A to Z Raconteur

The Calling
Written by Community Member Amphar in honor of Okosar the Raconteur

In the beginning, before my home of Ak’Anon was threatened by the shadow of the Bloodmoon, I was a simple clockwork engineer, fresh out of the Academy. It was only a decade after Ak’Anon was opened up to the world, and all I knew was my peaceful life of gears, machinations, and books. The books were what my father objected to.

It is not the norm for a Gnome to dream about faraway adventures. Conventional wisdom is that the Creator, Brell Serilis, frowned on that kind of a life for us. Tinkering is a noble profession, and it should fulfill any reckless desires that might creep into one’s consciousness.

It was a time when a steady stream of great tales started to flood in. There were tales of Steamfont and the Dragonscale Hills, of course. But there were even more faraway places, places that sparked my imagination. I couldn’t get enough of these books.

Everything changed for me one night when I had the most disturbing of dreams. I dreamt the clockworks I spent all day servicing started to crawl on me, to cover me, to dig into my skin, creating an exoskeleton that was slowly choking the life from me. Unlike our beloved King Ak’Anon, however, these machines started to take over my being, and I started to fade away. With a desperate cry, I exploded to cast away the machines, waking up in a cold sweat. The dream troubled me for days before I decided to seek out help from a most wise counselor, an Academy instructor of mine named Julene Urncaller. (more…)