It was a little boy, entirely alone and shivering in tattered clothes. He could not have been any older than eight years old. As the villagers rushed forward to offer the weeping child a warm blanket, Hazkar caught sight of the boy's tiny left arm. It was completely encased in thick, cracked greyscale.
Hazkar stopped dead in his tracks, utterly mortified. A profound, shattering horror gripped his ancient heart. To see the curse of Mother Rhoyne afflicting a child so innocent broke through his self-imposed isolation. From that day forward, Hazkar stayed within the village, watching over the boy and the other afflicted outcasts.
But the mist offered no mercy. As the long, dreary weeks bled into months, Hazkar was forced to watch the horrific progression of the disease.
The stone slowly claimed their bodies, but the isolation aggressively claimed their minds. Hazkar watched helplessly as the kind men and women who had welcomed him slowly lost their humanity. They forgot their names. They forgot how to speak. Their eyes turned milky and feral, driven only by the agonizing, burning pain of their mutating flesh and an unquenchable, mindless hunger.
Eventually, the tragic curse fully overtook the little boy. The child's innocent tears were violently replaced by rabid, guttural snarls.
When a new group of terrified, infected refugees stumbled into the village seeking shelter, the madness finally boiled over. The feral Stone Men, completely lost to their sanity, surged forward and attacked the newcomers with petrified claws and snapping jaws. Among the vicious horde was the eight-year-old boy, his small face contorted into a mask of pure, rabid fury.
Hazkar stood paralyzed in the mud. He was forced to witness this inhumane tragedy of the mist.
In order to protect the newly arrived refugees, the few villagers who still retained their sanity were forced to take up rusted weapons. Weeping openly, they brutally struck down their former friends and family. Hazkar watched as his soul broke all over again, as the kind man who had originally welcomed him drove a heavy spear directly through the rabid little boy's chest.
The child fell dead into the mud, his feral snarl finally fading into permanent peace. Hazkar fell to his knees, burying his face in his hands. He possessed the power of a god, yet he could not save a single soul from his mother's divine wrath.
The horrific tragedy of the young boy's death forged a cold, unyielding resolve within Hazkar's ancient heart. He grew fiercely determined to completely stop the spreading greyscale and permanently break his mother's devastating curse.
He escalated his desperate experiments, focusing his grim work upon the rabid and insane Stone Men who wandered blindly through the ruins. Through gruelling, bloody trials, he finally realized a horrifying limitation to his own power. He could only carefully isolate the dark corruption of the curse—a foulness which felt distinctly similar to the oppressive mist itself—but he could never truly eradicate it. Even his submerged divine essence was entirely unable to burn the deep sickness away.
Throughout his endless, obsessive search, he was completely unable to find a definitive method to break the affliction. This profound failure heavily motivated him to seek out Mother Rhoyne, believing she alone held the true cure.
Decades bled away in a suffocating haze of failure. He grew upset with himself, and the empathy he had once held for the suffering of the people turned into a twisted sense of protection. He deemed ending the suffering of the stone men, in order for them to be useful to his experiments, a cost worth paying to find answers.
He began mass-killing of batches of villagers. Every death broke his mind as he justified it as a sacrifice worthy of the crusade he was pursuing. Eventually he discovered that mana bearing individuals or even those that had minute traces of it could be used as sacrifice to increase his own divine essence.
Hazkar reasoned that since these people were dying and could not use mana as it is, he had better take it from them to advance the cause.
Then, one fateful day, the endless monotony was broken. A strange man and his young daughter walked directly into the ruined village.
There was something profoundly strange about this specific duo. The father, despite bearing what Hazkar initially perceived as the early markings of greyscale, felt unusually, terrifyingly potent. The young child, however, was an absolute anomaly. She was outright leaking raw, unrefined mana into the damp air. The girl possessed true and tangible magic.
This shocking revelation immediately sparked a dangerous idea within Hazkar's mind. He theorized the distinct possibility of using her abundant mana to forcefully disperse the cursed mist, for her unique energy carried undeniable hints of divine essence. He could easily work with her in tandem to begin clearing the mist.
The man standing beside her, however, appeared to be strictly mortal, yet even that simple classification felt deeply unnatural to the ancient deity. He possessed an aura that defied the natural laws of the Rhoyne.
Hazkar's cold, milky eye narrowed in the gloom. He had finally found the perfect keys to his millennium-old prison. With this strange, powerful duo now standing within his grasp, Hazkar eagerly began his search for answers entirely anew.