In a thread on another forum with people reminiscing about AC1/2 now that it's all over, Stormwaltz (one of the original devs and perhaps the game's foremost loremasters) just shared a script for an 'intro trailer' he wrote for AC2 back in the early brainstorming days, detailing his vision for the future of AC's world. It's really cool:
FADE IN.
A bustling street in CRAGSTONE. The city is much larger than in AC, a bustling medieval metropolis on the scale of Paris or London. A great statue of Thorsten Cragstone stands watch over multi-story brick-and-wood houses and cobblestone streets. There are many people bustling about: mages in robes, warriors in armor, and peasants in simple villein attire. A knight on horseback trots down the road. A streetcorner magician surrounded by a rapt crowd of children makes a pile of stones rise into the shape of a homunculus and dance a jig. There are people old and young, slender and plump. In the foreground, a man and a woman pass by the camera left-to-right, cooing at and tickling the chin of an infant wrapped in blankets.
The voice of a female ARCANE mage describes the scene. Her words are measured, calm, and wise. Perhaps her voice indicates someone a bit more elderly.
ARCANE (V.O.): We are those born under a sun our ancestors never knew.
As the couple passes in front of the camera, there is a flash of violet-white light behind them. When they clear the view, we can see a six year-old boy tumbling into the street, and a portal collapsing in on itself behind him. The camera pulls back slowly as he blinks around in confusion and begins to weep. We can see him calling for his mother, but we cant hear his voice. He looks very small among the unconcerned crowds.
A new voice, that of a male ARTIFICER, speaks. He is young, angry, and cynical.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We are those untimely ripped from the light of our sun.
FADE TO:
A distinguished looking human mage is performing the final flourishes of a long casting. He is in one of the Empyrean meeting halls, surrounded by a crowd of younger mages, standing and sitting. All his attendants are dressed in the orange robes of apprentices. We pull back to see the boy who portalled into Cragstone watching from behind a bench. He is a little older now, perhaps ten.
ARCANE (V.O.): We seek knowledge lost to time.
CUT TO:
The same view of the master and pupils, reflected in the boys eye. A portal blossoms open before the master, and the audience applauds. The boys eye widens in fear and horror at this specter of his past, the camera closing on its reflection until he ducks behind the bench. Beyond his head, we can briefly see a manual printing press in another corner of the hall, attended by three ink-stained men. The man closest to the camera looks over our heads, towards the mages, and spits on the ground.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We develop arts the others never sought.
FADE TO:
A war mage is surrounded by Olthoi in a thick jungle landscape. The Olthoi are new genera not seen in AC. The mage casts a shockwave ring. This is not the rather tame and two-dimensional ring of AC, but a massive concussive wave twice as tall as a man, rippling the view like heat haze. All the Olthoi fall, and several trees are splintered and felled. He surveys the shattered, oozing exoskeletons with a smug smile.
ARCANE (V.O.): We pacify the wilderness with fire and light.
Reacting to some noise we cant hear, the mage looks over his shoulder. The camera tracks to follow his line of sight; a man in light leather armor and a woman in scalemail, both draped with vegetation for camouflage. The man holds a matchlock firearm, as found in Europe in the 1300s 1400s. The man fixes a heavy glare at the mage. He was the boy in the last two scenes, now grown to a man in his early twenties. The woman rests a booted foot on one Olthoi carapace and fingers the pommel of her sword.
Alarmed to see them, recognizing them as ones who would do him harm, the mage spins and begins to cast too slowly. Huge gouts of black smoke erupt from the arquebus muzzle, and the mage is thrown back, his body shattered.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We push back the frontiers with thunder and steel.
FADE TO:
A cluster of great alabaster buildings in Yalain High Empyrean style. They are built upon the green back of an island, whose tall, jagged stone cliffs stand against the pound and spray of the sea. On one end of the island is a hill, upon which rests a magnificent Empyrean citadel. This is KNORR, the ancestral home of ASHERON. It resembles the Irish Aran Islands. Among the buildings a menagerie of magical effects flicker. Mailas ancient school of magic has new students. In the sky beyond Knorr, a conglomeration of airborne islands float serenely above the sea, connected by delicate footbridges. This is the aerie GAEAVIEL, capital of the Zefir. Some of its people flit between the pieces on membranous wings.
ARCANE (V.O.): We rebuilt the great old Lyceums.
