Gist of the main plot:
Protagonist is the captain of a small squire squad, tasked with escorting some nobles from their home kingdom(temp.name K1) to another kingdom(temp.name K2). 2nd big bad attacks the band of people and everyone gets killed. Protagonist too, except there’s this presence that claims that they’ll have to rely on each other. Protagonist is found and transported to his original destination.
Some days late, protagonist can function normally after treatment, but since 1. K1 hasn’t responded, 2. K2′s leader worries and 3. K1 and K2 aren’t that far away, protagonist leaves K2 accompanied by side character 1(SC1), who is one of the potential successors of K2 leadership. Along the journey SC2, a mercenary and SC3, who none of the characters have any idea why they’re tagging along joins. Skipping the side character plots because I haven’t come up with them yet.
K1 reached. Shit goes down in K2 because the big bad just got released. The team goes back to K2(hurrah instant travel) and try to figure out how the fuck they’re supposed to deal with the big bad. Eventually they face off with the 2nd big bad. The presence gets revealed as the long-ago prince of K3, which was destroyed millennia ago partially because of the big bad. The gang travel to K3 and find the last pieces of hints to make the big sealing spell. Sealing spell is done on big bad and last hurrah.
Lore of K3(because no one knows the prince isn’t exactly dead):
A long time ago, K3 awakened to magic and prospered. During the peak of K3′s prosperity, a malevolent force appeared and the prince then attempted to seal them away, with the help of magicians. However, the lead magician betrayed them, killing the team, and the prince, at his last breath, took it on his life to seal away the malevolent force, holding a chip of the stone to channel what magic he had. The grieving king and queen cast a spell to bury K3 in the ground with the mad lead magician, and left the kingdom with their people. The crystal the malevolence was sealed in was taken to K2, and the chip the prince had was made into a beautiful accessory to honor his sacrifice.
So what the fuck is up with the lead magician?
They’re the second big bad, all right. But they’re also from what counts as the deities of the story’s world, the Stargazers, who watch over the progression of the worlds in various dimensions. SC3 is also a Stargazer, and was close to the second big bad. They’re also dimensions themselves, which 1. is because ruling something will take something else of equal power, and 2. will be important later.
The second big bad was tasked with watching over the story’s dimension, and came to love the world so much that they went to the world and gave the prospering kingdom(which the prince would be born into later) some of their own abilities and magic. However, jumping a world beyond what it should have progressed to has consequences(which were vaguely cautioned by the other Stargazers, but no exact data was given because it had close to never happened), and the big bad, which is a non-sentient, world-erasing entity was generated. Out of defiance and an actual need to concentrate on dealing with the entity without the gazers breathing “it’s useless, you can’t fight the world’s fate” down their neck all the time, the second big bad cut their, and by extension, the world’s connections with the other gazers and became what they called a Rebel.
At the time, the second big bad tried to come up with the sealing crystals as a plan from their now limited ability, but when they faced it, they found that sealing it away was possible, but it was temporary and made whatever was sealed indestructible for the time being. In addition, since magic was still there in the world, the reason for the world eater to exist was still there, so their world would still be erased sooner or later.
As a result, the second big bad came up with a gambit. For this, they needed someone from the far past who had the will to save the world and also knew the truth of the big bad(the prince), 1, Due to the Rebel being a close friend of the prince’s, the prince knowing the sealing spell and the Rebel knowing that the prince would rather seal himself away without a body to be a hope for the future than to die to the big bad, they pretended to go mad from the revelation, attacked the team and was sealed in K3 as a result. 2, K3 was buried underground, but there was still a lot of paper and books to go by, and the Rebel was able to research their own magic and come up with a spell that would transfer the world eater to themselves. After all, by giving magic to the world they were governing, they had connected their essence to it, and the two dimensions were already partially fused. Having finished the spell and sealed the book they wrote it down in, the Rebel could then wait for the opportunity.
Then what the fuck is up with SC3?
A friend who’s finally found their way to the dimension the Rebel is in, knows what the Rebel is trying to do and simply wants to see the Rebel before they are truly lost to their own gambit.. Anything that’s beyond the Stargazers, even things that they had controlled in the past, is in the unknown and takes an agonizingly long time to find. With the timelessness the Stargazers are, SC3′s done pretty well to find their friend in that amount of time.
And what the fuck is up with the protagonist’s eyes?
They’re indication of the prince being there. Eyes are windows to the soul. For one, there’s the Supernatural Gold Eyes trope, and for two, they’re the actual color of the prince’s eyes. When the identity of the prince gets revealed by more or less exorcism, the protagonist actually has dark brown eyes(which happens to be the color of the shaded portion of the eyes). At the beginning of the story, the prince is the one moving the protagonist, and because they’re from millennia ago, they have to slowly learn the language from the protagonist and therefore doesn’t speak much. The protagonist himself is a quiet person, too.
toradbos dump spot 