Nex created Kakishon to be a place he could retreat to in times of stress to relax. His closest friends valued invitations to Kakishon, and his enemies quailed at the thought of exile into the magical realm’s more dangerous corners. While the act of creating an entire archipelago of disparate islands was in and of itself a feat almost godlike in its scope, Nex went one better. With the aid of a small army of proteans, primal spirits of chaos harvested from the deep entropy of the Outer Planes’ Maelstrom, Nex hid the islands of Kakishon in a tiny planar bubble and then hid that demiplane in a parchment scroll. To the casual observer, this scroll would seem to bear only a single, strange rune, but when activated, this rune transforms into a detailed map—a map of the realm of Kakishon. With the proper words, Nex could open a portal through the map and step into this paradise realm to escape all his worldly worries.
Nex created Kakishon to be selfrenewing—those who lived within would never want for comfort or sustenance. Yet even such a mighty work could not keep Nex’s attention forever. It is, perhaps, a testament to his vast power that he grew so bored with Kakishon that he eventually set the scroll aside in one of his numerous libraries and forgot about it. Centuries after Nex vanished at the climax of his war with Geb, the Scroll of Kakishon was discovered by a nowforgotten merchant. His attempt to sell the relic ended in tragedy as he was assassinated, and the Scroll of Kakishon fell into obscurity. The potent relic passed through dozens of owners, with none ever quite discovering the famed artifact’s trigger before someone else came along and claimed it as his own. Eventually, the Scroll of Kakishon became part of a dragon’s hoard, and there it languished for over 3,000 years.
The scroll was rediscovered a mere few centuries ago by a wizard named Andrathi. Lover to the exiled djinni Nefeshti, it took Andrathi several years to decipher the map’s purpose, and had he just a few months more he could perhaps have mastered the artifact’s power. Yet fate intervened before he had that chance.
His lover Nefeshti was the leader of a powerful group of genie crusaders rallying against the cruelties of the City of Brass. Called the Templars of the Five Winds, Nefeshti and her janni warriors had recently become embroiled in a brutal war against the efreeti Jhavhul and his own army of wish-fueled warriors and monsters. As potent as Nefeshti and her Templars were, they were slowly losing the war. When Andrathi approached Nefeshti with an audacious plan to force open the portal to Kakishon and capture Jhavhul and his army within the hidden world, she begrudgingly accepted that this was the only way they could win their war against the efreeti warlord.
The plan was simple—Nefeshti and her Templars would lure Jhavhul into an ambush, letting the efreeti believe that he had the advantage. Nefeshti would use herself and her Templars as bait and a distraction, and as soon as Jhavhul and his army attacked, Andrathi would be able to steal into the midst of the efreeti’s forces and tear open the portal to Kakishon.
The plan was not without risk, for while Andrathi was certain he could open the portal, he was uncertain if he could close it, or how violently the artifact would react to the forced entry. He didn’t want to risk his lover or her army on something that could backfire, and so he volunteered to trigger the trap on his own.
Everything went according to plan until the last minute. When Andrathi forced open the portal to Kakishon, the resulting vortex violently drew everything in the region through—Jhavhul, Andrathi, and a significant portion of the efreeti’s army. In the blink of an eye, where once raged a genie horde, all that remained was the Scroll of Kakishon itself. Nefeshti saw the event, and ordered her Templars to strike at once—they handily defeated the fraction of Jhavhul’s army that had escaped being drawn into Kakishon, but not before one of Jhavhul’s gnoll priests, a wily creature named Shirak, claimed the Scroll of Kakishon from where it lay. Shirak retreated to the depths of Jhavhul’s fortress in the House of the Beast and hid the Scroll of Kakishon, hoping someday to be able to free her master. By the time Nefeshti defeated the other remnants of the army, Shirak and the scroll were long gone.
The Templars’ successful defeat of Jhavhul and his army left a bitter taste in Nefeshti’s mouth. The djinni grew obsessed with searching for the Scroll of Kakishon so she could rescue her lover and ensure her enemy Jhavhul was defeated, and in her obsession she failed to notice how her Templars were falling to internal strife. As years turned into decades, and decades turned into centuries, Nefeshti grew more and more insular and her Templars drifted apart. Yet no sign of Jhavhul emerged, so they at last grew complacent and satisfied that, while it had cost one of their own, the enemy had indeed been truly defeated.