FADE TO:
A city, whose layout vaguely echoes that of the Knorr Lyceum. It is built in a determined Isparian style, on a large platform in the middle of LAKE LITHANEN, and held above the water by a forest of stout wooden poles. This is NEW TIRETHAS, the City of Artifice. Enormous waterwheels turn along its flanks, and windmills built into its tallest towers spin in the breeze off the lake. Small plumes of smoke rise from it, though nothing large enough to suggest industrial age manufacturing. A ship, sails furled, is moored alongside. Massive Lugian dockworkers unload it, carrying one crate on each shoulder. Among the platforms supporting poles glow the lights of the dark, watery Tumerok-Mosswart hybrid slum called the Frith. Human, Lugian, and Tumerok children sport in the water and jump off the decks of the city.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We built our own great mills.
FADE TO:
A castle under construction at twilight. The area is lit by torches. To one side, the shacks of the builders can be seen, and a few merchants hawking wares from horsecarts overflowing with hay. Children can be seen running with pets. The walls of the central keep are partially constructed, and quarried stone is being moved into place by horse teams. Wooden scaffolding surrounds the higher walls. In the center of all this activity, a noblewoman in purple regalia directs the activity. She stands in a ring of megalithic menhir standing stones, which glow faintly blue with power. Interestingly, this glow also seems to infuse the partial walls of the keep
ARCANE (V.O.): We built mighty strongholds.
FADE TO:
A sweeping landscape: forested valley on the left rising to mountains on the right. Lugians can be seen on the mountain crags, working with pickaxes. Filthy miners file out of a shaft, wiping the sweat from their elephantine brows. Others can be seen heaving massive blocks of solid granite into the shape of houses. On the edge of the forest, a party of humans can be seen. Some hold torches, and the other look out of the trees with satisfaction at their handiwork. The forest is fully ablaze, tree branches bursting into flame, trunks crashing to the ground. A huge column of smoke rises into the blue sky, and ash falls around the humans feet. The trees are being cleared to build a new city. On the edge of the burning wood is a ruined Empyrean tower. Flames lick its bricks, blackening them. A portion of the wall falls away.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): For it was our world now to shape.
CUT TO:
An angry female mage chants to herself, a ball of icy light swirling and swelling between her outstretched fingers. A fireball leaps from her hands into the eye of the camera, and we perform a high-speed pullback to track its flickering corona. As we move back, we can see she is among a rough battle line of charging human, Tumerok, and Zefir war mages, loosing fire, ice, acid, and lightning at irregular intervals. On their flanks, thundering echelons of cavalry sweep in. On the hilltops behind this army, trebuchets lob boulders at something behind the camera. The camera jerks to a halt as the fireball impacts an artificer arquebusier, blistering his skin away.
Sweep up and back, revealing a line of human rifleman, pointing their muzzles at the oncoming mages. There is a second line of Lugian axemen and Tumerok berserkers behind them. Behind their line is the battered wall of a stronghold, slammed by boulders from the enemy trebuchets. The stricken man writhes on the ground, screaming. All at once, the matchlocks loose a volley of smoke and flame. The mages and cavalry fall by dozens, snapping back, broken. Horses squeal in fright and pain. One mage, in dying, casts a wall of blue-white flame at the artificer line. This knocks down one section, the arquebusiers dying as their powder bags catch fire and explode.
There are hundreds of bodies strewn across the fields. Small shreth feast upon the dead, and the sky swarms with carrion birds. White smoke obscures the view.
ARCANE (V.O.): So we fought one another.
FADE TO:
The smoke is now seaspray. A deep-draught sailing caravel slices through the whitecaps of a blue-green sea. Its sails are decorated with brilliant-hued, geometric Gharundim patterns. The crew on deck points upwards in dismay.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): Across a hundred islands.
The camera tracks up, where a pair of skyships battle. One is suspended from a cluster of hot air balloons, the other trails sparkles from its iron-shod keel, a sign of levitation enchantment. A lightning bolt crackles away from the magical ship, smashing open the hull of its opponent. Debris, and a flailing body, fall to the water below. The hot air ship uses a small deck catapult to hurl a flaming rock back at its attacker. The rock crashes through the sails and onto the deck. The magical ships sail catches fire.
ARCANE (V.O.): Across the bright blue skies.
