LogFAQs > #899247770

Decided to discard the random conversation in favor of a little ... exposition. *audience boos* Only a little. I promise.

The Night Before (3)

Fiske had purchased the tome from a fence in the capital -- one of his contacts for books, a good source for spellbooks acquired from dead adventurers. The fence had said that it had belonged to one of the mages the realm had hired to exterminate the Undead of the Tomb of Ixpelmus. He had also suggested that the mage might have retrieved the tome from the Tomb itself. Perhaps that explained the unusual price?

The tome had been sealed up in a black iron box. There had been locks to break, wards to dispel, all of that. Standard practice. And then Fiske had opened the box.

At the academy in the capital, he had been taught about books that must never be opened -- stories told to students in their first year to scare them. Like most of his peers, he paid them no mind, and he let them drift into the nothingness of memory as he completed his studies and started his career as a young alchemist. But the tome the unlucky mage had unearthed in the Tomb of Ixpelmus made all of those stories come back, made Fiske see the grain of truth at the heart of the pearl of hearsay and rumor.

Cover made up of carved bones. Pages of desiccated skin. Ink derived from blood. A smell of death about it. A book of necromancy, no doubt about it, and extremely old, possibly dating back to the darkest period of history, the years after the fall of the ancient Elves, before humans arose from their primitive origins and took their place in the world. The script suggested a language similar to that of the Elves, but ... alien, hard to describe, almost invulnerable to translation, and Fiske had to pick at it for several months in order to unravel enough of its secrets to get it to start making sense.

And then he discovered the untold story of the Pit of Periphetes.

The author described the scope of the disaster to a degree that none of the fragments left behind by the Elves had captured, and it added elements to the story that did not appear in any of the fragments: Stories of madness among the Elves, of the emergence of the first cult dedicated to the black stone in the Pit, of mass sacrifice and the rise of the Undead. The tome agreed that the Elves made a point of avoiding the Pit, but it added that they did so because it had corrupted a great number of them, including the necromancer Ixpelmus, the one imprisoned in the depths of the half-forgotten Tomb.

The tome also mentioned a key point that departed from all common knowledge of the Pit: The black stone might not have been a stone at all. Instead, it might have been ... a being? A consciousness? A purpose? The term did not quite translate, but the author seemed to suggest that the black stone had come down from the sky for a reason, and that it might be amassing the souls of its victims in the Pit for -- the text stopped there.

Fiske reread the tome again and again, hoping to understand more of it. He had stumbled upon a warning, and it quickly became his obsession. He closed up his shop and sold off most of his possessions, using the proceeds to fund his journey to Rostik and maintain his supplies. He doubted that a mere alchemist had the ghost of a chance in the Contest, but ... he had to try. He had to verify the text. He had to see the black stone for himself and try to determine its intentions. As a practicing mage, he had a responsibility to do so. After all, no one else had any knowledge of the writings from the Tomb of Ixpelmus. Regardless of his qualifications, he had a duty to fulfill.

And he continued rereading the tome up through the night before the Contest, keeping himself locked up in his room above the bar in the hopes of finding one more truth.
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-- I Abibde / Samuraiter
Laughing at Game FAQs since 2002.