The ink is still wet on the page, and my hands tremble—not from the chill of the Aethelgard wind, but from the weight of what I carry in my satchel. It has been three weeks since I left the relative safety of Highwatch. The city feels like a lifetime ago, a dream of stone and bureaucracy that I have gladly traded for mud, blood, and the raw, unfiltered magic of the wilds. Today, however, the wilds decided to stop whispering and started screaming.
I woke beneath the boughs of a Weeping Ironwood, the canopy so thick that the morning light filtered down in thin, sickly veins of gray. The air here in the southern reaches tastes of copper and ancient dust. I broke my fast with a strip of salted venison and the last of my water, staring at the map I stole—no, borrowed indefinitely—from the Imperial archives. It showed a ruin marked simply as “The Veiled Sanctum,” a place the cartographers labeled with a red skull, the universal sign for ‘here be death and madness.’ Naturally, that was precisely where I needed to go.
The Descent into the Hollow
The terrain shifted as I moved further inland. The rolling hills of the borderlands gave way to jagged ravines, the earth split open as if by some colossal claw. This is the Hollow, a scar on the landscape where the magic of Aethelgard grows thin and cold. It is said that the veil between our world and the Fade is gossamer-thin here. I could feel it. The hair on my arms stood on end, and the ambient hum of nature—the birds, the insects, the rustle of small creatures—faded into a suffocating silence.
I had to pick my way carefully. One wrong step on the crumbling shale meant a fall into the darkness below. I moved like a ghost, my boots making barely a sound against the rock. This is the way of Hermes; to be unseen is to survive. I am no knight in shining armor, clanking through the dungeons to announce his presence. I am the shadow that slips through the cracks.
As I descended, the temperature plummeted. My breath misted in the air, swirling into shapes that mocked me before dissipating. I saw faces in the mist—memories of those I failed, those I left behind. I pushed them down. There is no time for regret in the line of work I do, only focus.
The Guardian of the Gate
I found the entrance to the Sanctum half-buried in a landslide of obsidian boulders. It was a gaping maw, ringed with runes that pulsed with a faint, violet luminescence. I should have been afraid. A sensible man would have turned back, but a sensible man would not be hunting for the lost secrets of the Arcanum.
I stepped across the threshold, and the air pressure changed instantly. My ears popped. Then, I heard it—the scrape of stone against stone.
From the shadows of the ceiling, it dropped. A Gargoyle, but not like the mindless constructs that guard the noble estates of Highwatch. This thing was fluid, its granite skin shifting like liquid mercury. It had no eyes, just a smooth, concave depression where a face should have been.
I didn’t draw my sword immediately. I cast Haze, a simple cantrip that obscures the visual spectrum. The creature paused, its head cocking to the side, sniffing the air. I moved to the left, circling wide. It lunged at where I had been a fraction of a second before, shattering the stone floor. I needed to hit it with something harder than smoke.
I whispered the incantation for Force Bolt, channeling the mana through my fingertips. The air crackled. I released the energy, aiming not for the torso, but for the support pillar directly above it. The impact was deafening. Tons of rock came down, burying the beast in a cloud of dust. It wouldn’t kill it—gargoyles are stubborn that way—but it would buy me time. I scrambled over the rubble, heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
The Heart of the Sanctum
Deep within the ruin, past the trapped corridors and the halls filled with the statues of forgotten kings, I found it. The chamber was circular, lined with mirrors that reflected not my image, but different versions of myself. In one, I was rotting. In another, I was burning. In the third, I sat upon a throne of skulls. I looked away from them, fixing my gaze on the pedestal in the center of the room.
There it rested. The Shard of Aethel.
Legends say it is a sliver of the moon that fell when the world was young, a conduit of pure, unadulterated starlight. It pulsed with a rhythm that matched my own heartbeat. I approached it slowly, my hands wrapped in cloth to keep my skin from touching the surface directly. Magic this volatile doesn’t just burn; it rewrites.
As I lifted the shard, the mirrors shattered. The sound was like a thousand screams tearing through the air. I felt a rush of information flood my mind—histories of wars that never happened, languages that no tongue has spoken in millennia, and the location of the other shards. I fell to my knees, gasping, the weight of the knowledge crushing my consciousness. I saw the Empire’s true face, rotting from the inside out. I saw the rebellion, not as a ragtag group of freedom fighters, but as a harbinger of something far worse.
It took everything I had to shove the shard into my lead-lined satchel and cut the connection. The visions stopped, but the headache remained, a sharp throb behind my left eye that promised to stay for a week.
The Long Road Back
I am writing this by the light of a small fire, hidden in a copse of trees miles away from the Sanctum. I don’t know if the Gargoyle dug itself out, and I don’t care. I have the prize. But the victory feels hollow.
For years, I have told myself that I am doing this for the coin, or for the thrill of the chase. I told myself I don’t care about the politics of the Empire or the plight of the common folk. But holding that shard… I realized that I am the only one who knows what this truly means. If I hand this over to my employer, the Archmage Varian, he will use it to crack the world open. He thinks it’s a battery. He doesn’t know it’s a key.
So, I have a choice. Do I fulfill the contract, deliver the shard, and disappear into the night with a purse full of gold? Or do I go rogue? Do I become the very thing the Archmage fears: a loose variable in his grand equation?
I look at the map again. Highwatch is to the North. But the coordinates I saw in my vision—where the next shard lies—are to the East, in the Sunken Basin. That is a place of nightmares, a swamp where the dead don’t stay dead.
I am Hermes. I am a thief, a scavenger, a survivor. But tonight, looking at the violet glow leaking through the seams of my bag, I feel like something else. I feel like a man standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at the drop, and realizing that the only way forward is to jump.
The fire is dying. I need to keep moving. If Varian realizes I have the artifact and I’m not heading back, he will send the Huntmasters. And they are not as easy to fool as gargoyles.
Tomorrow, I head East. Let the chips fall where they may.
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