FADE TO:
Human and Lugian parties meet before the towers of Linvak Tukal. Both have a large and splendidly arrayed cadre of warriors. Heraldry is everywhere, and the riding creatures used by each race paw the ground anxiously. Two representatives, a male Lugian and a human female, stand before their respective delegations. They shake hands in Lugian style, as Romans did: each party clasps both of the others forearms. The human visibly winces as the Lugians powerful hands squeeze her.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): Taking allies where we may.
CUT TO:
A whirling violet nexus of portal energy opens in the middle of a sunny field of wildflowers. The portals highlights are black, and blue-white lightning leaps out to char the surrounding rocks and vegetation. From its maw drop four figures. Tall they are, and golden-eyed: EMPYREAN. All seem a bit stunned. Two are in elaborate mail, wielding Atlan swords. One of them kneels to kiss the grass. Another is wrapped in splendid cerulean robes, filigreed with silver wave designs. He wears a pale golden crown set with sapphires. This is KELLIN II, the last Emperor of the Yalain Seaborne Empire. He looks proud and arrogant. The last figure is a tall, thin woman with severe features, clad in black armor with silver trim. Her hair is glossy sable, and her eyes large and velvet black. She is beautiful in a gothic way, and looks around with a savage, hungry smile. This is SARESH, the human guise of the Shadow General BLACK FERAH.
The voice of the Arcane narrator is hushed and reverent.
ARCANE (V.O.): But the gods returned to the lands they had known. They brought light back to the world.
CUT TO:
Cragstone at twilight, besieged by the resplendent armies of the Empyrean. Thorstens statue is broken off at the waist. Exotic magical siege engines hurl plasmatic gales of mage-fire at the city walls. The buildings burn brightly, and the stars are muddled with smoke. Flashes of gunpowder and magic speak defiance from the battlements. In the foreground lines of Empyrean force-march huddled human and Lugian refugees away from the town, prodding them with crackling electrical halberds. Shimmering magical bonds hold the prisoners wrists together. The Empyrean soldiers are the same height as the Lugians, but lightly built and nimble.
The voice of the Artificer is stone cold with fury.
ARTIFICER: (V.O.): The Empyrean conquered the homesteads we had bled for. They sent us away into darkness.
FADE TO:
A single candle on a rough wooden table. As the camera pulls back, we see a disheveled, gold-eyed man writing on a scrap of paper. The walls are stone, streaked with mold and dank water. A pair of manacles hangs from the walls. We can see, through a barred window, an Empyrean guard in exquisite armor standing guard. It is ASHERON, imprisoned in Kellins dungeons. A new voice speaks. It is weary beyond measure, yet mellifluous and pleasing to the ear.
ASHERON (V.O.): We are not gods who walk this world once more. We are all of us men, selfish and fragile and fallible. Yet gods exist, and there are others than our own.
CUT TO:
With a flash of light, the music drops away to the sound of wind, and whale-like squealing. We see a wasteland. The sky is stormy-overcast. As lightning quarters the sky, we can briefly glimpse a great, dark shape with coal-red eyes moving behind the clouds BAELZHARON. From horizon to horizon, a black mist covers the land. Above it a pair of SHADOW SPIRES drift forward. In places, pulsing, intestine-like organic structures loop upwards out of the fog, only to melt away and collapse.
In the foreground, the mist can be seen to twist and swirl towards the camera with horrifying speed. Herds of animals, all sizes, flee from it. Flocks of birds fly before its advance. A man, running among the panicked wildlife, is seen to stumble and fall. His flesh boils away to a puddle of grey ooze as the mist touches him. A flaming meteor streaks down across the sky. A tree, its base enveloped, shivers and blackens, its fruit veining and engorging to monstrous size before the entire organism dissolves in the wind. With another flash of light, we
CUT TO:
Asherons face, now free of grime and wear. He is obviously straining, white-faced, nostrils flaring. Pull back to see a magical field rippling from his hands, forming a barrier that the black mist laps at and recoils from. Glancing over his shoulder, he cries,
ASHERON: We must work together!
Other figures join him, flanking him on either side. A Tumerok shaman adds his magic to the barrier, and a Zefiri mage alights to offer his as well. Two humans join the line. One contributes his magic to the others. The other human, braced by an Lugian axeman, readies a flintlock on his shoulder. In the sky, a manta-winged shape swoops in, its tail and eyes lit with pale fire.
FADE OUT.
Silence. The AC2 logo fades in. One final voice; it is hollow, as if coming from a dark and empty room, and is coldly amused by the foolish squabbling of all things mortal.
