As you requested, here is a transcription of those entries in Sacerdote Cedric Anvilfriend's journals that you marked, translated from Bade'in to Low Empyrian. I have attempted to render the translation as true to the meaning of the original as possible, and have kept the abbreviations that the sacerdote used at times for names. I hope you will find this useful. If you decide to have any other entries transcribed, I am always at your service.
Your obediant servant,
Kauldur Tempin Icehand
[Year 501 - KTI]
Coiling 1
Persifal ported in today to tell me that Yinark was dead. Seems like some humans went exploring where they shouldn't. Wyllow says two escaped. Yinark killed five. I'm surprised any lived. Yinark's a bastard, but he's a damn skilled bastard. All that was left was a black spot and a handful of ashes. Burnt down one of Wyllow's silver deodars. Figures he'd take one of her pet projects with him. I don't know what she ever saw in him.
P. wants me to resurrect him. I'll try - more for those two than because I think it'll work. He chose the fire a long time ago. Out of my hands.
I might be able to help Wyllow, though. P. says she's taking it hard.
What worries me most is those two who are still down there. Not many people could take Yinark down. SS? P. says it's possible - except he was killed during the day. Maybe the fangs finally got wise and spelled up a sun protection. P. doesn't think Bel would permit it. I'd like to think not.
If it's not a fang it's a minion. Told P. to run a check on her defenses.
Coiling 2
P. brought the body but Wyllow's gone hiding. Or dead. P. plans to look and get Garrik in on the hunt. Point or not, he's not going to find Wyllow if she's decided to hole up. They grew that blasted treehole too well. She's got a hundred hiding places.
I'm stuck here with the corpse. Y. wasn't my favorite person alive. He's just barely tolerable dead. And he's getting soot on the altarcloth.
[Handwriting changes here; I expect this was added later. - KTI]
Wyllow killed him.
I don't blame her. I told her he was a bad seed. She didn't listen. I guess she figured it out at last.
What's she going to do now?
I am stricken dumb like a hunted rabbit.
My arms are wrenched from their sockets.
My feet sink in filth.
My eyes blur from seeing evil.
My ears are closed from hearing the cries of bloodshed.
My heart is apalled at the thought of evil.
When human baseness is revealed
My foundations shudder
My bones are out of joint
My entrails heave like a stormtossed ship
My heart is utterly sore
And in the havoc of transgression
A whirlwind swallows me.
Coiling 3
The spawn are here. P. ran a security check and found more holes in her defenses than in an atheist's argument. Magic graft-and-link. Yinark's work. No wonder Wyllow stopped his heart and burned him to support her story.
P.'s kicking herself. Now we have to figure out whether to handle it ourselves or notify the archon. P. doesn't want to alert the powers-that-be yet. She likes being the respected civic founder. I told her pride was a sin. She said something crude.
The spawn must have come in from under, and that scares me. An SS-drow alliance? It makes sense. Too much sense. I hope it's a byway treaty and not an arms treaty. All we need are spawn, fangs and spider points fighting side-by-side under the city.
If P. won't call in the guards or guild, it's going to be up to us. The kids in her school aren't ready for this yet. Too bad. We were hoping for a few more years before it came to this. For undead, the SS sure push hard.
Coiling 4
G. didn't find Wyllow, so it's just the 3 of us. Sure could use Ezzat, but P.'s got him working on some way to seal the place off from magical entry. Pity. Old bones could bring the fire to a few spawn and make the place look like a midsummer's fireworks display.
So far we've already set off a few bangs - gives me the jumps. P.'s magic fails and half this place is going to thunder down like an avalanche on top of us. Told her to get some bade'in miners, but no - magic was faster. Sometimes I can't figure out what Bel sees in her. Hope it isn't my martyrdom.
Coiling 6
They brought all the creepies and crawlies, all right. Burn them! One nearly got me before Garrick shaved off four of its legs. The whole nest was on us, and P. ended up porting us out to the keep.
We have to get outside help. The SS has something big going on. P. needs to evacuate, seal it up as best she and the dustman can, and call in the Heliochrys - maybe even the Board. Agrimony owes us one. This'd be about right.
