Xeen: A World Split in Two

Previouslythree fugitives from Terra — Sheltem, Corak, and the party of eight who never asked for the role they'd been given — left the planet aboard three separate ships.

Sheltem heads for Xeen — a resource-rich experimental planetoid, large enough to rebuild an entire army from nothing. Corak and the party are right on his heels. But entering Xeen's atmosphere from space without a Guardian's built-in shielding means burning alive during the descent — a real danger for newcomers in small, unshielded ships. At the last moment, Corak changes the course of the third ship, the one carrying the party of eight from Terra, and knocks it clear of the planetoid's orbit, saving them from burning up. The ship vanishes without a trace. Corak, even in the middle of his own manhunt, couldn't let them die needlessly — but no one will ever learn where they flew off to.

Xeen is a world unlike any seen elsewhere — a flat disc with two faces, one light and one dark, each as populated as the other, each convinced it is the only world that exists. Both Guardians crash on the same, darker side, though not in the same way. Sheltem wakes from hibernation almost at once. Corak is less fortunate — his ship comes down in lava, and the protective field meant to save him snaps shut like a trap he cannot escape. Years will pass before anyone digs him out.

On the other, light side of the planetoid, good King Burlock rules well — or at least he does, until his brother, Prince Roland, disappears in search of the legendary Sixth Mirror, a portable portal spoken of only in legend. Roland returns after a long absence, convinces the king to have the whole court focus on the search for the mirror — and quickly brings everyone under his sway except for one person. Crodo, the king's advisor, is the only one who notices this is not the real prince. Before he can warn anyone, he is locked away in a magic tower, and the being wearing Roland's face proclaims himself Lord Xeen and seizes power. Rumor speaks of an experimental sword, the only weapon that could defeat him — but the Lord has already made sure the workshop where it was built no longer exists.

Burlock doesn't give up so easily. He gathers a handful of loyal followers, rebuilds the ruined workshop from the rubble up, and finds exactly what he was looking for in its depths. Armed with the sword Lord Xeen feared so much, they reach his castle floating in the Clouds above the planetoid and put an end to his reign. The castle begins to break apart, drawn into a black hole opening just above it — and from its remains, moments before it vanishes, a voice speaks that no one expected — the same voice that once ruled VARN under a stranger's name. The same promise: this isn't over yet. The Dark Side still belongs to him — and with it, the secret of who was really defeated in the castle of Xeen, and who is still missing from it. Among the rubble, the party finds one of the two artifacts of the old Xeen prophecy — the Scepter of Spatiotemporal Distortion. For now, they have no idea what it's for.

Burlock therefore sends his party to where he himself cannot go — following his brother's trail, to the Dark Side, from which Roland never truly returned. On the dark side of the planetoid, Sheltem has ruled for years as Alamar — a name he'd already worn once before, on a completely different world, and evidently found effective enough a mask to use again. The local queen, Kalindra, was dethroned and turned into a vampire so she could never reclaim power. Her advisor walled himself up in his own besieged tower. And the Dragon Pharaoh, who arrived here long ago to watch over the fulfillment of an old prophecy concerning Xeen, ended up trapped in his own pyramid, cut off from the rest of the planetoid.

The despairing Pharaoh sends out into the world the only thing he has left — his own Sphere of Power — hoping it will reach someone capable of finishing what he no longer can. It falls into the hands of Burlock's party. With it, they free his advisor, then the Pharaoh himself, and finally Kalindra, restoring the humanity that seemed lost forever. In gratitude, the Pharaoh reveals the last secret he knows: the only being on the entire planetoid capable of defeating Alamar is still in hibernation, sealed inside his own wrecked ship. It is Corak.

The party finds the wreck and, using a peculiar "soul chest," smuggles the sleeping Guardian's essence straight into the enemy's castle, unnoticed. There, for the first time since Terra, Corak stands face to face with Sheltem.

It's a duel with no escape — no ships, no gates, no third way out.

The years spent on Xeen have made Sheltem stronger than ever, stronger than Corak himself. When his own strength stops being enough, Corak reaches for the only solution he has left and triggers a procedure within himself from which there is no return. Both perish together, in an explosion that ends a chase that had been running since before anyone even knew the name Sheltem.

Not everyone on Xeen knows the truth about Lord Xeen that we learned along with Burlock and Crodo. Among ordinary residents, a different, simpler story circulates — that he arrived from a distant world named Havec, reached through a forgotten gate in the ruins of Greyhaven. When new horrors now start pouring out of that same gate, a handful of the Dragon Pharaoh's last loyal servants set out to see what's lurking on the other side.

Havec turns out to be a broken world — once prosperous, now a desert ruin, laid waste by a being the locals simply call the Source, which supposedly ruled Lord Xeen from hiding before he ever reached Xeen at all. How much of this story is true, and how much is local legend trying to make sense of its own catastrophe, is hard to say. The party from Xeen destroys the Source at its root, helps rebuild what can be rebuilt, and closes the gate behind them — leaving behind a world convinced it had spawned the monster itself, when its true origin lay far closer to home than anyone on Havec could have suspected.

One more matter remained to be closed — the same one the old Xeen prophecy had spoken of from the very beginning. Two artifacts, one from each side of the planetoid, had to reach the hands of those who stood as symbols of authority for both halves of the world. The Cube of Power, held for years by Alamar, is recovered by the freed Queen Kalindra. The party has had the Scepter for a while now — since the day the castle on the Light Side fell. Only one thing is missing: someone with the right to raise it on Burlock's behalf.

In the dungeons beneath Alamar's own castle, deep on the Dark Side, the party finds a prisoner nearly forgotten — alive, exhausted, but conscious: Prince Roland. Imprisoned here since the day he first set foot on this land, he had no idea that, all this time, someone had been wearing his face on the other side of the planetoid, ruling in his name. It wasn't him who was defeated in the Clouds of Xeen. It was only a shadow.

With the freed prince, the Scepter, and the Cube, the party reaches the Great Temple hidden high above the planetoid. There, where the prophecy was meant to be fulfilled, something more than a mere ritual takes place — Kalindra and Roland, both reclaimed from things worse than death, are married before the eyes of the entire planetoid, with the ceremony led by the Dragon Pharaoh himself. As they both lay their artifacts on the Altar of Unification, the light splits into four beams, encircles the planetoid in a web of energy, and stitches the two halves into one whole. For the first time since its creation, Xeen becomes a single, complete world.

But before that happened, that same party had descended deeper than anyone before them — to a control center so well hidden that not even Sheltem had ever found it in all those years. There they found legions of beings unlike any enemy they knew. The very same ones that had once watched the waters of Terra as a shadow, watching in silence as three ships flew away, waiting patiently for far longer than anyone could have expected.