SHADOW (V.O.): You cant stop change
The logo fades away again.
FIN.
Quote:
FADE IN.
A bustling street in CRAGSTONE. The city is much larger than in AC, a bustling medieval metropolis on the scale of Paris or London. A great statue of Thorsten Cragstone stands watch over multi-story brick-and-wood houses and cobblestone streets. There are many people bustling about: mages in robes, warriors in armor, and peasants in simple villein attire. A knight on horseback trots down the road. A streetcorner magician surrounded by a rapt crowd of children makes a pile of stones rise into the shape of a homunculus and dance a jig. There are people old and young, slender and plump. In the foreground, a man and a woman pass by the camera left-to-right, cooing at and tickling the chin of an infant wrapped in blankets.
The voice of a female ARCANE mage describes the scene. Her words are measured, calm, and wise. Perhaps her voice indicates someone a bit more elderly.
ARCANE (V.O.): We are those born under a sun our ancestors never knew.
As the couple passes in front of the camera, there is a flash of violet-white light behind them. When they clear the view, we can see a six year-old boy tumbling into the street, and a portal collapsing in on itself behind him. The camera pulls back slowly as he blinks around in confusion and begins to weep. We can see him calling for his mother, but we cant hear his voice. He looks very small among the unconcerned crowds.
A new voice, that of a male ARTIFICER, speaks. He is young, angry, and cynical.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We are those untimely ripped from the light of our sun.
FADE TO:
A distinguished looking human mage is performing the final flourishes of a long casting. He is in one of the Empyrean meeting halls, surrounded by a crowd of younger mages, standing and sitting. All his attendants are dressed in the orange robes of apprentices. We pull back to see the boy who portalled into Cragstone watching from behind a bench. He is a little older now, perhaps ten.
ARCANE (V.O.): We seek knowledge lost to time.
CUT TO:
The same view of the master and pupils, reflected in the boys eye. A portal blossoms open before the master, and the audience applauds. The boys eye widens in fear and horror at this specter of his past, the camera closing on its reflection until he ducks behind the bench. Beyond his head, we can briefly see a manual printing press in another corner of the hall, attended by three ink-stained men. The man closest to the camera looks over our heads, towards the mages, and spits on the ground.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We develop arts the others never sought.
FADE TO:
A war mage is surrounded by Olthoi in a thick jungle landscape. The Olthoi are new genera not seen in AC. The mage casts a shockwave ring. This is not the rather tame and two-dimensional ring of AC, but a massive concussive wave twice as tall as a man, rippling the view like heat haze. All the Olthoi fall, and several trees are splintered and felled. He surveys the shattered, oozing exoskeletons with a smug smile.
ARCANE (V.O.): We pacify the wilderness with fire and light.
Reacting to some noise we cant hear, the mage looks over his shoulder. The camera tracks to follow his line of sight; a man in light leather armor and a woman in scalemail, both draped with vegetation for camouflage. The man holds a matchlock firearm, as found in Europe in the 1300s 1400s. The man fixes a heavy glare at the mage. He was the boy in the last two scenes, now grown to a man in his early twenties. The woman rests a booted foot on one Olthoi carapace and fingers the pommel of her sword.
Alarmed to see them, recognizing them as ones who would do him harm, the mage spins and begins to cast too slowly. Huge gouts of black smoke erupt from the arquebus muzzle, and the mage is thrown back, his body shattered.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We push back the frontiers with thunder and steel.
FADE TO:
A cluster of great alabaster buildings in Yalain High Empyrean style. They are built upon the green back of an island, whose tall, jagged stone cliffs stand against the pound and spray of the sea. On one end of the island is a hill, upon which rests a magnificent Empyrean citadel. This is KNORR, the ancestral home of ASHERON. It resembles the Irish Aran Islands. Among the buildings a menagerie of magical effects flicker. Mailas ancient school of magic has new students. In the sky beyond Knorr, a conglomeration of airborne islands float serenely above the sea, connected by delicate footbridges. This is the aerie GAEAVIEL, capital of the Zefir. Some of its people flit between the pieces on membranous wings.
ARCANE (V.O.): We rebuilt the great old Lyceums.
