Tantalizing Crystal

Week 149 – Aljarhaa, Shieldbreaker

This struggle is endless, thank the One Prophet.

My arm rises and falls, my spear gleams red and streams with blood. My shield is battered and broken but my heart is strong.

The evil that rises in this place has consumed the evil that was in me, adding it to itself. I have seen serpents in the moonlight, but praise the Light they are no longer squirming in my soul.

Clarity is mine once more. I was a fool ever to trust the poison oracles, but I am here and my hand is strong against the beasts that haunt this land.

My soul has planted a banner here, and I stand beneath it and kill, and kill, and kill.

Halim Aljarhaa

Week 150 – Dacre, Vestal

Dacre's Daybook

I saw the thing from the stars again. Those melting, iron-hard crystals, the glimmering colors and the cloak of dead flesh. I think it has to wear those bodies like armor when it ventures out of the blasted heath into the saner confines of the outer world.

It has captured my imagination. I can't stop thinking about it. There is a deep and strange truth here, something to do with that comet that hit the Farmstead. It changed things in a way that I can't grasp except to say that there are laws from other realms intruding on this one. I think. . . I know there is a mind and soul behind it.

I'm neglecting my prayers and my service. I haven't written back to the rest of the cultic circle in weeks. I need to know this thing. I crave it in my bones and belly. The crystals are the key. There is a dust that can be refined from them. It stings and clarifies and opens the mind, and it has given me visions.

I've begun a great work, a chained and secret book of new prayers and new revelations. My brothers and sisters will call it heresy. The fools who worship the Light and its array of false gods will call it heathen witchery.

Let them. I have seen a new truth.

Dacre

Week 151 – Bosc, Plague Doctor

All of the work I do, all of the experiments and examinations, the blood-letting and surgery, the hours of labor gathering the finest leeches and distilling the most potent healing elixirs, and how do they repay me?

The first inexplicable mystical substance they come across, they eat. Or inject. Or take it like snuff.

I am utterly beside myself. Apparently it's not enough that I cured the Crimson Curse, now I must put my own studies aside and immediately take up the task of unraveling the secrets of the comet shards. Damn them all. I'll have to go to the Farmstead and examine the phenomena I've heard about first-hand.

Bosc, Dr. Md., physician.

Week 152a – Baldwin, Leper

My dearest wife,

I dreamed of you last night. I thought I could smell the perfume of your silks, touch your hand, feel you close to me. I dreamed of your dark hair sparkling with silver.

Light in the darkness, my queen. I remember you and the sweet pain of that memory makes me strong.

Close by this Hamlet lies an ancient Farmstead. Something of elder terror has fallen to our world from the darkness between stars, and it has changed and shifted everything. There are lights and sounds and visions that no one can understand.

The old Miller who lived there has changed as well. Some of the others saw him before. He is crumbling into dust but stands tall, sad and lost as I am.

I saw his wife. She was sitting by a ruined fireplace holding a basket in her hands, broken and empty. When I spoke to her, she looked at me and said something I could not hear, and her body shattered into pieces.

It seemed to fit the surreal environs. I wish I knew what she had said. Was it a message for the poor Miller? A last request? A few words from a dirge for her damned husband?

I am lost without you, my queen, my heart, my guiding star.

Light be with you.

Your Baldwin.

Week 152b – Bosc, Plague Doctor

I am somewhat taken aback.

I had anticipated a great deal of unpleasantness and anomalous behavior from the reports the others have given, but nothing they said could have prepared me for the alien environment of the blasted heath.

It is as if an entirely different set of laws pertains there. As if there is a tension between this world and all its earthbound inertia, and the visitor from outside.

I do not understand the purpose of the celestial array of stones surrounding the Farmstead, but I can leave the mystical side to Howard and his ilk. I do not know if Couer is up to the task. Perhaps he's been indulging in the fruits of the comet in addition to his powders and incense.

But regardless, I have samples, I have records, I have crystals and reagents and I have work to do!

Bosc, Dr. Md., physician.

Week 152c – Fortier, Raven Fiend Abomination

I went back to the Courtyard.

It's not that I want to be sick again. But there's something that draws me. Something about that smothering red light that seems to dull the pain of my own condition, that quiets the pull of the Weald and the things that roost there.

I don't know that I'll ever find out what happened to me. That's fine.

My name is Fortier. I am a woman. I am human.