Me, I'll get enough clerics down there to light the place like a summer's day in Bahr al-Raml. You can't tell me the SS isn't skulking down there somewhere, just waiting for us to drop our guard.
Bel took Yinark's body on the altar. I think he got off too easy.
Coiling 7
Still the flame to stop the night
Still the scourge to stop the fight
Trust the dark to bring the light
Trust the wronged to bring the right.
Sometimes a man can get to hate prophecy. Especially when he's the one spouting off the gibberish and not even knowing what the hell he's talking about.
P. says she thinks she knows what it means. She & E. are off to talk magical theory. That leaves me and the sticky-fingered point to play cards, I guess. He cheats.
This worries me. Scourge? Still? It's not my place to contradict Bel, but nobody ever said I can't question. I don't like the idea of losing her and Wyllow so quickly.
I've got to assume Wyllow's dead. Otherwise the drider took her alive - and that's not nice to think about.
Can't scry her, can't commune for her. She's gone and hid herself good this time. Yinark wasn't worth even one of her tears. He sure as hell isn't worth getting lost or captured or killed over.
G. says finding a druid in her own forest is impossible - so she might be alive, if she hasn't gone and killed herself in remorse, or whatever.
P.'s going to start the evacuation today after she's talked to E., and she's going to ask him to farspeak the Board. Nice to think she's finally taking her religious advisor seriously. I've sent out a call, too - told everyone within a hundred miles to gather at the Tabernacle in the city. Justiciar Khevrin's promised an entire unit, and Sacerdote Valanya says she's calling in a young paladin from Saldon. I've told them all to keep it quiet. Last thing we need are riots, too. This is going to be tricky enough as it is.
Coiling 8
The school is lost. Evil has the Unders. Garrick's gone - lost somewhere in those dark corridors with so many other good men and women. Yinark really opened the gates of Hell - may he burn there forever.
How can I recount the deaths? How can I do justice to the fallen?
Those who have come are terrible - they have power we just couldn't stand before. There are nine of them, like the ancient Punishments of legend come to stalk the earth once more, the nine Damned Souls of the ancient Kusta pseudepigrapha.
What have the SS done? In all the years we've fought them, I've never seen anything like this. Have they really forged a pact with the Abyss, with the Hells, with the forces of the Adumbra?
Only twelve of us escaped, thanks to Persifal and Ezzat and the grace of the gods. We were all grievously injured, but all who survived are stable now.
Any other time, I'd relish a challenge like this. Now I'm just scared. I'm not sure we can control it. Place your trust in Bel, or Vair, or Sangre, I keep telling the younger clerics, who are asking what went wrong - but I know exactly how they feel.
I've only seen Persifal cry three times before this. She's not that kind of woman. But today was the fourth. The prophecies call her Bel's Scourge. The prophecies have never seen her in tears over her murdered students.
The lich and me - what could we do to comfort her?
Ezzat says the whole place will have to be destroyed - that it's the only way we can be sure they're all gone. He says he senses a breeder somewhere in the caverns. That means it'll start dropping spawn as soon as it gets located in a suitable chamber. Once that happens we've lost. Damn things are created faster than we can hunt them down and make snapcrackers out of them.
Persifal says destroying the Unders will collapse the city. I'm afraid she's right.
I don't know where that leaves us, though.
Coiling 9
Persifal and Ezzat have a plan.
She explained it to me this morning. I don't like it, but I can't gainsay her. She's got the Word on her side.
I suppose I always knew that it would boil down to something like this. Bel's favoured burn bright, but briefly.
To see a candle's flame, one must bring it into darkness.
I asked if she needed me to help. She said no - that it was only one plane to bridge, just a bloodlink to build a little detour in the chronoscape.
Her plan won't solve the problem, but it'll - literally - buy us some time. She says I need to stay here to figure out how to destroy those monsters without bringing the city tumbling down. If she's calculated correctly, only one day will pass in the Unders for every year that passes here - and the seals she and Ezzat have made from the blazons I'd forged for her years ago will act as the spellwards to keep everyone where they should be - out or in.
