The Lindenhurst Pages

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

Short informative solo. Set a few weeks after Unleashed

It had been my first time back in this graveyard since the final encounter with Arius Mephisto, and the place was still churned up pretty badly.

The carnage left by our magic, and Arius's portals, had only just started being cleared up. I could almost picture the astonished expressions of the groundsmen of the cemetary as they wandered back into work, the whole place littered with craters, potholes, debris and charring that wasn't present the night before. I imagine being greeted with this scene would have driven deep concern as to what happened here into the mind of any rational person, and would certainly have some people looking over their shoulders.

Nonetheless, I had come back for one reason and one reason alone. Arius had been looking for something here, and I had never been fully satisfied that he had found it before being wiped out. I was not comfortable at all with leaving loose ends with regards to him or his machinations, perhaps out of fear that doing so would inevitably come back to bite us. I had to assume the worst, that whatever it was he was searching for could create more problems for us. I had seen enough of Arius and his sorcery to be justified in being paranoid of ruling anything out, even some sort of inexplicable ressurection or some post-mortem vengeance.

Nothing was impossible. That's what I had to assume.

So, here I was, standing now at the grave Arius had been looking at when we found him.

It had taken me a little while to find again amongst the chaos, but now I knelt in the sodden grass before it. My knees sank into the mud slightly, and as the morning wind whipped my face I tried to read the faded text on the headstone, shielding my eyes from the sun with a scarred palm. There was no ink within the worn engraving, which was set on white stone. This, along with the glare of the Coronian sun, made it much harder to read, but there was at least a little of the original inscription left. At least, the bits that had survived the erosion caused by weather and time.

G-I-…-E-…-N X-E-…-…-E-S

Annuit Coeptis.

Beneath “Annuit Coeptis” were a couple of rows of unrecognisable symbols, in a language that meant nothing at all to me. If I were going to guess, I would say that the script resembled something eastern, but right now it wasn’t translatable. That would come later. For now, my task was to find whatever it was that Arius had been scouring this cemetery for before Storm Veritas destroyed him.

I stood up, and grabbed the shovel that was impaled in the soft turf next to me. A quick glance left and right reassured me that I was alone in the graveyard, and not being watched, so I thrusted the shovelhead into the mud below and stomped my foot onto the flat of it. The curved end penetrated the earth and, within a few moments, I had ripped through the grassroots and started to churn through clean, but compact, mud. It was clear that this grave had been dug deeply. A few minutes more of hard toil produced no results, and no impact with any wooden or stone sarcophagus.

The unearthed mud continued to pile up behind me, and the moist dirt underfoot was starting to get slippy the further down I dug. I had to be a bit more careful as the shovel started to reach layers of clay like substance, and so chiselled out bits from the corners in a more precise way. Suddenly, after what seemed like an age, there was a clang and a harsh vibration that reverberated up my sweating arms. I retracted the shovel, and gently started to tease the earth with the shovelhead’s edge to feel out the shape and location of the solid mass below.

Scraping the head back and forth across the object, I scoured the mud and clay from what appeared to be the black granite lid of a box. It wasn’t a large box, though; certainly not one large enough to contain a full body in state. I knelt down, using my white coat to wipe off dirt from an obscured brass plate.

More gibberish, although the etching was clearer than that on the headstone. On more careful examination, I recognised a sentence in clear tradespeak below, in smaller typeface.

THE KINGS OF TOMORROW BOUND BY FORTUNE AND GLORY FOR THE WATCHERS OF YESTERDAY

The message meant nothing by itself, but a quick count of the letters confirmed that the sentence seemed to be a character for character translation of the gibberish above it. I realised that I might be able to use the sentence as a cipher to reverse-engineer a translation of the symbols on the headstone. It might be an important clue, or it might be a complete waste of time, but with nothing to write on and it being only a matter of time before someone wandered into the graveyard to pay respects to a loved one, it was irrelevant. I’d have to get the box out of the grave and back to the safehouse at Tylmerande sooner rather than later to do this, and come back later to translate the headstone.

Carefully, I began to lift the box from the ground. I expected it to be far heavier than it actually was, but easily lifted it out of the grave and onto the grass verge as its contents rattled around inside. On further inspection, there appeared to be no obvious way to open it. Another quick glance left and right confirmed I was still alone, and so I used the opportunity to wrap the box in my stained coat, before lifting it onto the waiting Slepnir.

“Sorry for making you wait,” I said, patting his side reassuringly, “We’ll get you fed and watered soon, I promise. Then we’ll find out what’s in this little item.”

