Nerick Spellchaser

During most of the crisis, the mysterious magician called Kage Tenjin attempted to drive Dorian and the other heroes of the Nightmare Crisis towards the collection of Nightmare shards, claiming to desire to place them out of the hands of those who would seek to use the shards for dangerous purposes. Intervention of Toril's higher powers revealed that Kage was himself a host to a Nightmare shard, and had a quiescent human personality which they awoke who sought to continue Kage's false quest in truth. This lasted until the heroes encountered Shar, when "Special K," another Nightmare host, ambushed Kage and removed his Nightmare shard. Following this ambush, Kage disappeared for several months. When he returned, the magician called himself Nerick Spellchaser, an alias Kage had used, and lead the way through Deep Shadow to the place where Nightmare was forged. Following the crisis, Nerick chose to travel the multiverse, eventually building himself a home in Sigil and adopting a son.

This is a complicated question to ask Nerick; with the primary reason that he is not himself of what his own true history is.

:"And to make it harder to judge, not only can I not be sure which, if any, of these lives was actually mine, but I can't be sure that these are even real memories. I know I wasn't supposed to survive being separated from Nightmare. These memories might just be the fantasies of my mind as it approached death. Given what I know of Nightmare, I was a man who accepted or was tricked into accepting a Nightmare shard. Anything beyond that is confabulation or fragments picked up from the various Nightmare shards I handled.

:"I use the name Nerick Spellchaser because Nightmare used that name when we sought to pass as human, and I find some pleasure in working against it using this false name. And though I take responsibility to recollect Kage's part of the Nightmare Saga, I am not Kage and was not an actor in these events until my separation from Nightmare."

During the confrontation with Shar, the host known as "Special K" ambushed the company and stole away from them all of the Nightmare shards that the party had collected. Kage intended Nerick to die at this point, as so much of his human mind and memory had been destroyed.

:"I need to step back a bit here to an earlier event: Kage getting called into a Celestial Court. This happened because one of the times that Kage did what Nightmare did best (destroying something), it caught the attention of a number of Toril's benevolent powers.

:"And they perhaps had a better understanding of my situation then they had of Nightmare. They hauled Kage into a celestial kangaroo court and separated me from the Nightmare Shard. When they did this, it was like waking up from a hundred years of slumber and being put on trial for complicated financial crimes. I didn't exactly understand what was going on, but ending up agreeing to continue hosting the Nightmare shard to retain my magic.

:"Which is probably a good thing, as I hadn't been truly aware of just what a state my mind had been in from prolonged hosting of Kage. I wasn't a person so much as the outline of one, all hollowed out on the inside and liable to collapse once the supports were taken away.

:"Which is precisely what Nightmare did once it realized that the others would actually try to keep the weapon under lock and key should they manage to re-assemble it. It struck at us during one of our most dangerous moments and Kage handed over our shards. All of them."

After loosing Nightmare, Nerick vanished for several weeks, finally returning with a new weapon that he said was the opposing number of Nightmare.

:"I was broken. Only a shell of a person, and one haunted by ghosts. All I had left at that point was instincts, which had me draw myself into Shadow and run. And I kept running. Time doesn't have terribly much meaning the deeper you travel in Shadow, and I was running towards the center of the plane, or at least where this effect was strongest.

:"At the end of my run, when I finally ran out of energy, I found myself in an ancient city, one that had been trapped, not in deepest Shadow, but instead at the edge of all reality. I know now that this was the Atlantis that the person who forged the Eternal Dream had tried to save. But this place was broken, taken away from and protected by the forces Dream bound, no-one in the city could create for themselves new memories, new feelings. Nor could they die: they were locked in that place, safe.

:"In the center of that city, I found the unbroken blade: Solace. It was Nightmare's opposite number, and a part of the Eternal Dream. I'm not sure how I knew how to do it, but in that place I rebuilt my mind, taking down the first notes in what would become my journal. When I finished pulling myself together, I left that place, taking Solace with me. I had hoped it would be of some help when we went to reclaim Nightmare."

In the aftermath of the Nightmare Crisis, as everyone else returned to their homes, Nerick sought out the forces who had manipulated the end of the Crisis.

:"And I asked them for a job. I saw that they did what needed to be done to keep the Universe working. So I technically work for them, though assignments are so few and far between that I'm mostly left doing my own thing.

:"And for a good number of years, my own thing was to travel the multiverse, learning new things and recording them into a journal of my adventures. I even found an apprentice at one point who convinced me to establish some kind of permanent residence in the city of doors.

:"This freewheeling lifestyle came to an end about a decade and a half ago. I came across a cult that had been abusing a child, attempting to raise it to be the host for a powerful demonic entity. I took the child from them, and went for help to one of the people who was probably least likely to help me: Dorian.

:"For the sake of the child, Dorian agreed to help. Together, Dorian and I forged a memory spell and re-wrote the child's life. I took responsibility for the child, joining in on the dream and raising the child as a father. By the end of the spell, Abraxas was a mostly normal child and I was his father.

:"When his talents began to manifest, I returned with Abe to Sigil and offered him the choice of sealing away his talents (because I knew what was after the boy) or helping him to gain control over them. It was a shitty thing to ask of a child, I know. 'Son, would you like to be Harry Potter and live in a magical world?' Any child who says no to that is likely in need of serious therapy, which I need to mention Abe had already been given.

:"For the moment, my son is off on his own. I've trained him as best as I could, and I've been contacted by my 'employers.' They have a job for me."