Her friends the gargoyles and I spent all day placing the seals, with E. locking the necessary spells into place. The last remains to be set - after Persifal teleports to the wood and starts the ritual.
Sealing that last portal is going to feel like sealing her grave.
It's been seventy years since I was first called by Bel to prepare the way for His Scourge - forty-three since I held Persifal for the first time and blessed the first breath she drew. I never thought I'd be expected to live beyond her last.
The fire of the Sun brings both life and death.
She assures me that it won't kill her - that she'll only be in stasis until I return. But once the seals are broken, the evil below will be freed. I won't dare free her until I know for certain how to destroy them.
Has this been Bel's plan for me all along? Wield her like a weapon against His foes, turn her like a key?
I took down Thorne's cantos and read them again last night. They have never seemed more appropriate.
These will collapse upon the whole structure,
And all the dark powers will perish in agony and perdition.
And wretchedness will overtake all its inhabitants,
And perdition of Hell in which there is no mercy,
Bel save me from these and take me beyond them all,
So that I shall not be devoured in the distress of those hell-deeps.
Coiling 10
The thing is done.
Coiling 17
Today I cleared out the Spire and set off her last-laugh wards. I'll store her papers in the Tabernacle until she returns.
Harvest 29
I have received a reply - Keephame has a copy of the Kusta. I abhor the thought of travelling there ... but so be it. If she can do that, then I can do this - even cross the ocean.
Fading 22
The Nine Damned Souls were created by the Betrayer to escape the chains of flesh. However, he found that his creations were not free of flesh so much as imprisoned by it - with every death they moved from body to body, constantly reborn. The Betrayer searched for a new answer, but kept the Damned by him to carry out his will.
What the Kusta doesn't explain is how "the Betrayer" managed to create a soul in the first place. The idea that one can create a soul is a mage's heresy, and I am disturbed to find even this faint a trace of such a tradition. But forget that. The story goes on to say that the Damned moved from body to body training in magic and skill at arms, becoming the Betrayer's assassins and spies. At some point they found - forged? - a set of weapons called the Swords of the Seven Seals.
I have the librarians working on that right now.
If these are the same creatures, there have to be more contemporary references to follow up.
I could spend years here, searching.
I guess that's exactly what I'm supposed to do.
Fading 26
I found this in a book that must have been written by one of the heretics. Hilden, the "Pious Magus." He goes on to describe diabolism, so I will continue reading. But this preface seems to embody the essential difference between the way we look at the world, and the way mages look at the world.
I have seldom been so thankful that Bel sent me to guide Persifal's steps on the correct path.
We, the Transient, in our state of body and soul, exist between the great Wheels of the Universe. And we spin, on our earth, using the physical and spiritual gifts of the Deities to lead lives of distinction. Sentience and free will, knowledge and memory, tradition and assimilation, mastery and ignorance, teachings and learnings, mistakes and atavisms, capacities and limitations, war and worship; ours is a nature unbound but predestined, an orbid of a myriad chains of bodied-souls around a locus beyond our ken.
We are nothing not predescribed, can do nothing but that which affects ourselves alone. In each facet of the individual and group Self so defined, we affect the teetering balance between the two great forces, the Above and the Below. A single external force is available to us, by the Deities' unknowable motives, and its name is Power. This is the Universal Magic, a force which includes the particular magic of the wizard, the magic of the elements, and the mastery conferred through true faith.
Whatever its form, Power is pervasive and complete, and as close to Holy perfection and Damnable sin as anything of this Sphere can be. As mortals caught in the Spin of a universe far too alien, we crave Power. This craving can start simply, as in the instinctual urge to survive, to live, to take in breath and release it, then go through the process again and again. It could be the power to help others survive, to protect family and home. The levels of power are many and intricate, with no steady truths about which powers are greater. The power of the body to make new life, to procreate; the power of strong hands and discipline to build places and craft objects of lasting quality; the power of the mind to philosophize and make sense of the world; the power of one mortal's emotional gravitas to rule over the masses and change the course of worldly history.
