Behind Blue Eyes part 8: Peter Heimos

"I am Peter," the Blue-Eyed Man, introduces himself. "I have come all this way to make right all that has gone wrong. Shall I tell you a story?"



The party agrees to listen and Peter tells the tale that he and hia crew came from a distant world. The were shipwrecked here and soon found that they had awesome power beyond the reckoning of mere men. In time, he and his companions, though mortal in their own world, found that they were quite immortal here. It was not long before they were worshiped as gods. He is a man, he maintains, a human from a distant place, and powerful beyond Erenthean imagination, but he is still a human in mind and subject to all the usual frailties. His crew were much the same way. The problem with having absolute power was being corrupted absolutely. The result was thousands of years of war and strife.

His name is Peter Heimos, he says. The party recognizes the name of the head of the pantheon of pagan gods, supplanted by the Church of Westrun and its worship of the one true God. Peter allows that he had struggle against a representative of the true God and lost. Whether that true God is real or not, he cannot say. Only that the head priest of that God, Valoren, was able to beat him in single combat, and imprison him. Heimos also found that much of his offensive capability was stripped from him and some part of it was tied to Valoren's own weapon.

The party is rapt with attention. The women find that he is quite charming and difficult to ignore.

Peter asks if they are ready for the rest of the tale. When they agree, he says that while he has been a god for a thousand years, from the standpoint of this moment they now share, his ship has not actually crashed, yet. From this reference point in time, the crash is still years off. In fact, he has traveled through time, and pulled some of the party along with him because he hopes that one of two potentials might be possible.

The first potential he hopes for is to avoid the crash in the first place. He knows of a power nearby that will emanate from a hidden stronghold. That power will accidentally pull his ship to Erenth and strand him and his crew. He hopes to avoid the crash and to restore all things to their correct path. 

The second potential he hopes for is to journey to the crash site, just after his ship lands and make sure that he and his crew do not have contact with the people of Erenth. If that meeting can be stopped, they will not become gods and Erenth will be what Erenth should have been all along.

Nothing is as important as stopping him and his crew from coming to power, Peter explains. That is why he had to conscript the party through some calculated means. He needed to pull them along and have them learn to fight and wield power of their own, before he could trust that those who remained were strong enough to face the obstacles ahead.

He must go to the stronghold, alone if necessary, Peter explains. He will either talk the resident out of using the power source, or not. If he does not, he would like the party to meet him on top of Mount Solis, the nearest and tallest mountain that lays across the Dagger Sea.

The party is at a cross-roads whether to join Peter at the stronghold or to help the party of the dwarves and their struggle against the great black beast. A word about that beast, Peter allows, it is none other than Osianus the Black, a great Prince well known in these parts for much of the last thousand years, but he appears to be a man no longer. Osianus has been cursed for some crime of his and is now more beast than man.