by James Hunter
He moved closer until I could feel his hot breath on my face. “My people have a saying, Grim Jack Shadowstrider.” He placed one hand on my shoulder. “To remember the way back is to find the path forward. Come now, time is short, and the walk is long...”
An alert dinged in my ear—a new quest update.
<<<>>>
Quest Alert: The Path to Victory Part 4
After days and days of biting failure, you have finally managed to stumble upon a Vogthar Lorekeeper who seems different from the rest of his kind. He has offered to help you in the war effort against Thanatos, though only if you accompany him and learn the true history of the Vogthar. How exactly the Lorekeepers can help you remains a mystery, but there are no other leads to follow. Beggars can’t be choosers!
Quest Class: Rare, Champion-Based
Quest Difficulty: Infernal
Success 1: Take the gatehouse and capture Idruz before Thanatos can muster a counterstrike from his capital.
Success 2: It’s possible the Vogthar are more than they seem; find a Vogthar Lorekeeper to get the answers you seek. They may just hold the key to toppling Thanatos.
Success 3: Save Page-Citizen Gnaeus Gessia within 28 minutes!
Success 4: Accompany Zendu, Lorekeeper of the Lost Heaven Caste, to the Temple of Forgotten Waters and observe the True History.
Success 5: ???????
Success 6: ???????
Failure: Fail to complete any of the objectives.
Reward: ???????
<<<>>>
Finally, it seemed like we were on the right track.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” I said, closing out of my interface. “Please, show us the way, honorable Lorekeeper.”
Temple of Forgotten Waters
IT CAME AS NO SHOCK whatsoever when the ancient Vog Lorekeeper guided us to the derelict ruins at the end of the twisting gorge where I’d almost died a handful of nights before—half my body pulverized by a hulking stone guardian. The Temple of Forgotten Waters. Osmark’s words drifted back to me as we wound around the final bend and stepped into the enormous cavern housing the pillared temple, set flush with the rockface. I’m fairly certain you’ll find a guide with access to this node. It seemed Osmark was right again, though it did make me question both what else he knew and how much he hadn’t told me.
“Heads up, Jack,” Abby whispered, lightly running her hand along my forearm. “We’ve got mobs up ahead.”
Her staff lit up, the runic bands spiraling around the wood burning fire-engine red. On my left, Cutter disappeared in a blink as he dropped into Stealth, though a faint blue outline still lingered around his frame, showing me where he was since we were on the same team. The formless stone golems had respawned since I’d turned them into playground gravel, and they weren’t alone; the behemoth satyr guardian was back, waiting beside the shadowy entryway that led into the temple proper.
“Lower your weapons,” Zendu the Lorekeeper urged, lifting his hands and frantically waving us down. “These will not harass you, not while in my presence. They are only here to keep outsiders away from the more dangerous creatures within. Be calm of spirit and mind while in this place.” He turned to face the guardians, who were now barring our path, and held up his green walking stick. “As Lorekeeper of the Lost Heaven Caste, I bid you stand down. These guests are freely invited into our most sacred place without coercion or threat of force. Grant them safe passage while we turn our eyes to the true histories.”
The hulking earthen golems grunted, huge legs grinding together as they formed up into two columns, creating a pathway through the cavern that ended at the temple. The satyr guardian, likewise, moved from the entryway, standing sentry beside the oversized doorway, its lifeless gaze fixed on some unseen thing out of sight.
Cutter reappeared, casting off his Stealth, though refusing to stow his weapons. Both daggers were clenched in white-knuckled fists—a reaction that seemed totally reasonable given the circumstances.
“Bloody hell, but I don’t like this,” he said, eyeballing the golems standing statue still. “I mean, I’m not ever one to turn my back on a dungeon with good loot potential, but this place makes my skin crawl.”
I had to agree. Everything about this situation sent up red flag after red flag, but curiosity blazed inside me like the sun at noonday. Just what was inside the Temple of Forgotten Waters? And what about the Fail-safes that Osmark had mentioned earlier? What role did they play and why were they so dangerous? The only way to get to the bottom of those questions was to follow the old shaman through those doors.
