COMPANION Intro: Previously in The Chronicler Saga

Previously in The Chronicler Saga

          Samuel awoke to fire, and death followed wherever he tread.
          Filled with knowledge but absent of memory, Samuel lived in a world without context. He knew the fire in which he woke was not an accident, but its true nature—and whether he was at the heart of it—remained a mystery. As did its connection to the vision of a horrible murder haunting his thoughts, and the inescapable silver eyes of a heartless killer.
          Samuel was soon rescued from his own naivete by the rakish wanderer Kaleb, through whom he learned of the world into which he’d been born. That his kind—constructs—were engineered as a semi-sentient subservient class. And though he didn’t remember, it didn’t take long to learn he was different, even from other constructs. That he was blessed—or perhaps cursed—with the one thing his contemporaries lacked: emotion.
          Learning to deal with that emotion came at great cost, when Kaleb left him to be repaired by Atherton, an artificer and old family friend, and his apprentice, Michael. While Samuel lie insensate in the wake of another violent vision, Atherton, driven by fear and some unknown knowledge, attempted to imprison him. In the chaos of Samuel’s escape from Morrelton, Michael lost his life. In that same escape Samuel killed a man in Kaleb’s defense, only to find his trust betrayed, learning Kaleb was not what—or who—Samuel thought him to be.
          Before he died Michael offered Samuel direction, sending him to the forest home of a hermit adept named Mane and his two charges: Pariadnus, a suspicious youth who blamed Samuel for his friend Michael’s death, and Eriane, a free spirit with a troubled past and a secret adeptitude.
          No sooner had a grateful Samuel settled with the trio when Jacob—the vagabond he’d known as Kaleb—arrived to warn them of pursuers intent on Samuel’s destruction. Forced to trust the rogue once more, Samuel, Pare, and Eriane escaped thanks to Jacob’s powers of translocation, teleporting them to a nearby bluff from which they witnessed the spectacular destruction of Mane’s forest cabin.
          It was in this event Samuel learned a terrifying truth: His visions weren’t random at all. Instead, they were the thoughts and memories of other constructs, passed on to him through an unknown link in their dying moments. In the wake of the cabin’s destruction, Samuel watched Mane’s murder through the eyes of his servant construct, Icariascus, when the construct met his end by that same murderer’s bullet.
          He also learned for certain his pursuer and the silver-eyed man from his visions were one and the same.
          After escaping that destruction, they fled to the mountain city of Kelef, hoping the city’s great library might lend answers about Samuel’s origins. During that desperate flight, Eriane nearly revealed her adeptitude: the ability to guide a bullet’s path by affecting metals thought immune to kheomancy. Samuel prevented the revelation, and thus prevented a reprisal from the gun-hating Pariadnus.
          Upon reaching Kelef, Jacob ushered the party into the unlikely care of an old associate. Mistakenly believing Jacob had sold them out, Samuel, Pare, and Eriane snuck away in the dark of night to the lair of self-proclaimed construct prophet Acthemenius, who revealed Samuel’s true nature as a Chronicler: a legendary class of construct designed as infallible historians, persecuted into near extinction. In this interaction, Samuel discovered that his visions of a brutal murder were, in fact, an eyewitness account to the violent killing of the Sovereignty’s Queen Consort nearly a year prior.
          This brief pause proved their downfall. Colton, the silver-eyed killer from Samuel’s visions, and Bales, now revealed as the Queen Consort’s murderer, set upon them in Kelef’s seedy underbelly, seemingly killing Jacob before he could reveal he had not betrayed them. With Samuel unconscious, Pare in Colton’s inescapable clutches, and Bales bearing down on her with his murderer’s blade, Eriane drew her pistols. Her first shot killed Bales with his knife still in her gut, and her second took Colton in the eye and freed Pare. Freed them all.
          Inconsolable at Eriane’s use of guns, Pare turned his back on Eri in her moment of need, leaving her and Samuel behind to die. Moments later, a surprisingly not-dead Jacob returned, rescuing them both by translocating them to safety. While Eriane lay unconscious from her wounds, Jacob quietly retreated, offering Samuel instructions on finding him in the sovereign seat of Balefor. Eriane awoke to find Samuel by her side, the two of them vowing to set out together not only to help Eriane understand the nature of her abilities, but to bring Samuel’s knowledge of the Queen Consort’s true killer into the light.