FADE TO:
A city, whose layout vaguely echoes that of the Knorr Lyceum. It is built in a determined Isparian style, on a large platform in the middle of LAKE LITHANEN, and held above the water by a forest of stout wooden poles. This is NEW TIRETHAS, the City of Artifice. Enormous waterwheels turn along its flanks, and windmills built into its tallest towers spin in the breeze off the lake. Small plumes of smoke rise from it, though nothing large enough to suggest industrial age manufacturing. A ship, sails furled, is moored alongside. Massive Lugian dockworkers unload it, carrying one crate on each shoulder. Among the platforms supporting poles glow the lights of the dark, watery Tumerok-Mosswart hybrid slum called the Frith. Human, Lugian, and Tumerok children sport in the water and jump off the decks of the city.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): We built our own great mills.
FADE TO:
A castle under construction at twilight. The area is lit by torches. To one side, the shacks of the builders can be seen, and a few merchants hawking wares from horsecarts overflowing with hay. Children can be seen running with pets. The walls of the central keep are partially constructed, and quarried stone is being moved into place by horse teams. Wooden scaffolding surrounds the higher walls. In the center of all this activity, a noblewoman in purple regalia directs the activity. She stands in a ring of megalithic menhir standing stones, which glow faintly blue with power. Interestingly, this glow also seems to infuse the partial walls of the keep
ARCANE (V.O.): We built mighty strongholds.
FADE TO:
A sweeping landscape: forested valley on the left rising to mountains on the right. Lugians can be seen on the mountain crags, working with pickaxes. Filthy miners file out of a shaft, wiping the sweat from their elephantine brows. Others can be seen heaving massive blocks of solid granite into the shape of houses. On the edge of the forest, a party of humans can be seen. Some hold torches, and the other look out of the trees with satisfaction at their handiwork. The forest is fully ablaze, tree branches bursting into flame, trunks crashing to the ground. A huge column of smoke rises into the blue sky, and ash falls around the humans feet. The trees are being cleared to build a new city. On the edge of the burning wood is a ruined Empyrean tower. Flames lick its bricks, blackening them. A portion of the wall falls away.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): For it was our world now to shape.
CUT TO:
An angry female mage chants to herself, a ball of icy light swirling and swelling between her outstretched fingers. A fireball leaps from her hands into the eye of the camera, and we perform a high-speed pullback to track its flickering corona. As we move back, we can see she is among a rough battle line of charging human, Tumerok, and Zefir war mages, loosing fire, ice, acid, and lightning at irregular intervals. On their flanks, thundering echelons of cavalry sweep in. On the hilltops behind this army, trebuchets lob boulders at something behind the camera. The camera jerks to a halt as the fireball impacts an artificer arquebusier, blistering his skin away.
Sweep up and back, revealing a line of human rifleman, pointing their muzzles at the oncoming mages. There is a second line of Lugian axemen and Tumerok berserkers behind them. Behind their line is the battered wall of a stronghold, slammed by boulders from the enemy trebuchets. The stricken man writhes on the ground, screaming. All at once, the matchlocks loose a volley of smoke and flame. The mages and cavalry fall by dozens, snapping back, broken. Horses squeal in fright and pain. One mage, in dying, casts a wall of blue-white flame at the artificer line. This knocks down one section, the arquebusiers dying as their powder bags catch fire and explode.
There are hundreds of bodies strewn across the fields. Small shreth feast upon the dead, and the sky swarms with carrion birds. White smoke obscures the view.
ARCANE (V.O.): So we fought one another.
FADE TO:
The smoke is now seaspray. A deep-draught sailing caravel slices through the whitecaps of a blue-green sea. Its sails are decorated with brilliant-hued, geometric Gharundim patterns. The crew on deck points upwards in dismay.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): Across a hundred islands.
The camera tracks up, where a pair of skyships battle. One is suspended from a cluster of hot air balloons, the other trails sparkles from its iron-shod keel, a sign of levitation enchantment. A lightning bolt crackles away from the magical ship, smashing open the hull of its opponent. Debris, and a flailing body, fall to the water below. The hot air ship uses a small deck catapult to hurl a flaming rock back at its attacker. The rock crashes through the sails and onto the deck. The magical ships sail catches fire.
ARCANE (V.O.): Across the bright blue skies.
FADE TO:
Human and Lugian parties meet before the towers of Linvak Tukal. Both have a large and splendidly arrayed cadre of warriors. Heraldry is everywhere, and the riding creatures used by each race paw the ground anxiously. Two representatives, a male Lugian and a human female, stand before their respective delegations. They shake hands in Lugian style, as Romans did: each party clasps both of the others forearms. The human visibly winces as the Lugians powerful hands squeeze her.
