The gods aren't truly eternal, not in the way that you would believe a thing to be forever lasting. They would someday be snuffed out when the planes exhausted the last of their energy and ceased to move in harmony anymore and all things ended.

Some of the gods wouldn't even make it to that far off time. They warred with each other and the structure of powers changed. Or when a god had need for something outside of their scope or range, deals would be brokered for favors or control of entire domains of power. This is how the Raven Queen became to hold dominion over Death and Fate and Winter—how she came to sit atop the throne once held by another.

This is why she kept her eye on the machinations of the other Gods in their domains. She removed herself from their immediate influence and took up residence in Shadowfell. And other than a brief bout with Lolth to gain a portion of her power, she stayed out of the squabbles of the gods that existed in the rest of the immaterial plane.

And that is why she was the first to notice the change; it was small at first, not the way that the Hunger had been years before with its sudden severing of bonds between the planar network. This was a smaller thing, more pin-point accurate. Something was granting a portion of power to the undead in the material plane.

It wouldn't have been noticed by anyone on the ground. Even the necromancers who schemed to break the very law which she held above all else wouldn't have felt their influence being tampered with. The shift was only something that she would be looking for. The vital thread of magic that connected undead to the plane where their energy derived and connected their maker to their control was drawing influence from a second place. A plane she couldn't see. A thirteenth plane.

Delicate. That was the word. She was so isolated from the world for so long that she had forgotten her own name, her mother's face, the area that she was born in. Any history or connections that the Raven Queen had were lost to time. So for her to go trouncing about the planes to solve this mystery would draw attention from the other gods. It would be seen as weakness, a chance to strike a deal with her.

Kravtiz, her confidant and avatar had been crucial to stopping the Hunger. It was unusual for her to be this sentimental, but she had kept a souvenir. The remnant of the enemy that had sailed through countless realities devouring all in a perverse attempt to be the only thing and then, later out of gluttony and need: John.

The Raven Queen wasn't very good with names. She had seen billions of lives come and go in her time, but she needed a name from this John. Ravens made of living shadow of Shadowfell toyed with him day and night, slicing bits of him off and giving his form time to remake itself into a cognitive image of the person who first left his home plane hundreds of years ago. And then beginning to do it all over again.

She rarely checked in on John, but this time when she paid him a visit he seemed to sense something had changed. He stopped screaming long enough to lift his head and stare into her eye. Light emanated from some unseen source just enough for him to see her pale face and the shimmering dress that she wore made of feather and shadow.

"You set out to devour eternity and become everything and you lost control in the end. You were bested in combat by three heroes. One of them happens to be involved with a servant of mine, a beautiful Elven man. Name him. Name the three." Her voice was hollow and curt.

John smiled, wide and white, though blood streaked his face and one of his eyes was swollen over.

"You astonish me, John. You assume that helping to undo a grave wrong is penance for having done it in the first place. You exist here because within that eternity that you sought to control was me—you died within the bubble of my small planar system while trying to unseat all of Creation and our prize for that was me going through the trouble of having my lovely ravens reassemble your soul just to bring you here for special treatment." She grabbed him by the chin with a black gloved hand shaking his head side to side.

"Name the three and your punishment ends now. I shall return you to the nothingness from which you were reassembled."

John laughed, that forced laugh that he must have reserved for speaking engagements and dinner parties where he was uninterested in the topic of conversation, but needed to play nice.

"You can be free of this. You can finally rest." She pulled him by the chin until he was staring into her purple eyes. The thing about the Raven Queen is she is beautiful and she is terrifying. She looks human, but in an unsettling way that screams 'wrong' and when she speaks to John the next time she's yelling and the screech of a bird echoes from somewhere. "The names!"

"Merle…Taako…Magnus…" John manages to say.

How could she forget Taako from TV? She nods knowingly and the stories of their travels flood back over her. If they could stop John on his petty quest, then they'd surely investigate this other plane and its syphoning control of undead. And of course, they could keep her name out of it.

"Thank you for your cooperation."

The last thing that John saw was the Raven Queen throw her head back as if to laugh, the feathery dress that crossed her chest just above the breast line seemed to lurch up her chest and shoulder blades and her neck. The plumage of the features spread like the top of a palm tree and her face blackened and stretched to form a beak and for her eyes to pull back into large dark orbs. A human-sized raven stood before him and let out a cry before crushed his head with a crack.

He felt the snap of bones he shouldn't have had anymore and then John felt nothing at all.

John ceased to exist.

We're a raven sailing over the expansive forest of the Nentir Vale on an eastbound wind through a near cloudless sky. The trees below are thick, green and rolling. They stretch up so far that we're having to push up higher than normal, catch updrafts of warm air and soar up off of them, flapping furiously to keep momentum and altitude.

