it.
The Avatars have encountered many threats since being declared by the gods, but none were more threatening than the Knightmares, a collection of powerful creatures with deep-seated hatred against the gods. A sentient cloud that was seeded by Crane much to its rage, a sorcerer once spurned by Salica, and a deranged golem in Tanis once buried by Serenity composed a terrifying set of adversaries on their own, but they were far from the most terrifying members of the group. That honor went to the Phoenix Council, a trio of embittered phoenixes who despised Chaos for enslaving one of their own and their leader, Erdas. They had power which eclipsed the majority of the Avatars and a seductive allure that had inspired a great many Templars to turn their backs on the gods, including my own mother. As it turned out, my heightened profile since becoming the Archknight wounded her pride and primed her for the Phoenix Council's manipulation. It was this unforeseen betrayal that allowed them to capture me and deliver me into the custody of their master.
What is not widely known is that Erdas is a god, one I would describe as the God of Suffering. According to the Avatars of Serenity and Salica alike, it would appear that he was their uncle. While his motives for declaring war on our gods and our people remain a mystery, I have experienced firsthand what he is capable of. Although the Avatars would ultimately declare victory over the Knightmares, they were unable to defeat Erdas himself because he remained hidden throughout their campaign. His aim was twofold. With the power of the three Avatars of the Children, he combined the magical essences of life, death, and time through some means indecipherable to me to create new lives for the Kilgor, the race that our gods once belonged to.
But his plan for me was far more straightforward: he wanted to break me. As the current living symbol of the collective will of mankind, it stood to reason that destroying my will and credibility would harm the morale of those he wanted to destroy. I do not say this lightly because I am well aware that this makes for a convenient excuse for a man trying to restore his damaged credibility. But it is well known that I have made myself into a pariah through quite deliberate actions. The reason for this is because, during my captivity, Erdas reminded me exactly why I was already tainted long before I publicly denounced the gods and my role as the Archknight. He forced me to relive, in vivid detail, the mistakes that I have committed to these pages. He reminded me of how I was once cursed with Garanda's presence, how I turned to Samson Amul for answers and performed unspeakable acts under his tutelage, and how I placed my trust in the wrong person, thus turning my greatest shame into an even greater danger. For days, without any chance to resist, he reminded me that I did not deserve the trust that I had gained. By the time I was rescued by the Avatars, I had regressed to the young man that had been tricked by blood mages to accept evil.
I turned my back on everything I had come to believe in, much to the widespread chagrin of my former supporters. I retreated to my home in Palon to recover, speaking to no one but my family. My beloved Voltairine was supportive and thankfully did not pry into my plight. I have yet to thank for her patience because fate separated us yet again soon after my escape from Erdas' clutches. The members of my old blood coven found me and took me at last. Recently, as Voltairine and I were entertaining a visitor, a portal appeared in the form of a blood pool and dragged me in. That was when I found myself once more in the caverns beneath the Solan Lighthouse, which the coven had occupied after Erdas left them for the planet Mennon.
What I saw there was evil, even by the standards I once ascribed to blood magic. Samson Amul, after many years of mastery in blood magic, had turned his curiosity towards something even worse. Dark magic had infected this coven and twisted their studies into the summoning of demons. Consorting with the likes of bladots, they had become something I no longer recognized. Samson was worst of all. He had actually turned one his former students, a man named Jacob Harret, into a wrathar out of curiosity. When I found them, the coven had been draining this demon of his blood for presumably academic purposes. What I saw was far more abhorrent than anything I was used to among the coven. It wasn't out of residual guilt for what I once did as a member, but complete revulsion that I decided that my old coven had to be stopped.
However, to defeat the entire coven alone would have been impossible. They took me so they could keep their eyes on me once more but, in this position, all I could do was attempt to reason with them. I managed to stay any decision to kill me for leaving because I never told anyone about them. Despite learning that plenty of my former friends were unnerved by this new direction, nearly half of them remained committed to the seemingly alluring power of dark magic. It was all I could do to convince whoever I could to retire to their beds when I decided to launch my attack. I knew that the gods did not truly forsake me for rejecting them when my attack was preceded immediately by the unlikely appearance of my youngest daughter Sarianna and a rifleman who called himself Damon Orion. The two had managed to track me down in an attempt to rescue me, but I wasn't ready to leave yet.
The battle that followed was quick and brutal due largely to the number of people who had taken my advice to hide while I wiped out the committed warlocks. With the power of my increasingly reliable silverfist transformation and both Sarianna's gun and Orion's gun to cover me, a defeated Samson laid at my feet only twenty minutes later, with the other dark mages dead. I slew the demon, thus finally taking control of the lighthouse. With that, I was free to leave, but a more pressing matter occurred to me then. If I had known at the time what had become of Voltairine in my absence, my priorities might have been different. But as it was, I felt responsible for the future of my coven. So I took over as their leader with the specific intention of preventing such evil being tolerated among them ever again.
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