The Grand Council of Solaris sentenced me to death by exile in the Great Abyss for practicing what they branded as 'Forbidden Transmutation.'

They stripped my velvet robes, shattered my platinum distilling alembic, and cast me into the gaping chasm below the capital. The drop was three thousand yards into eternal fog and suffocating miasma where no holy light had penetrated for ten centuries.

Yet as my battered body struck the subterranean lake of luminescent black quicksilver, I did not perish.

The abyss was not a cemetery. It was a boundless laboratory of ancient shadow elements waiting for an alchemist bold enough to drink its darkness.