But these things are only shadows of the true Power. It is Universal Magic that gives the greatest power. Through it, even the distant Spheres must take notice of us. Priestly faith is the power, not to create miracles, but to beseech the Upper Spheres to provide such miracles. It is also the power of mind and heart to grow close to and appreciative of the boundaries of humanity's limited understanding of the heavens.
However, it is in the potent pool of Power known as Magic, that of wizardly disposition, that the free will of humanity is given head. A wizard who reaps the bounty of this gift has many choices open to him, dealing almost exclusively with the Sphere of Earth. Despite magic's potential for cosmic significance, we exert our sentient force and bend this Power almost exclusively to our own realm's experiments. This can be called short-sightedness, base ambition, egotism, or a display of ignorance without parallel. Regardless of what we call this shortcoming, it is an extension of man's free will, and therefore a result of our uniqueness in the universe.
Hilden goes on to describe three Emypreans, the True, The Shadow, and the False (or Ash). Can he mean the three planes of existence? At first I thought so, but he describes the Shadow Empyrean as "the force that fuels any worldly manifestation of the supernatural, including magic." That is the Heresy in a nutshell. I would have closed the book then, but he then moves to a discussion of Soul, Spirit, and Body, and how souls and spirits can be taken by what he terms the Depravati - demons and devils, I suppose (trust a mage to coin a new word for something we already have words for) and used to manifest themselves on the earth. He says the taking of souls is governed by the Law of Drawing Down: Transmission, Accusation, and Consent. How does he know, I wonder? Once they're taken, though, then the Depravati can subsume them into soul avatars or celestial mantles.
I figure all this boils down to souls really can move from place to place, especially if they're the souls of Depravati. I skipped most of the book and went straight to possession, since as far as I can tell, that's the way these things are skipping from body to body. Hilden claims there are two kinds of possession, Phantastikos and Psychomachia. It's the last one that allows the Depravati to take over completely, so I'm gambling that's what's going on with the Damned.
There were a lot of details, but I flipped past them to the section on destruction. Not really promising. Says a demon's True Name is etched in runes of the Black Tongue on its heart-stone and can be used in the Ritual of True Mastery (!), but I don't see that it can be used to destroy them. Now, if you got its heart - Hilden calls it a Caligo - then it's another story altogether, but apparently they don't keep their demonic hearts in their bodies, so that's out. Or is it? Can a possessing demon keep its heart somewhere else? It's corporeal, after all. NOTE.
Fading 27
Caligo hearts leak an evil "Aura" that affects the area around it. Search?
Fading 32
Found out more about demons and devils than I ever wanted to know, but not nearly enough on destroying their souls. Seems like all you can do is hold them at bay for a while.
Did find out more about the swords. Called Ecstafex Blades. They're all bound together in a hierarchy, and to use the power of a sword it must be near all of its inferiors. That means that whoever's got the most powerful sword still has to depend on the weakest sword to use that power. Nice system of checks. If I can destroy the very first sword, it would disable all the rest. I'd almost hate to do that to such fine pieces of craftsmanship, but one or two of the references indicate that they may be animaphages - souleaters. Anyone who dies by one of these blades is eaten - completely wiped out of existence. Not a nice fate.
Sweetfear has the power of Manifest. It's the one that would need to be destroyed. Its bearer can appear wherever desired.
Darkzone has the power of Paradox. Its bearer can be whatever desired.
Blackthirst has the power of Sacrament. Its bearer can will another to be whatever desired.
Darkfire has the power of Ecstasy. Its bearer drinks the life of whoever is struck.
Whiterain has the power of Revelation. Its bearer captures and transforms souls.
Greystorm has the power of Epiphany. Its bearer harnesses the essence of magic and bends it as desired.
Bloodangel has the power of Dirge. Its bearer destroys.
The Swords of the Seven Seals. I'd like to figure out who made them, and why. Nasty lot.
Sunwane 13
I think I've learned all I can here. I've learned a number of ways to send them away for a time, but nothing about destroying them. Last night it came to me. I'm searching in the wrong place. Most of the information here is wizardly - it doesn't have anything to do with me (although how Persifal would enjoy some of the books I have tossed aside). There is a way to destroy them, but I do not think that I'm the one to do so. Bel's fire would turn their spirits - souls - whatever they have to astral ash.
