The Sword of Fire
The Sword of Fire: Forged by Agni in The Celestial Temple, the Sword of Fire was gifted to the Mortal realm long before the fall of the Khaz Modanian Empire, and the rise of Shireroth. The sword belonged to the Line of Emperors who ruled the Khaz Modanian Empire and was seen as a sign of the royal throne of Khaz Modan. Legend tells that the sword was lost several centuries before the fall of the Empire and was not found again until Kaiser Raynor I vanquished the dæmon creature, Rrakanychan and reclaimed the sword for Mortal Man. It is said that the wielder of this Great Sword would have the power to command flame and bend it to their will. Under the control of the dæmon creature, Rrakanychan the sword was used to set ablaze entire villages, forests and plains, reducing even the strongest fortified walls to rubble.
The sword subsequently, somehow, fallen into the hands of the Empress of Minarboria, a Gnostic and chthonic realm populated by the undead and genetically modified post-humans, and has thereby, arguably, passed once more out of the hands of mortal man and back to those powers which were once decried as demonic by the Cedrist religion. Another facet perhaps to the ongoing Benacian Schism between the bloodlines of the Kaiser who enslaved the demon tree Malarbor and those who worship that same tree's sprouting, the shrub Minarbor.
Kizzy Drakland, the Queen of Malarboria, possessed the Sword of Fire after a trial of worthiness by Kalgachian occultists. Kizzy was, in turn, obliged to surrender the Sword of Fire to Daniyal ibn Daniyal Simrani-Kalirion in 1662 under the terms of the Convention of Drakorda, which permitted her to depart from the lands of what had then become the State of Modan following a Humanist revolt against daemonic rule.
The Sword of Fire, as the centre piece of the state regalia of Modan, represents the celestial fire by which the human supremacy was established upon the hostile alien world of Micras, and represents the reforging of the ancient continuity between the greatest empire, that of Khaz Modan, and the revived State of Modan in the fallen and degrade modern age where - in the absence of purifying fire from the heavens - coexistence with inhuman and nonhuman sapients has long been tolerated, to the ultimate degradation of humanity.
The Sword of Fire has been said to have only reached its full potential when it was used by Rrakanychan. Only a demon, it was postulated, could transcend the self-imposed constraints of moral scruples, such as which inform human conduct. The Liches, whilst pretending to a heightened sensibility beyond good and evil and possessed of an arrogance that was itself bordering on divine proportions, were still moral creatures, their residual fondness for mankind, even as merely the pupae from which their undead forms had emerged, limited the scope of their imagination and thus denied them access to the blade's full potential.
It is not yet know what the sword, now in the custody of the Prince of Modan, is capable of in the hands of one whose intent is to rededicate it to the archonic workings of the Celestial Temple.