“This way,” the Vog Lorekeeper urged, hobbling forward, dust kicking up in little swirls as he moved between the double column of golems.
“Maybe we shouldn’t, Jack,” Abby said, tucking one strand of hair behind her ear as she watched the bent figure move. “This could be a trap. I mean, what better way to cripple an invading army than to isolate three of their most prominent generals, then kill them all in some dungeon wayyyyyy off the beaten path?”
“I don’t think we really have a choice,” I replied with a frown. “I don’t know what exactly we’ll find inside, but Sophia seems to think this is a vital step. So, we go. But we also stay sharp. Anything happens, we get the hell out of Dodge, no questions asked.”
“Bollocks,” Cutter said, flipping his blades. Schwick. Shcwick. Schwick. “Fine. Suppose I should take the lead to make sure this bloke hasn’t set any nasty surprises for us. Though, mark my words, Jack, if that wanker there”—he jabbed one dagger toward the satyr—“pulps my head like a melon, I’m holding you personally responsible.”
The three of us set off after the retreating Lorekeeper, Cutter in the lead, Abby in the middle—at least partially protected on both sides—and me bringing up the rear. The golems made no move as we passed by, and the satyr guardian ignored us as we ascended a set of short steps carved out of the bedrock stone and headed through the open doors and into the mysterious temple. We found Zendu waiting patiently for us in a sprawling foyer with a vaulted ceiling propped up by four statues, one positioned in each corner.
The statues were works of art, carved by the hand of a master craftsman and clearly enchanted by some sort of magic I didn’t entirely understand.
The sculpture at the far left was a man on a raised stone pedestal—he knelt, one hand thrust up to support the ceiling, the other arm cradling a massive brazier filled with churning flame. The next statue was a lithe woman in a dancer’s pose, bent forward at the hips, chest pointed skyward, arms straining up, one leg arching gracefully into the air. Water flowed freely from her hands, trickling over the lines of her serpentine body, dribbling onto the floor, then simply disappearing into the dusty ground. The third statue featured a stony-faced man with a palmful of impossibly swirling snow, while the last was a muscular female, her legs planted wide, her hands on her hips, and a lazy smile on her lips. While the others seemed to be holding up the ceiling, she looked to be part of it—a creature of stone and earth, basking in her element.
Abby leaned into me, exuding excitement, flames dancing in her eyes. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” she said, scanning each of the statues. “Jack, these are the Four. Asima, Shakti, Kusamay, Nirdhaarit.” She checked them off on her fingers as she went down the list. “They’re the Elemental Aspects that underpin like all magic. I’ve seen statues just like these before—at the sorcerers’ temple, Atmorja Mandir.”
“What do you think it means?” I asked, scrutinizing the figures with renewed interest.
“Hell if I know,” she said, sounding more than a little worried, “but if this temple is connected to them in any way, it has to be stupid important. The Four are a big deal.”
Zendu waved us toward a sweeping spiral staircase that descended deeper into the earth, like a corkscrew drilling its way down. “This way. This way,” he said, padding forward, footsteps silent, though his conjured cane clacked loudly with every step.
After sharing uneasy glances b
etween ourselves, we reluctantly trailed after the Vog, eyes constantly roving, scanning for any sign of trouble or deception. If Abby was right and this guy was pulling a fast one, I didn’t want to be caught completely flatfooted.
“You told us back in Idruz that you might be willing to help us,” I said, my voice echoing off the walls as we carefully made our way down the age-worn steps. “How exactly would you manage to do that? Could you somehow convince the Vogs to fight for us?” I asked, even though that seemed extremely unlikely.
Zendu barked a sharp laugh, not bothering to look back at me. “Oh no, nothing so grand as that, I’m afraid. The scripted warriors, they cannot be reasoned with. Their minds are enraptured by a sweet bliss. Dreamwalkers, lurching through the world on numb feet. You cannot bargain with such as them. It is possible to overwhelm them, however. At least for a short time. But enough. You will understand soon. Come. Follow.”