What is necessary is the right tool, however. I don't feel that it's me. I'm old - my joints ache - I don't have the strength to channel Belfire. That destiny must belong to somebody else.
I will watch and wait, I suppose.
[Year 511 - KTI]
Coiling 10
Days come when the inhabitants of the earth are seized with great panic
And the way of truth hidden
And the land will be barren of faith.
A world in disorder shall hear no useful echo
But the deep sea shall ring forth a great sound of menace
And the earth shall bellow, bloodstained by wars.
The earth will break open over vast regions
And fire explode interminably.
Wild beasts will desert their haunts, and women bear monsters.
An unknown force will wield sovereignty.
Blood will trickle forth from wood
And stone speak its voice.
People will be confounded
And stars change course.
Then the sun will suddenly shine by night
And the moon by day.
A murky cloud shall cover the boundless earth,
From east and west and north and south.
And then a great river of burning fire
Shall flow down from the heavens and consume every place.
The mendicants of Bel
Shall punish fearfully with flaming whips
Bind tightly with fiery chains and unbreakable fetters.
There shall be a wailing from all
And gnashing of teeth.
From the heavens shall flow a river of fire and brimstone.
These shall be the sign for all mortals.
The notable seal.
[Year 591 - KTI]
Shadowing 17
Today Siri read to me a prophecy found carved in a deep chamber in the mountains. I don't know if it means anything. Has it already happened? Will it happen? Does it apply to Persifal?
Stone girds the lands
Shadows hide the stars
Death champions the young
Sun dies and returns
Mist makes a path
Crystal watches treason
Wood challenges sky
Stars tread earth
Veil shrouds madness
Mortals rescue time
Metal summons flesh.
Some of it seems similar to Bel's Words - but they are not the same.
A man can get to hate prophecy.
[Year 620 - KTI]
Mist 13
I'm a fool. The one I seek won't come to me - I have to go to him, or her. I've spent time studying the prophecies again, and I think it's clearer now. But first I need the signs - they will tell me when the time to search is near.
I will pass this lore to my acolytes, all the young clerics of the Tabernacle, so that if I die they'll still remember, and search.
[Year 707 - KTI]
Today one of my acolytes - I forget his name - died. I saw the light reflecting from his eyes oddly and asked him about it. Then his eyes exploded.
Giorge says this is something new, this "Watcher" thing. People all over have these eyes of glass that shatter when they're discovered. Doesn't make sense to me. I have prayed, but all Bel has seen fit to tell me is that the acolyte was an innocent pawn.
Crystal watches treason?
[Year 726 - KTI]
Sunwane 11
I hadn't thought much of the earthquake earlier this year but now I'm told there are things in the ocean that are attacking ships. I fear I am now seeing the first of the signs.
I can hardly stand without help. What am I supposed to do now?
[Year 768 - KTI]
Withewind 19
I hear that the university has given the thing a name now - The Hierodule Plague. They say there's no cure.
And women bear monsters.
[Year 777 - KTI]
Mist 5
Agrimony came by to visit me today. He hasn't aged a bit, although I could see the shock in his eyes when he saw me. Never did have an ounce of subterfuge in his body. Head-on, he always had to meet things head-on.
He tells me that archmage fellow - the spider point - Eidolon was behind the old Watcher thing. Called him out on a duel - idiot - and the point whipped his ass and locked him in a magic bottle or jewelry box or somesuch. Just got out and visited as soon as he heard I was still around. I told him what happened to Persifal, but he says he can't help. He's got to help hunt down Eidolon, who's hiding with those sea-monsters. Told him when he gets a chance to stop by again. He owes us one still.
There was something about time in all that, but I forget.... I'll ask him next time I see him.
[Year 800 - KTI]
Wraithwalk
There are dragons and ships in the sky. The time is nigh, but I'm no longer ready.
I told Gi Bradlori to saddle up my pony. The whole world's at war, and I'm not going to sit here and die in bed.
Before I leave I'll be sure to tell him to keep an eye open for the person who'll free Persifal. Or maybe I'll just leave him these journals. It's a long story now, and I don't think I have time to tell it.
