Low-Fantasy Occultist

The decision to draw upon the darker sides of human nature wasn’t made lightly. Nick was familiar with tapping into these emotions, but he was very aware of the dangers of exposing his soul to ideas that so closely reflected the corruption he was trying to eliminate.

Yet, looking at the golden ziggurat of the First Tower, he knew that a sanitized version of humanity could never be strong enough to hold back the Abyss.

Pure ideals could be powerful in certain situations, but without a solid foundation, they were fragile and would shatter under pressure. To create something that could reach the heavens and withstand the storms of centuries, humanity had always relied on a much denser, sturdier mortar.

Tightening his metaphysical hold on the tether connecting his mind to the genius loci, he reached into the depths of his own psyche for the part of himself that was kept away from the public.

From there, he pulled out Dissatisfaction, the primal itch that drove the first humans out of the caves. A satisfied species built nothing, after all, nor did it look at the sky and wonder what it felt like to touch the stars.

Dissatisfaction was the engine of progress, the constant refusal to accept the world as it was. Nick directed his endless frustration with his limitations into the pursuit of mastering the Occultist path, pouring it into the golden bricks.

Next came Pride. Not the superficial vanity of nobles in their silks, but the profound, fundamental arrogance needed to look at the laws of nature and decide to bend them. It was the unwavering belief that a mortal hand could shape reality that allowed him to craft [Hubris’ Reach] and ruin the Tidemaster’s Blessing despite the vast difference in power between them.

Nick infused his own defiance into the connection, the raw audacity that allowed him to stand against entities who saw themselves as gods.

Finally, he offered Regret. It was the heaviest of the three emotions, a cold, suffocating weight that could not really be viewed in any positive way.

It was the awareness of mortality, the desperate, gnawing need to leave a legacy so that one’s brief existence would not be completely erased by time. The First Tower had been built by men and women who knew they would die long before it was finished, driven by the hope that their descendants would remember their names or, at the very least, use what they left behind to keep the flame alive.

As these concepts flowed through the Shard and into the mindscape, the golden ziggurat responded. The light of the bricks shifted, adopting a deeper, more grounded hue. The structure stopped being just an ideal and became a monument to realistic, flawed, and unbreakable human effort.