In the dying days of First Shem, a sorceress magen stood in her crumbling magical laboratory and studied the patterns of her most potent spell: a spell that bound herself to the relationships she had forged with others during the turbulent wars still raging above her. Ten close friends (including her son and daughter) were now tied in with her soul, bound like a dryad to a treant. Her spell protected them, she hoped, from death itself. She feared few mortals, being one of the greatest magen sorceresses ever to live, but the End of the World was another matter.

She had but one small ingredient left: Divine Power. She knew no god would brook her mad plan, so she chose an aspect she knew was untended, more or less, and began making plans to tap into a whole new realm of Divine Power. One of the Neutral Champions had recently fallen, and she was going to be the replacement.

She gathered her tools--her Gifted Wand, her enchanted rings and robes, her collection of scrolls and potions, and especially her familiar, Horkrim the Azure Drake. She walked up the broken stairway to the outer sanctum of her hideout and found her ten companions, reveling in their new connective nature. Their thoughts were no longer secret, their emotions no longer hidden. The room was full of a sense of deep and abiding community and exposure.

They knew her plan before she said it, but they let her speak it anyway. It helped to do so, and it felt right.

They each gathered their belongings and began their long journey, from Moradayn on Palhur to the Mountain of Trials on Taggarus, a year and a half journey by every conveyance they could find, through the hell of the Eschatonic Wars. By the time they reached the Mountain, Hepzibah's daughter had died in a void-based assault that had severed her from the group, but the group found that this seemed to make them stronger. The mystery of this eluded even Hepzibah until halfway up the Mountain, when she realized she had not factored in her familiar to the spell. Its connection to her added a twelfth member, and the magic number of 11 was now realized with the loss of her daughter.

Her companions remained at the base of the Mountain, ready for anything, while she struggled up it. When she reached the top, the Beast of Ordeals proved too much for her at first, and indeed, she would have died, but her connection to the others kept her alive. She rose again, after over a week in oblivion, and slew the Beast with her new found strength. She came down the Mountain Champion of Connection, and found to her horror that the world was literally falling apart.

Quickly, using her new powers, she and her companions, who shared her powers, began to form bridges, magically, mundanely, divinely, crafting them with incredible speed and ease, connecting their way across the broken pieces of Shem to one of the many portals spawning in the Apocalyptic Fires, stepping out of mortality and into a new realm.