Side Story 2

Side Story 2: The Devil Within
This side story follows Einar as he explains his past to a visitor.

Einar was an orphan, raised by monks. When he became old enough, he, like the others his age, was given a choice by the monastery: leave the monastery behind after the monks help find him work, or stay and work at the monastery, learning the ways of Ki if he so chose. Einar chose to stay, and learn the ways of the monks.

He and the other students were taught eighty-one stances, and then from shifting between those stances, six hundred and forty-eight movements. After two years of training, they were declared ready. After a day of rest, they were instructed to perform a circuit of movements. Before long, under the calm instructions of the monks, Einar and his fellow initiates felt Ki flow through their bodies for the first time.

They came to learn of the enhancing effects of Ki, techniques to heal, to harm or to reinforce.

Einar in particular spent much time learning and thinking on healing techniques, not just healing people, but animals, and eventually plants as well. Time passed, and Einar became one of the monks tending to orphaned youngsters himself.

Around this time, disturbing events began to happen in the city - brutal murders, made stranger by the fact that each time the murderer was found and inevitably killed, one of the people who fought the murderer would themselves go mad and start killing others. For a while, these events did not affect the monastery, as it was somewhat isolated from the rest of the city.

However, it does happen. The hall of techniques, where the accumulated knowledge of generations of scholarly monks was stored, was on fire, and when Einar enters the building to help anyone perhaps trapped inside without fire resistance or breathing techniques, the hall's custodian is engaged in a melee with several other monks. Even with the custodian outnumbered, they are unable to do much more than hold him at bay until the head monk arrives, who handily defeats the deranged custodian.

Then whatever was afflicting the custodian flees into Einar and he discovers that it is no madness, but a possessing spirit hell bent on causing death and destruction. The spirit takes control of Einar's body and uses him to kill many of the monks and others at the monastery, before the remaining monks band together and plan to capture him and lock him away, forcing him to flee the city.

Although the spirit did not always assume control of Einar's body, it would stop him from killing himself or otherwise doing things the spirit did not want. They travelled to a nearby city, where Einar headed to the church, hoping for assistance from the gods in stopping the spirit. There is no response until Einar prays to the god of death, who explains that the spirit had less control over him than he had thought, only able to possess him for an hour each day. The god of death offered a solution: he would make Einar immortal, and Einar would be the spirit's eternal prison.

Einar agreed, and left society for the remote valley where he now lives, the spirit unable to harm anyone but Einar himself.