Challenging Visions

Week 172a – Dismas, Highwayman

Fecking hell, this business just gets worse and worse.

Worse. . . That's not true. It's never been as bad as beneath the manor. But damn'd if it isn't trying its best to get close.

Those crystals are everywhere. I go on a mission to the Ruins, and there's some gigantic horror from the blasted heath slashing me to pieces and breathing those wretched crystals all over me. Have to pluck them out right away, or they start to grow. No wonder the Heiress is so all-fired enthusiastic about getting work gangs to break them apart.

And Bosc's got her nose in a book or poked into some strange-smelling experiment every second. She doesn't sleep much lately. She's too excited.

To tell the truth it's a bit attractive, really. She. . . I don't want to say raves exactly. Or gloats. But something like that. She's got a new toy and she's having a devilish good time with it.

It's better than when it was the Curse, anyways. A successful experiment always puts some fire in her blood, and there wasn't much success with that.

Dismas.

Week 172b – Bosc, Plague Doctor

Thorel has been hard at work among the crystal-breakers, and he has brought back a wealth of carefully-gathered information about their interactions with the normal world.

Perhaps "normal" isn't quite accurate, but it will serve.

The crystals grow, but they wither and fade if they are too far from the others. It does not appear to be related to their size. Rather, a single great crystal will die, while many lesser ones together survive. The creatures of the comet, likewise, cannot venture forth alone – or if they do, it must be in some monstrous combination with things of this world. Strange!

I am tantalized by this. It hints at properties that could be of great use. Even now I have discovered a procedure by which the crystals may in time become fixed, unchanging, and their beneficent properties made use of as I have in my ashen distillation.

This is a stepping-stone into realms of the chemister's art I never imagined.

Bosc, Dr. Md., physician.

Week 173 – Dacre, Vestal

There is a war going on between invisible gods

I've seen it in the crystal visions

The thing of earth and flesh

and the thing of comet crystal

The sleeper and the thing in the earth

I can see a star falling like lightning piercing my eye and mind

Later

Dacre's Daybook

I must keep this book locked away from myself when I am in a visionary trance. The crystals bring wondrous sights and deep insight, but clarity comes only with consideration of those sights and sensations. I cannot simply let it flow through my fingers onto the page.

The profane scroll has disappeared, and I find that I do not care how, or why, or anything. It carried its own secrets, but they were petty and small things compared to the Sleeper.

I must return to the Farmstead. There is so much to learn.

Dacre.

Week 174 – The Heiress

Wilhelmina Constantine von W-, Heiress and Lady of the Hamlet: Her Diary.

Everything in this damnable Hamlet of mine seems to move in circles, and with each spin of the wheel it becomes more and more clogged with evil and disease.

There was the darkness beneath the manor, and it sent its madness back into the Hamlet with each party that entered it. The Courtyard and its contagion, which still crops up, and now the comet and those maddeningly strange crystals.

Everything evil sends its fingers into my land and each leaves an ineradicable trace on it and on me.

Laudanum helps me sleep, but I dream regardless. I keep seeing the stone man in the Courtyard, but his head is the head of my Ancestor's statue.

I should have that damned thing torn down.

Lady W., Heiress.

Week 175 – Gwenllian, Hellion

Cry Gwenllian! My own name on my tongue

My spear, heart-seeking, springs out before me

I am a lioness, a war-dog drenched in blood

A storm was my father, the warm earth my mother

[numerous scribbled-out lines]

Later

This is harder than I thought it would be.

Poetry does not come so easy to me in this language. I can't feel the thump and rhythm of the words the way I do in my mother tongue. It all sounds wrong.

This is frustrating. But I do not back down from challenges!

Gwenllian will prevail.