ARTIFICER (V.O.): Taking allies where we may.
CUT TO:
A whirling violet nexus of portal energy opens in the middle of a sunny field of wildflowers. The portals highlights are black, and blue-white lightning leaps out to char the surrounding rocks and vegetation. From its maw drop four figures. Tall they are, and golden-eyed: EMPYREAN. All seem a bit stunned. Two are in elaborate mail, wielding Atlan swords. One of them kneels to kiss the grass. Another is wrapped in splendid cerulean robes, filigreed with silver wave designs. He wears a pale golden crown set with sapphires. This is KELLIN II, the last Emperor of the Yalain Seaborne Empire. He looks proud and arrogant. The last figure is a tall, thin woman with severe features, clad in black armor with silver trim. Her hair is glossy sable, and her eyes large and velvet black. She is beautiful in a gothic way, and looks around with a savage, hungry smile. This is SARESH, the human guise of the Shadow General BLACK FERAH.
The voice of the Arcane narrator is hushed and reverent.
ARCANE (V.O.): But the gods returned to the lands they had known. They brought light back to the world.
CUT TO:
Cragstone at twilight, besieged by the resplendent armies of the Empyrean. Thorstens statue is broken off at the waist. Exotic magical siege engines hurl plasmatic gales of mage-fire at the city walls. The buildings burn brightly, and the stars are muddled with smoke. Flashes of gunpowder and magic speak defiance from the battlements. In the foreground lines of Empyrean force-march huddled human and Lugian refugees away from the town, prodding them with crackling electrical halberds. Shimmering magical bonds hold the prisoners wrists together. The Empyrean soldiers are the same height as the Lugians, but lightly built and nimble.
The voice of the Artificer is stone cold with fury.
ARTIFICER: (V.O.): The Empyrean conquered the homesteads we had bled for. They sent us away into darkness.
FADE TO:
A single candle on a rough wooden table. As the camera pulls back, we see a disheveled, gold-eyed man writing on a scrap of paper. The walls are stone, streaked with mold and dank water. A pair of manacles hangs from the walls. We can see, through a barred window, an Empyrean guard in exquisite armor standing guard. It is ASHERON, imprisoned in Kellins dungeons. A new voice speaks. It is weary beyond measure, yet mellifluous and pleasing to the ear.
ASHERON (V.O.): We are not gods who walk this world once more. We are all of us men, selfish and fragile and fallible. Yet gods exist, and there are others than our own.
CUT TO:
With a flash of light, the music drops away to the sound of wind, and whale-like squealing. We see a wasteland. The sky is stormy-overcast. As lightning quarters the sky, we can briefly glimpse a great, dark shape with coal-red eyes moving behind the clouds BAELZHARON. From horizon to horizon, a black mist covers the land. Above it a pair of SHADOW SPIRES drift forward. In places, pulsing, intestine-like organic structures loop upwards out of the fog, only to melt away and collapse.
In the foreground, the mist can be seen to twist and swirl towards the camera with horrifying speed. Herds of animals, all sizes, flee from it. Flocks of birds fly before its advance. A man, running among the panicked wildlife, is seen to stumble and fall. His flesh boils away to a puddle of grey ooze as the mist touches him. A flaming meteor streaks down across the sky. A tree, its base enveloped, shivers and blackens, its fruit veining and engorging to monstrous size before the entire organism dissolves in the wind. With another flash of light, we
CUT TO:
Asherons face, now free of grime and wear. He is obviously straining, white-faced, nostrils flaring. Pull back to see a magical field rippling from his hands, forming a barrier that the black mist laps at and recoils from. Glancing over his shoulder, he cries,
ASHERON: We must work together!
Other figures join him, flanking him on either side. A Tumerok shaman adds his magic to the barrier, and a Zefiri mage alights to offer his as well. Two humans join the line. One contributes his magic to the others. The other human, braced by an Lugian axeman, readies a flintlock on his shoulder. In the sky, a manta-winged shape swoops in, its tail and eyes lit with pale fire.
FADE OUT.
Silence. The AC2 logo fades in. One final voice; it is hollow, as if coming from a dark and empty room, and is coldly amused by the foolish squabbling of all things mortal.
SHADOW (V.O.): You cant stop change
The logo fades away again.
FIN.