Shade of the Hero
Legacy Name: Shade of the Hero

There were many beliefs about what would happen after death. Some believed that they would go on to join the three Golden Goddesses, and be rewarded for the goodness of their lives by spending this time in the paradise known as the Sacred Realm.

This was the belief, and for them, it might well be true. Not for him though. Never for him.

He had a name once. He can still remember that. It was a name whispered in legends of a small boy who had racked up scars in order to save a world far bigger then he could imagine. It was the name of that boy, who would go forward seven years into the future, unintentionally unleashing the very disasters he had tried so hard to prevent.

"You must use your courage to seek power..."

The name of the boy who would become a hero unparalleled because he would awaken six sages and defeat evil. It was also the name of a hero then forgotten, abandoned to time as he was sent back seven years by the very princess he had sworn to protect, left alone with no family or friends.

"...and find it you must."

That was his payment. All who he had come to know over the years forgot of his deeds, of him and yet he preserved on. He had been given the magical instrument, cast aside by the princess who knew him, and left behind by the fairy who had been his one true companion through it all.

He had not begrudged them then.

Though his journey did not end there.

He had left when his welcome seemed worn out, and went on to another land, searching out the one who had left him behind.

"Only then will you become the hero for whom this world despairs."

Reluctantly, he had found himself through into yet another quest. Three agonizing days, repeating endlessly. Forever. Day after day, watching people he grew to care about suffer and ache. You couldn't save everyone. Not all the time, and that lesson hurt more then any scar he had ever earned. Not only could he not help them, but with each new cycle, he found himself alone once more. Forgotten and abandoned, because he had never made a difference.

That had been his personal hell.

Forgotten, alone, and unloved. He had become a thing as strange as the world around him. A jaded man in the body of a child, cursed to find he lacked the strength to help. All he had to his name was his courage, fueled by the hope that somewhere, somehow, he might one day find someone who could not only remember him, but would never leave him.

At the end of his journey, however, that was not what he found.

This was his curse.

Unfulfilled with life, when he died, he found he could not move on. He was a shade trapped to the earth. He had grown bitter in life, never passing on the things he had learned, hating himself for it, yet never able to open up. He was a lost soul, one of the things that, when he thought hard enough on, he realized he had tried to heal himself while alive.

"Although I accepted life as the hero, I could not convey the lessons of that life to those who came after."

Fate could be a cruel mistress, it seemed.

Perhaps this was why he had begrudged the boy who appeared before him. A child, so new to the world, but apparently valuable enough to not be called forth until he was a young man.

Had the Goddesses learned their lesson with the first failed hero or did they only seek to mock him with his own successor?

Still, though bitterness had tainted him, he could not turn his back to the youth who now set out to save the land. He planned to give the boy something he had never had in life.

A mentor.

"At last, I have eased my regrets."