The Aftermath: Final Entry

11th Sun’s Dawn, 4E 199

Drusus Varo, Overseer of the Ascadian Isles Expedition

It is over. I will start from the beginning.

Vira woke us on the morning of the tenth. I rose with an anxious fervor I had never felt before. Everything was the same. But the voices in my head were cordial, and the chill was invigorating, as if to combat the tenor of impending doom. Silence rang with divine intent.

As we dressed, I knew that the whole crew felt as I did. Even in this moment of mundane telepathy, my agenda remained a secret. Nobody would have suspicions.

The party assumed its usual arrangement. Vira and Saenus close by me, to ward off Dreugh. I trusted Mehra to stay near. We were still quiet. Any spoken remark was drowned out by those unspoken. The feeling of companionship with the crew woke a sorrow I didn’t know I had, but this only strengthened my resolve.

We crossed bridges and causeways. We trekked and clambered, until we were standing in the shadow of the Temple plaza. There the twin statues of Vivec lay in shameful dismemberment, the triptych shrines desecrated by the elements. A corner of pavement gaped open at the moonlet’s fury. Embedded in the sea floor was Baar Dau itself. No Dreughs. None anywhere.

The sun had set. It still felt too soon, but it always would. We halted for Saenus to speak his incantations. Then one by one we plunged into the black water. With the cold tightly snared around my body, I fought to calm my breathing and keep my eyes open. All was dark but I could hear stone scraping stone. My hands groped out to find an opening while others followed behind. Still dark. A little further.

My eyes found a dull light and stuck to it. A little further. The light was colorless and the source wasn’t visible. Further, and I found myself bathed in the light of a monstrosity.

At my feet was a pile of papers. Ink was diffusing from the top like a plume of incense smog. I could make out one name before it all vanished: Lideg. But that was only the top, and the pile spoke for a century of letters to Amaya.

The globular structure was smaller on the inside. The walls were plastered with what looked like a grotesque network of roots, contorting and overlapping across the whole inner surface.

A few of the roots were like long sinews, stretching towards the center of the moonlet from the inner walls. But as I followed my eyes along these roots, my stomach began to roil. These roots had bulging growths and red patches of veins. The farther my eyes followed them, the louder the silence screeched from all crevices of my skull. Arms and legs. At the center, an inhumanly distorted torso. A battered head.

Two blank eyes, flooding the entire chamber with light. They were already watching me and everyone else simultaneously. When I looked back at them, the light painted after-images all across my field of vision. These became a patchwork of lost frescoes and schematics. I allowed myself to recognize the beauty and remain unaffected.

Nerevar’s eyes spoke to me with silence. Silence was silence, delivered in reverse, so that my mind’s conjecture and skeptical thinking would generate the words:

“YOU CAN’T HIDE.”

Then the two eyes merged into one and I saw Mehra’s reflection, knowing that she could see mine in the same way.

“TREACHERY IS LOUD. BE SILENT OR SILENCED.”

The eyes assumed their original position.

“A PART OF US OR A PART OF NOTHING.”

The roots moved. They were limbs as well. A myriad of torsos and heads without eyes formed a net at all possible angles. Nerevar was covered in eyes. In them, I could see the reflection of people and each person. And then I felt reality winding its rope around me.

“A PART OF US OR A PART OF NOTHING.”

An ultimatum. Bubbles funneled out my nose and mouth like a plume of incense smog. I hadn’t fooled them; they had made a fool of me. I knew the spell had dwindled away and I wouldn’t be able to inhale.

“A PART OF US OR A PART OF NOTHING.”

A part of nothing. If that was my fate, so be it.

Then the chamber was solid with bodies and confusion. Lobster claws lashed out through the network of limbs and tore it apart. Adrenaline delayed my becoming nothing.

Cirelmo told me that the ward renders the tent airtight. This negates all of the storm’s damage, but the air inside becomes noxious rather quickly. Cirelmo combined the ward with a variant of the water breathing enchantment.

I took a scroll from my knapsack and unrolled it. The ink would fade soon. My voice did not produce the incantation, only bubbles. So I spoke silence instead. This time the bubbles grew until Baar Dau was one large bubble. The water and the Dreughs drained out. Everyone was dead. Everyone except me, Mehra, and the Incarnate. The Incarnate whose eyes painted a blank after-image onto my retina. Without the water, the beauty was gone.

My next memory is of time passing. This is because someone cleansed the original memory from my mind. I am not a god; I am a mortal and therefore weak to the seduction of forbidden knowledge. The expedition here has taught me that no mortal may know the Tools or their secrets. Otherwise the world would spiral into chaos again.

Past the black spot tattooed into my memory, I found myself in an empty moonlet next to Mehra. Keening and Sunder left no traces behind. I looked at the stump of my wrist. Wraithguard was not missing; it was never supposed to be there. With no more right hand, no more Wraithguard, I write the same scrawl. All voices are gone and all unnatural instincts neutralized. We are the same people we were—excavators in a broken land. But the past month can never be undone.

I’m sitting above deck and we are halfway across the Narrow Sea. It’s a small boat so Mehra and I can maintain it by ourselves. There is enough money to hire a carriage once we reach the border. We’re going back to the Waterfront.

This has been my personal journal. Now I’m dropping it into the sea.

The End