Down the shoreline from the valley, the mountain ridge proceeds to broaden and dance, it’s contours and eroded channels forming the likeness of a stormy sea frozen in time.  These peaks, they cut the skies, tear the breath from the world turning earth to sand, forest into frost, and fire into rain.  Here, amidst the patchwork of a landscape and the travel stitched ravines, a castle stood.  Secured over flood plains, and surrounded by the scared earth, there withstood conflicts of every origin.  The backbone of humanities magicraft, and the birthplace of the interracial alliance.  The sole place in Imaginary where beastkin, human, and demons stand united.

Secured by jealousy and mutual pride, the nature of the landscape was raised from a fool's errand into their finest collection of proving grounds.

Those who strived to learn magic inevitably found themselves passing through here.  A roster of sorcerers spent a fair portion of their lifespans defending this point, but one was determined to have it all.

Dark, forbidden, sacred, arcane, foreign, basic or unrivaled.  Tracy simply didn’t care.  If it was magic in nature, then she would make it hers.

Life was something that could not be taken.  In imaginary, everything that you dish out would eventually be returned to you, and for this reason trauma was regarded as a cancerous plague.  It was rare that between the guardians and the conscience of people everywhere, that a soul could be neglected.

Tracy spent five months in hell.  Driven into the mountain and cut off from her village completely, she was pinned down by the barrier of elements, wrathful anima, and plagued by doubts and night terrors.  She never slept.  When she thought she might be, the line between one nightmare and another was shattered like glass.  Beasts formed by lingering memories toppled and rose like undead, approached her, and passed on with all the lifeforce she had on her.

Soul carved wretched, the silhouette of the one who finally recovered her was defined only by the way the storms moved about him.  The first person to act disheartened by her appearance suffered amnesia.  The way she’d retaliated simply wasn’t in the same league as his identity.

Seven weeks in quarantine and cautious probing.  An eternity of unquenchable ambition.  She never asked.  When one spoke of magic, she adopted their source.  When someone complained or talked her down, they realized defeat.  Tracy subsumed trauma and stigma within her own, a critical mass that simply had no undoing.

She spent the rest of her lifetime in that tower, and began the next one without an ounce of her resolution lost between.  She simply would not allow another to inherit her spirit.  Maybe she couldn’t.  For the first time, it seemed like a character of Imaginary had truly become immortal.

She kept to magic.  The village couldn’t verify the person she was now, but for the sake of her origins, the sorcererst respected her wishes, and enabled her.

Tracy was cruel.  She was self righteous, and imposing onto others.  She acquired a bottomless thirst for vengeance, and took whatever she needed to sate that.  As she progressed in the arts of sorcery however, her malice began to wane.  The mood within the castle rubbed off on her.  As they put up with her struggle, she acknowledged theirs.  She never paid back that which was given to her, but she began to forgive those who followed in her footsteps.

The border dividing magics and their origin, she stepped through with unstoppable force.  To the inconsolable tyrant, she became an unbreakable battle drum.  To the ruthlessly self imposed, she became the way forward.  To the disheartened and defeated, she raised the foundation.

Tracy was merciless and brutal, but she was reliable.  The grudges she held were shared by everyone around her, and exposed deeper meaning in the magic arts than anyone before them could deny.  She single handedly ground down roadblock after roadblock, and tore a nursing furrow in her wake.  Those who had something to offer did so.  They had to, because they were needed, and the community never forgot them for that.

As the years passed, the founders and leaders of the sanction saw her path leading further and deeper, beneath their means to regard her.  Before long she would become a relic, invisible to all that might discover her, and that made the tragedy of her past seem all the more irreconcilable.

They asked that she make a place for herself of the highest order, and apologize that the worst had come to pass.  The assigned - covertly - a scholar to be her witness, and while the doors closed behind her, they would never stand in her way.

An elixir of dust and brine made their way into satchel, from the sandstorm, she had captured a mist not long for this world.  With glittering streaks splitting her face, she and her shadow began the journey across the savage ridge, only for the second time in history, during the storm season.

Tracy would go on to become the guardian of the earth ring, The Timeless Sorceress.