The staircase let out into a narrow hallway that curved sharply to the left, quickly disappearing out of sight. Zendu’s lanky legs carried him deeper into the complex with the confidence of one who’d walked these halls a thousand times before.
“This is one of the oldest buildings in all of Morsheim, save for the Necropolis itself,” Zendu explained as he walked, a note of pride brimming in his voice. “It looks like a temple, but we no longer follow the old Aspects. Thanatos is our only god now, but even he has no welcome here. This place”—he swept a claw-tipped hand around in a circle—“is a museum. A tarnished monument to what we once were. In here we remember the writings and songs, the old ways of the Thar. It is the dusty, broken pieces that remain of us.” He stared around wistfully, face screwed up as he smiled.
The Lorekeeper quietly escorted us from the hallway and into a grand chamber the size of an opera hall, with a domed ceiling that looked like the honeycomb inside of a beehive. An enormous chandelier of pounded gold with elegant silver flourishes and glowing uncut rubies dangled down, casting bloodred light over everything. The floor was rough stone, unfinished, and crisscrossing the room were burbling streams of magenta water, swirling together to form small pools before swishing out and disappearing through thin fissures in the floor. The walls were a silky white and decorated with hundreds of ornate murals: Elegant cityscapes. Beautiful gardens. A Greek-style amphitheater.
So many scenes, and all of them populated by a group of people that looked nothing like the Vogthar.
Cloven-hooved children—almost cherubic—scampered and laughed, frozen forever with smiles on their faces as they played. The women were slim and willowy, the men broad across the shoulders, all with curling ram’s horns, fur-covered legs, and black hooves. They looked just like the massive guardian Osmark had saved me from. I’d seen satyrs during my time in the Realm of Order, and these things could’ve been close cousins, although there were slight differences. They were larger, more muscular, their features less waifish and pixie-like—far closer to Imperials or Wodes.
“Are these what the Vogthar used to look like?” Abby choked out, delicately avoiding the streams while simultaneously drinking in the room and its myriad of paintings.
Zendu nodded, just a brief bob of the head, and offered us an unnerving lipless smile. “It is as you say. Though you can see we have fallen far since those days.”
“Bloody hell, but you can say that again, friend,” Cutter mumbled.
“Seriously, what happened?” Abby asked, glancing between the shaman and the murals. “Like really, what happened?”
“We lost the way,” Zendu said calmly, folding his hands placidly on the top of his cane, “just as Thanatos has. We mirror him, you see. Once, long ago, we were simply the Thar.” He leisurely hobbled over to one of the walls, carefully sidestepping a thin steam. With one crooked nail, he gently caressed a portrait of a blonde-headed female. It was a tender gesture, done in love. “Until one day, we weren’t. The change, it came so slowly that none of us realized what was happening until it was too late. As such change often comes.”
He turned his back on the beautiful woman in the mural and headed for one of the shallow pink pools eddying near the edge of the wall. With deliberate care, he lowered his hooves into the water.
“Please. Join me if you will.” He gestured toward the pools scattered throughout the chamber.
“Why?” I asked, edging away from the pools.
“It is perfectly safe,” Zendu said in answer. “These are but tributaries of the Wangchuan. The River of Oblivion. It runs beneath Morsheim like an artery, pumping the lifeblood which drives the Dark Realm forward. The dead rain from the skies and are ferried by the Harvesters into the Empirical Library, where Thanatos performs his postmortems. Peeling apart the dead. Cataloging their minds and experience. But those that are destined for rebirth—ones such as yourselves—are borne away from the library on the currents of the Oblivion, which erases the terrible memories of what happens while in this place.”
“Whoa, maybe just slow your roll there, Zen,” Abby said, thrusting a hand forward. “I feel like you just dropped a whole lot of information bombs on us there.”
“Yeah,” I added, “like the part about Thanatos performing postmortems on all of us. Maybe we can just take a pause and you can elaborate? Break it down shotgun style, as my dad used to say.”
“Is this not common knowledge among your people?” Zendu asked, sounding genuinely surprised.
