Zebuxoruk, the Forsaken

The Forsaken

Zebuxoruk is neutral, “choosing no side in the affairs of the gods,” and every other god dislikes him or ignores him. Some legends make him evil, others good. He has been called the Forsaken One and the Disgraced. After escaping the Plane of Justice, or the Void, he walked Norrath in mortal form, whether because mortality was forced on him or because he wanted it.

The hidden city

A hidden city honours him without worshipping him, and he does not much care for it either. Its people keep both true and false stories about him. Many are fallen priests, paladins and shadow knights, followers abandoned by their own gods and trying to find a way back; others seek true neutrality, and the understanding that the gods are more mortal than they seem.

Teacher of forbidden texts

His crime was sharing what the gods wanted kept secret. He translated Cazic-Thule’s writings on fear for mortals, and those writings ruined Thelin Poxbourne. He also reached Kotiz, a great necromancer who had been an apprentice of the Shissar and took over their laboratories and libraries after the Green Death. In Zebuxoruk’s Pact the Spirit of Kotiz remembers speaking with him in secret and being offered his journal of war, the Unholy Book of Zebuxoruk, which promised battle strategies and magic unknown on Norrath.

The gods in council

For that, the gods imprisoned him. The Plane of Time is wrapped in a cloud of endless energy, and there the gods of every realm gathered to decide what to do with Zebuxoruk, whom they had imprisoned “for reasons unknown.” Players could overhear them: Solusek Ro protests that banishing him will not stop mortals from entering the planes, and Rallos Zek agrees that the time to act is now. In the Plane of Justice the prisoner Mavuin passes on the news that Zebuxoruk “has been captured for a second time.”

The prisoner of Time

Mortals set him free, and that is the climax of the Planes of Power. Once released, Zebuxoruk delivers a dry verdict on his jailers: all the creations of the Nameless are capable of poor judgment, and these gods carry powers beyond our understanding without seeing where their actions lead.

The scroll of time

His own account of what came next is The Words of Zebuxoruk. The races of Norrath gathered in the place “where time cannot be measured,” asking for his forbidden knowledge. Then Druzzil Ro appeared. “Zebuxoruk, my student, I cannot allow this to happen,” she said, warning that if he escaped another prison the gods’ power would be compromised, and she wove a spell to send everyone back.

He saw time unroll like a scroll and tear into two whole copies that knew nothing of each other. One curled back on itself for several hours; then both moved on, and their words slowly changed. He ends unsure which scroll he is on. Jindrack settled it for players in 2006: the Plane of Time happened in EverQuest II’s timeline, and even a goddess cannot truly control time at its source.

A seedling in the Void

Seeds of Destruction returned to him in 2008. Its announcement showed a ruined future Norrath, shattered into millions of pieces, with a shadowy figure tending the last seedling tree in the Void. In the game Zebuxoruk warns that future and past will be evacuated for “a last stand in the Now,” which he calls magnificent and utterly futile.