History

The Calyx flower grows wild in the caverns beneath Antioch, pale blooms with faintly luminescent petals. Callida Sulveth picked them as a child. She was born to a minor but respected family, a girl of notable promise in a society that rewards cunning above all else. The Sulveth name carried no political weight and no house behind it, yet those who knew the family remarked on Callida’s particular gift for stealth and cunning. A girl with her instincts had no shortage of possibilities.

When she was still young, Callida fell gravely ill with a sickness the healers of Antioch could not treat. The illness was rare, and its cure is rarer still. There existed on the surface an infirmary of some renown whose healers worked with a particular herb found only in the light, its cultivation impossible underground. Dark Elves do not seek the sun willingly, but the Sulveth family made arrangements and sent their daughter above ground. She arrived and the treatments began.

They did not finish.

A parish of Malagant’s church operating in the region had identified the infirmary as a target. Beyond its patients, the clinic served as a waystation for Dark Elven dead. Drael’Thalan who died in the region and whose families had paid for their return to Antioch were brought there to be held in its mortuary until transport could be arranged. Months of fresh dead could be stored at any given time, and Malagant’s followers are required by their god’s tenets to grow his undead army wherever they are able. A prize like that was worth spilling blood. Those inside were quickly put to the knife: the healer, the staff, and every patient too weak to flee their beds. The parish then used Necromancy on the victims, commanding these newly made undead to haul away the contents of the funerary vault. The Dark Elven dead that families in Antioch were expecting to have returned to them were gone before anyone knew to look.

Callida was not among those cut down. She hid. It was what she had always done best. When the parish was gone she was alone in the wreckage, far from her home and family, in the one place on Arthos where salvation had been within reach.

Still dying, she took the infirmary’s ledger before slipping out into the dark, an act the Church of Raze would later record as the defining demonstration of her resolve. She found shelter nearby and spent the night writing inside the front cover: what had happened, what had been taken, and the holy symbol of Malagant’s church, which she had seen clearly enough to describe. The ledger already held everything else, every name and every family of every Dark Elf whose remains had been stored there and were now gone. When an Antioch courier arrived the next morning expecting bodies to be transported and found a massacre instead, Callida walked out of hiding and gave him the ledger. In the weeks that followed, the families of the dead received it. Grief-stricken and furious, they did not hesitate. By the time the last of them had taken their vengeance, the parish existed only as a lesson. Callida did not live to see it. She went back to her shelter and did not leave it again.

The illness that her vengeance had held at bay finally caught up with her when the ledger left her hands. At the moment of her death, as she stood at the threshold between the living world and whatever lay beyond it, Raze reached out and dragged her back.

The Dark Goddess did not return her unchanged. Callida had become the vessel through which Raze speaks on Arthos, her own self still present inside it, now inseparable from a purpose far greater than herself.

As Raze had shed the name Alakasha, she shed the name Callida Sulveth.

The Conduit in Antioch

Centuries have passed. The girl who hid in that infirmary has not aged a day since Raze claimed her. She resides within a large metal box carried by servants, its exterior carved with glowing runes and wards, ageless and motionless inside. Those who seek an audience come when no other recourse remains, when every path to vengeance has been exhausted and nothing is left but the word of the goddess herself.

She does not speak aloud. A chosen servant, called the Voice, acts as intermediary, bound to her by a mental connection the Conduit establishes and holds at will. Words pass to her through the Voice, and her words pass back out the same way. This servant changes across generations, growing old or dying, replaced when the Conduit judges it necessary. To be chosen as the Voice of the Conduit is the highest honour the Church of Raze can bestow on a living person. Those who have held the title say the bond feels less like speaking someone else’s thoughts and more like finally knowing your own mind with certainty. It is a certainty shared across Antioch, drawn from centuries of devotion anchored by a presence that has outlasted every war, every collapsed house, and every Primum the kingdom has produced.

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Among the faithful, Calyx flowers are left at the base of the Conduit’s box, the same pale bloom Callida picked as a child. The Church of Raze holds no doctrine that accounts for the practice. The Sulveth descendants still live in Antioch, quietly revered for what their ancestor became, and they too leave the flowers in turn. It is an acknowledgement without words that the girl inside is still there.

Art by: Vineeta Agrahari