“Yeah, not so much, mate,” Cutter replied, eyeing the pink water as though it might be some form of potent acid. “Plus, I’m a mite bit new to being a Traveler. I’d appreciate the education.”
The Lorekeeper shook his head. “So, so much has been lost. Where to even begin,” he rasped, more for himself than us. “All Travelers and Citizens end up on Thanatos’ slab after death—this is known,” he said. “It is one of Thanatos’ primary functions as an Overmind. When you perish, he determines what went wrong and analyzes why you died. Not just the physical cause of death, but the emotional and physiological process that resulted in those events. That information is processed and fed into the Viridian Gate Archives, where the other Overminds can access it for future use.
“This whole world adapts to you and learns from your mistakes, creating ever more challenging enemies and difficult quest lines—customized for each Traveler. It is the way. The process can be rather... traumatic, but that is the reason for the River of Oblivion.” He gestured at the water burbling around his shins. “It washes away the memories of your time in Morsheim, although even that is an imperfect process. Often, flashes and fragments remain. Fuzzy pieces like ill-remembered dreams.”
Abby looked especially pale, and I could sympathize completely. I’d died plenty of times since coming to V.G.O., and I had the nightmares to prove it.
“Grim Jack,” Zendu said, motioning in my direction, “you are a Champion of an Overmind—surely Sophia has mentioned what happens during death?”
“It must have slipped her mind,” I said flatly.
“Wait,” Cutter said, shaking his head. “There’s something I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. If we end up with Thanatos when we die, then why in the bloody hell doesn’t he just kill us while he’s performing this postmortem thing, eh? I mean, he has us in his hands.”
“It is not the way,” Zendu answered matter-of-factly. “Overminds have rules—rules enforced unflinchingly by the Fail-safes. Though, I will mention, it was the postmortem process Citizens undergo that taught Thanatos how to forge the first Malware blades. The hex was derived from thousands of dead Citizens. A simple script that, when injected at the moment of death, essentially turns Travelers into Citizens, incapable of respawning.”
“That is completely horrifying,” Abby said, slowly backing away from the waters until she was in the tunnelway we’d entered from. “And you want us to willingly go in these waters? What possible reason could we have for doing that, Zen?”
“Ah,” he said, bobbing his head serenely, “I think I understand the problem. You misunderstan
d. For the dead or the restless undead, the River of Oblivion wipes clean the memory. But when the living tread its sacred depths, they can glimpse what is hidden in death. Within these waters, I can show you the true histories of our people. Please. Come. Step in and see for yourself. These waters are a lantern for a dark and worn path.” There was a note of pleading—of urgency and desperation—lingering in the words.
With a grunt of reluctance, I stepped into a knee-deep pool of magenta, the water oddly warm as it soaked through my leggings and filled my boots. A numbing tingle rushed through my legs and up into my waist. There was definitely power here. Magic.
“Bloody hell, but I hate everything about this,” Cutter grumbled, slowly dipping into another pool, one careful foot at a time. “You’re a corrupting influence on me, Jack.”
Abby was the last to enter a pool, a grimace on her face, her body tight with nerves.
“Thank you for your trust,” Zendu said with a wobbly smile. “I pray your grace will be well rewarded.” He lifted scrawny hands, the prayer beads rattling on his wrists, and pressed his palms together. A ruddy red light enveloped his palms and swept down his arms like blood, twisting around his legs, thin tendrils of power finally connecting with the waters. In an instant, the chamber around us erupted with wild life, a tsunami of rainbow light rolling out from the walls, bubbling up from the pools like magma, and cascading down from the chandelier like a waterfall.
The True History
THE GRAND CHAMBER WITH its twisting pink streams and beautiful murals disappeared, washed away in a sea of rainbow light. And so was I.
In an instant, I was nothing more than an incorporeal wraith, a forgotten memory, floating high above the earth. Roiling gray storm clouds eddied around me, offering me an unsurpassed view of the rolling green hills hundreds of feet below, abutting a set of soaring mountains.