Al’Kabor & Miragul in the House of Thule

The Queen of Nightmares

The dreams belong to Terris-Thule, the Dream Scorcher, Cazic-Thule’s daughter, with “an equal measure of her father’s cruelty,” who delights in torturing the innocent as they sleep. She is tall and skeletal, with pale grey-tinged skin, a featureless face with two empty eye sockets, and brass horns at her temples. She watches over the nightmare herself, and her minions give the trapped Erudites “just enough hope to keep them in the dream, but never allow them to win.”

The pattern was older than House of Thule. In the Planes of Power, Terris broke the jewelled dagger of a mortal named Thelin Poxbourne and scattered it through her maze so that he could never escape his nightmares.

Al’Kabor, mocked and feared

Al’Kabor is the greatest living wizard, by rumour at least, though some Norrathians openly laugh at him; the spells he worked so hard on and gave away are, to put it politely, not very good. His fame comes from travelling with Firiona Vie, at whose side his power has decided many of her victories. Her companions might call him rude, boring or uppity, but never weak. He has visited every great library in Norrath and may have found knowledge lost for ages, and he is one of the oldest living Erudites, old enough to have fought the Heretics to save Erud’s great library.

A shattered world

What could such a wizard fear, and why does he never use the nearly limitless power he has? His nightmare was the answer. In it Norrath is well and truly broken: a few floating islands in an empty void.

Miragul’s choice

Miragul studied every school of magic his people allowed and mastered them all, becoming the greatest mage in Norrath. It was not enough. He chafed at the limits his race put on magic, broke away and fled to pursue necromancy. As age crept up on him he turned his mind to cheating death, and he found a way. But something went wrong.

Dreaming in a phylactery

The lich Miragul is locked inside his own phylactery, and the dream is what keeps the waking horror away, or perhaps it does not. His nightmare looks like the remains of Old Paineel, eerily empty, and the deeper you go the more of his madness and despair you see.

A mansion as bright as Sol

In the end even the god of fear was fooled. His daughter Terris appeared and asked Cazic-Thule to walk with her, and showed him “a mansion as expansive and resplendent as the very rays of Sol.” The god admits, in An Offering to Thule: “Somehow, this plane is not my own.” It was the work of her brother as well: the official preview of that dream notes that Morell-Thule must feel some pride, since “it isn’t everyone who can trap the god of fear in a dream.”