Though under quota, I have made some progress on Carpos’ Chapter 2 of TTWC3. I’d like to at least get two chapters of his knocked out before the week is out. We’ll see if I can manage it or not. Stay tuned.
I made a little progress on Chapter 10 of EM, coming just shy of finishing it. Though tempted to wrap it up, I think I’ll just leave it until the next cycle and go ahead with TTWC3. Stay tuned.
It isn’t apparent now, but Dox is a rather special character in that he appears in many stories in the Tellus Arc. In fact, he happens to guide a lot of the events on the Planet from the date of his genesis on. He wasn’t originally in the Trident War Chronicles but was added in when the story was revived and I was working to better integrate the nascent Tellus Arc.
Much of Dox’s story gets filled in elsewhere, but I’ll go ahead and give you the basic background here. Dox was once a human archmage obsessed with the then-extinct Dark Race. Through his agents, he was able to uncover the Tome of the Black Lich, a spellbook sealed with the power of titular Black Lich, the last of the Dark Race. Through the power of the Tome, Dox became the Dark Eternal, a sort of noncorporeal entity of overwhelming dark power. This bypasses the key weakness of the Liches themselves, that their physical bodies become unable to contain the vast power they develop. Ironically, Dox continues his quest to perfect the Dark Race without realizing that he’s already achieved the nearest approximation to perfection that’s possible.
Dox powers himself by absorbing the souls of living things. In my canon at least, just as with the laws of conservation of mass and energy, a soul can neither be created nor destroyed, so each time Dox consumes a soul, he adds a perpetual energy generator, though the law of diminishing returns applies, hence his need to continually claim new souls for the multitude within.
In Dox’s epilogue, there are oblique mentions of a “her” interfering. I’m not going to go into the details here. You’ll learn more about her eventually, but I will say that in all the multitude, there is one soul that continues to defy him, not quite to the degree of parity but strong enough that any slackening of control can be exploited. That’s why his projection in the Darklands was destroyed. Otherwise Xanthe wouldn’t have stood a chance. Rest assured that this mystery benefactress will appear again.
It was interesting juxtaposing the dual nature of the Monarch Lich, who still retained much of his humanity, with the more inscrutable Dark Eternal. As I said before, the irony is that Dox already represents the perfection of the Dark Race but is completely unable to see beyond his goal of achieving that through new generations of Liches. The Liches themselves are an untenable species. That’s why they went extinct with Black Lich thousands of years earlier and that’s why they’ll go extinct again. All Dox has is his mission, but his view is so blinkered (contrary to his conceit that his vision extends far and wide) that he’ll never truly achieve it. That’s all the better for the world.
As a fun tidbit, it was actually Dox who was behind Shadowblight’s betrayal of the Shadow Clan and all his efforts to unify the Southern Continent. I think you only get an oblique reference or two from Brenok of “my master’s master”, but that’s who it is. Expect to see a lot of more of this guy. He plays a direct role in seven more books slated thus far and has some influence in several others. Next time we’ll be visiting that most tragic of serpents, Ophis Python. Stay tuned.
