Necessity is often said to be the mother of invention. But inventions born of necessity are more likely to be shortsightedly conceived, hastily assembled, and ultimately regretted. Such is the case for the Incarnate, a constructed being born of a process the Arbiter has now repudiated. Well-intentioned, desperate folly is folly nonetheless.
‘The Incarnate’ refers to one of a handful of similar beings still extant, but each Incarnate is so similar in appearance and mannerisms that Telerians who know of them believe there is only one. If scholars would be intrigued to learn there is more than one Incarnate, they would be shocked to learn that there were once hundreds or more. But the chaos and devastation of the Great Divorce — an event that for most Telerians marks the dawn of meaningful time — obscured their numbers from the gaze of history. This, no less than a war between the gods, was the great necessity that drove the Arbiter to commit an act of abnormal ambition and hubris: trapping souls to power artificial constructs, creating perfect, immortal soldiers. These constructs all resembled the Arbiter herself – a manifestation of the ordering nature of Light. The Arbiter made what she knew, over and over.
It took centuries of work and pondering after the Divorce before the Arbiter created the Shards. The Incarnates, her earliest, fumbling attempts at a similar concept, were flawed in ways that the Arbiter came to eternally regret. Shards preserve a mortal being as they were at the moment of their Sharding, with all their will and memory, their health and vigor, their capacity to live, learn, and age. But the spirit-crystals powering the Incarnates were simplistic, stripping the soul to its essence and obliterating all individuality and free will. However, as with the bodies of the Sharded, the Incarnates could persist beyond corporeal destruction: if the Incarnate’s constructed body was destroyed, the soul would persist within the gem and could operate a new Incarnate body.
But procuring souls to empower the Incarnate constructs required great sacrifice. The souls of the Incarnates were not willing volunteers, as the host-bodies of Lightbringers are, but Elves, more steadfast than most in their loyalty to Lumaya. They were asked to volunteer to fight for the Goddess and lied to about the capacity in which they would do so. It was an act of terrible tyranny, scarcely excused by the circ*mstances of an existential war, a fact that the Arbiter soon
felt gnawing at her conscience — in her hour of need, the Arbiter herself had presaged the foul methods of necromancers and the Knights Revenant centuries later, who are now her sworn enemies.
Nevertheless, the Incarnates, crafted by the Arbiter’s magic and vivified by the residue of bright Elven souls, were strong, tireless, and absolutely obedient, utterly resistant to Siroth’s temptations. The Dwarves, one of Lumaya’s most devoted allies during the Great Divorce, fought admirably but were only mortal. For a time, Lumaya’s army held their own against the Firstborn and Painsmiths aligned with Siroth. The Arbiter and Lumaya were losing the struggle even with
Incarnates on their side and the sacrifices of the Elves were for naught. Siroth’s tantalizing whispers subverted many of the Firstborn to his cause and this was too great a loss for the forces of Light to overcome. In desperation, Lumaya and the Arbiter crafted the Great Curse: an unstoppable banishment spell that expelled the gods and Firstborn from Teleria, ending the war.
Left behind were the mortal races, as well as a single Firstborn: the Arbiter, whose divine essences of Light and Darkness had been transfused with Teleria’s own Light and Darkness, rendering her immune to the banishment. With her, guarding the gleaming geometrical perfection of her fortress and gazing unflinchingly at her, were hundreds of her Incarnates. Each was an eerily silent version of herself. It was then the horror of what the Arbiter had created hit her.
She mournfully deactivated most of them and withdrew their primitive proto-Shards. She destroyed the Incarnate shells then crushed the gems one by one with a whispered apology to each, she released the souls of the Elves to true and final death and their proper place within Teleria’s leylines. She kept only a few, to serve as avatars, decoys, and an ultimate contingency, should the Arbiter’s Shards fail her.
Today, as before, without will of their own, the Incarnates act only at the Arbiter’s behest, defaulting to guarding her holdings and allies and attacking the forces of Darkness when under no other instruction. When they do so, the enemies of the Arbiter rage and shrink from their hallowed presence. Even when the Incarnates fight to protect servants of Lumaya, their allies are nonetheless disquieted by the presence of these masked, expressionless automatons.
