SourceMaterial-The Burning Page
The Burning Page
The Burning Page is a growing organization of Saemilists and their supporting followers founded approximately two centuries after The Great War ended. Their main occupation is the recovery of the ancient art of Runic Magic and the research and discovery of its expansion.
History
Though The Great War did not permeate the reaches of the Underdark as it did the surface, the Orcish evocation spell ripped through the continents and caused reverberations which penetrated the deep the crust of Avlis and loosened the rocks and caverns, some of which had been sealed off by tightly fitting portals for ages. Unknown to the surface dwellers, this set off a renewed age of exploration below them where Demon Lords sought out and conquered new territories sometimes filled with ancient races. It was within a newly reopened enclave that the Demon Lord Teralatax, daughter of Alifanitax, stumbled upon an ancient library with tomes that seemed to date back to the Age of Gods. As a practitioner of magic and a prominent member of the old Black Order, Teralatax was elated and immediately fortified the area and concentrated her efforts on combing this treasure trove for secrets to the power of the gods. Initially, she was taken by the idea of finding the all powerful Black Dagger, however her efforts soon proved futile on that account. Instead, Teralatax encountered a reference in an old book that referred to the Age of Spirits and the inhabitants that roamed the land before The Negerai Prime infested it with her ancestral kind. Thus began an adventure that would outlive her by over a thousand years.
The obscure reference that started Teralatax's journey told of spirits long ago that could use magic by drawing runes on their skin. As one of the few volumes detailing history before the arrival of the Negerai Prime, it told several accounts of spirits lost to history who were great warriors in their own right and used these magical runes on their skin to augment their abilities and those of their allies. Within the long-forgotten political web of that age, these warriors were held in great esteem and were seen to stand alongside of other types of magic users that existed among the spirit-kin. Intrigued, Teralatax had to know more about this great power and after exhausting the resources of the conquered library, she set out to find others that may have been uncovered by the great rumbling from above.
As she wandered through the tunnels and caverns of the newly revealed sections of the Underdark with her entourage, Teralatax kept journals of her exploits and findings. She set the goal of aggregating all knowledge of these runic casters in one place. Additionally, she began to do research and included these findings in her journals along with the rest. From her interpretation of the limited text, Teralatax believed that there must be some special kind of ink used in creating these runes and that by inscribing characters onto the skin in the language of Magya, she could produce magical effects. This became known in her writings as Teralatax's Theory.
Initial efforts focused on finding references to this mysterious ink, but to no avail. Teralatax began to devise inks on her own and experimenting with runes on the skin that could trap and use energy from the Mortal Magic Vortex. For over a century she relentlessly pursued this quest through library after library and tome after tome. Eventually, her obsession caught up with her when her paramour, another Spawn of Alifanitax named Elira, managed to stick a dagger between her shoulder blades while she was falling asleep at a table. By killing another Spawn of Alifanitax, Elira took on her Black Dagger energy and became as powerful as both of them combined. She also took on her lover's quest, but had different ideas on how to accomplish it.
After securing all of the territory she inherited from Teralatax, Elira had a tower built in her capitol city of Turgestok. She then set out a summons to all the powerful mages in her lands to assemble at the tower and begin researching the power of runes. Their apprentices would be set to work combing the caverns for more tomes, while the masters would conduct experiments. Occasionally, apprentices would also be brought in for some of the more dangerous trials, for safety. The fruits of that research yielded some new capabilities after a couple of decades. The conclave figured out the composition of an ink that could be used to inscribe runes on the skin, and how to wield that effectively on themselves and others by drawing power from the Mortal Magic Vortex, and in Elira's case, the Divine Magic vortex once she began to amass enough followers and power to grant spells to her worshipers.
With her new-found magical system, Elira set to turning it against her enemies. Her conclave was ordered to inscribe runes on all of her soldiers to enhance their speed, agility, and resistances to damage of various kinds. Her best fighters were kept together in a single squad that earned a bloody reputation on the battlefield and came to be called Elira's Death Runes. Over a period of several more decades, Elira and her Death Runes managed to triple the size of her holdings and multiply the numbers of rune-bearing soldiers in her army.