Aayela

In the forty-seventh year of the reign of King Dargon, twelve years after the battle of Cyr-Dhool, and five years after his third marriage, disaster struck the Realm.

Queen Dahra became ill; at first just a cold, but the fever rose and she became delirious; then she fell into a coma. King Dargon, never much of a ruler, seemed to lose all sense of the world outside, spending all his time watching over his young wife.

When old Grodrig, the court magician, first mentioned the Stone of Aayela, the courtiers just laughed at him. A myth, an old fairytale - how could he talk such nonsense? But he kept retelling what he had read in his dusty old tomes: how Heliax the Wizard had captured a spirit of light, Aayela, in a perfect crystal, bending her power to his will; how the Stone lay hidden, deep below the roots of the mountains, waiting for a hero to retrieve it.

Perhaps the Stone was the only cure for her illness? Finally the King himself, in one of his few lucid moments, decreed that the stone was to be found and brought back. As the youngest and most dispensable of the King's knights, you are the natural choice for a fool's errand like this.