The Dark Lords and the Chosen Defenders of Barokan
In the seven hundred years that the Council of Immortals maintained the system of Wizard Lords and Chosen, nine Wizard Lords were corrupted in one way or another, and declared to be Dark Lords.
Some eighty-eight years after the system was instituted, the third Wizard Lord, the Lord of the Midlands, became the first Dark Lord and was removed by three heroes chosen by the Council of Immortals. Those first three heroes, not yet called the Chosen, were given whatever magic the wizards were able to improvise—one was given skill with weapons, one gifts of persuasion and intuition, and the third magical senses, including awareness of the whereabouts of both his companions and the Wizard Lord.
Two of the three were killed before the third managed to dispatch the Dark Lord of the Midlands.
The Council of Immortals decided that such heroes should be maintained permanently, as a check on future Wizard Lords, and established the Chosen Defenders of Barokan. They recreated the same three roles, somewhat modified, and named them the Swordsman, the Leader, and the Seer; given the loss of two out of the three, they added a fourth, the Seducer, to improve their chances should they ever be needed again.
Almost fifty years later, the four Chosen were called upon to remove the Dark Lord of Tallowcrane. That Dark Lord’s extensive use of locks and bars in his defenses led to the addition of the Thief, and it was decided that henceforth the Seducer role should always be taken by a female, to be called the Beauty.
For more than eighty years thereafter, there were no Dark Lords. When at last another did arise, he resigned quietly, rather than face the Chosen. More than thirty years later, another did the same, and for the first time people began to think there might be an end to the matter.
Unfortunately, sixty years later, in the 305th year of the Council of Immortals, the Dark Lord of Kamith t’Daru demonstrated that Barokan was not safe. When Kamith t’Daru realized that he was likely to run afoul of the Chosen, he carefully studied the surviving records of how previous Dark Lords were defeated. This made him a difficult opponent, and after his death, the Council added the Chosen Scholar, so that the Chosen would always know at least as much about past encounters as their opponents did.
It was almost 170 years before another Wizard Lord dared to break his trust and became the Dark Lord of the Tsamas. His reliance on keeping his enemies at a distance led the Council to add the Archer.
The Dark Lord of Spider Marsh retired peacefully in the 511th year of the Council, rather than fight the Chosen to the death. About ninety years later, however, the Dark Lord of Goln Vleys put up a ferocious resistance before finally being brought down.
The Council added the Speaker of All Tongues after that.
The sorry end of the Dark Lord of the Galbek Hills came at the hands of the Last Swordsman, while the one and only Chosen Traitor, added after the defeat of Galbek Hills, brought down the tenth and last, the Dark Lord of Winterhome.