Further east are the Whitefall mountains, barely visible on the horizon even from our height. At our back is the Sword Coast, the jewel of the continent and housing the most expansive populations of peoples in the material plane.

We push further east over clearings and small stone ruins left by long dead civilizations, the start of bridges arcing over the forest too big to have been constructed for humans—remnants from the Age of Giants an unfathomable amount of time before the here and now.

A river pokes out through a clearing beneath us and we bank and curve to follow it as it snakes through a more sparse part of the wilderness and finally opens up into a wide inland lake that we might have feared to be the eastern coast if not for the mountains still looming in the distance. And we fly over the expanse of rippling water with the sun silvering its surface and being broken here and there by waves. We fly for hours, though time isn't measured in minutes or hours to a bird, we know it to be a long time.

We're forced to beat our wings against the moist air to keep our height and when the forest finally comes into view, we glide lower to rest and sit along the banks of the massive lake. There's a woosh and then a sharp pain followed by pressure and we're tumbling end over end. The sound of the air around us as we dive out of control spiraling toward the ground.

The dirt shore sprinkled with driftwood is coming too fast and the attempts to move our wings result in pain. And then everything goes black.

A tall woman with red hair and hooked ram-like horns at either side of her head stands on the shore in a white dress adorned with gold trim and jangly golden jewelry. Her thick, knee-high boots are digging into mud as she braces against the force of the spell that she's casting: a sheet of wind that sweeps from an unseen force over the water pushing the spiraling body of a bird back toward the land. The creature whirls like a top, an arrow jutting out of its middle as it bounces on the wind.

She halts her prayer as the bird reaches the land, but its still high up and falling fast with the arrow making its direction unpredictable and by the time that it is predictable it's too late. It's headed right for her face. She throws her hands up and lets out a scream.

And the bird never makes contact. Instead it floats a few feet from her held up by a spectral hand. A wavering, enthusiastic voice sounds behind her. "She's already more Cleric than we got out of you." Taako was approaching her from behind with his wand raised as he held his cast of Mage Hand, though it looked like he was expending very little effort on doing so. "She healed a villager days ago and I haven't seen her cast Zone of Truth once. Wait, my man, you said you're teaching her?"

"Yeah, I'm guiding her. Setting an example," Merle said, his face as red as a baked ham though whether it was from the strain of his pack or the heat wasn't clear.

Taako plucked the dead bird out of the air by the arrow. "Annemarie, baby, you've got to jump ship on Merle's Jules walking the Earth bullshit and come on down to my Arcana academy."

This wasn't the first time that Taako had made this offer to Annemarie and she smiled with her mace held nervously down at her side. "No thank you, I'm fine where I am." Merle had given her a chance when most sects of Pelor were at least somewhat suspect of her. A Tiefling was still thought to be in league with the infernal planes. Merle didn't see her that way though, he had lived with jellyfish or talking wolves and even made friends with the Lord of Ruination, John.

Merle didn't discriminate.

"Sorry about that one!" Magnus Burnsides bounds over a thick hollow long carrying at set of squirrels and rabbits and birds strung up together. Dinner. "It was further out than I thought."

"I think it's fine, big guy," Taako says. "But, um, how much do you think we eat? You've got a feast slung over your shoulder—you know I've got, like, spells for that and stuff."

"We won't always be able to count on magic, we've got to prepare for the worst—if we're going to make sure that people are ready to survive when…well when shit gets bad." Magnus's hair was white and poked up in short spikes on his head, except his sideburns, they were dark and faded back to white as they extended down into his stubble.

Merle and Taako looked the same after twenty years. Merle with his faded rust colored beard and sun-roughened leathery skin. Taako still blonde and lithe with skin the color of driven snow—Taako would look the same when he lived ten more of Magnus's lifetimes, as was the nature of the children of Corellon.

Magnus was pushing fifty now, his skin reddened and aged in the sun. He was still massive and fit and though he could feel himself slowing down some he'd always been so ahead of the average that it didn't seem to stop him from still doing what he did best. Helping others.

"We need to make camp soon," Merle mused.

"Yeah, especially if you expect me to cook all of this," Taako said.

"We don't expect anything too fancy," Magnus said.

Taako scoffed. "I don't know, I've got a reputation to maintain. I don't want the kid going back and blabbing to the world that I'm some kind of phony."

"Oh," Annemarie said, actually startled. "Me?"

"Rail-splitter a few trees down," Taako said ignoring the question. "I'm going to try and magic us up a proper kitchen so we can see what we can do with all this."