It took a few minutes to shovel the dirt back into the grave. There was now no disguising that it had been disturbed, but the likelihood was that the only person interested in the contents was no longer on this mortal coil anyway.

With this, I climbed atop Slepnir’s magnificent white form, slid my boots into the stirrups and headed for my house in Tylmerande.

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

“A, B, C, D…”

The sudden flicker of the candle’s flame at the corner of my desk caused me to flinch in panic, the pencil nib stopping precisely on its point as I willed the light to live on just a little longer. There was a terrible draught in my Tylmerande study, a by-product of living so close to the sea, and I had run out of candles. My final one was nearly down to its stub, with nothing left in the house to relight it. A ridiculous problem to have, admittedly, but a problem nonetheless. I needed to make my last one survive the night, so that I could finish the translation of the script and get back to the grave before the groundsmen arrived in the morning. So, with each small gust that disturbed the shutters and threatened to extinguish what little illumination I had, I held my breath and hoped the gods would be kind.

The nib touched back onto the parchment, and my keen eye aligned the next letters with their appropriate symbols.

“F through to I present. J, missing. K through to O present, P missing.”

I was making good progress, having translated nearly half of the known alphabet as the ocean’s breath hurled another icy blast through my house. I cringed as the candle swayed, and the flame desperately clung onto life.

“Q missing. R through to U. V Missing. W…there it is. X is missing. Y, missing. Z – no, wait. Y is…”

Finally, the divine spirits of the sea cast judgment down upon my work, conjuring up a gust that rattled the frames on my window and snuffed the last motes of life from my only remaining candle. With the wick burned down to its stub, whatever I had down would have to do.

I took the parchment to the window facing the sea, and held it up to the moon’s light, where I could just make out the pencil’s marks in the luminescence. if I'd cracked this, then the translated sentence should match that of the one underneath it on the brass plate.

ADRETSE FO SREHCTAW EHT ROF ROLG DNA ENUTROF B DNUOB WORROMOT FO SGNIK EHT

I heaved a sigh of frustration and rubbed my eyes as I attempted to make sense of the nonsense in front of me. Fuck. It probably wasn’t a total waste of time in the long run, but the symbols obviously weren’t a like-for-like translation of the tradespeak sentence below it on the brass plate, meaning using the sentence as a cipher was a dead end at the moment and would need more thought, and more time. As I perched on the edge of the chair near the window, I held the paper pinched between finger and thumb and thought about the possibilities. It had to be a separate sentence, perhaps part of a larger code.

It was then my mind wandered off-task. How could I open the box, which was sat on the corner of the desk? It was pointless trying to do it now, though, I reasoned. With no light available, and tiredness creeping in, it would have to be a problem for the morning, along with re-inspecting the translation. It would mean that there would be no way of getting back to the headstone early and translating the text before someone noticed the mess I had made.

It was then, as the exhausted and frustrated reflection in the window stared back at me, I noticed the words on the reflected image of the parchment staring back at me too.

THE KINGS OF TOMORROW BOUND B FORTUNE AND GLOR FOR THE WATCHERS OF ESTERDA

No wonder I couldn't make any sense of it. The gibberish must need to be read left-to-right, not the traditional right-to-left of tradespeak.

Who the hell writes in mirrored script? was the last thought that passed through my mind as my head hit the pillow, and I slipped into the welcoming arms of the abyss.

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

True to form, the trusty Coronian weather had turned on me.

As my golden eyes stared out over Tylmerande, across the quaint coastal buildings and the dusty port roads, I frowned as marbles of rain began to hammer down from the sky indiscriminately. I could almost feel the force of the droplets as they drummed a staccato beat against my clean window pane, rattling it like the skin of snare. Before long, the cumbersome clouds had choked much of the dawn light from the area and their cargo had churned up the dry dirt of the streets into a thin brown soup, which swilled around Slepnir’s hooves and annoyed the stallion to no end. To make the point, he bucked a little and shook his mane, staring daggers at me through the window.

I could handle a bit of water. I’d fought on battlefields in the freezing cold and the blazing hot, I’d camped on mountains infested with fire breathing dragons, and I’d pitched a tent in the red forests of Lindqualm. My problem was not the weather.

It was light.

My window was closing to return to the cemetery, translate the remaining inscription on the gravestone and leave, all undetected. I had to do this before the cemetery staff turned in for the morning, just after dawn, because no-one could know about this. I had no more candles, and no magic I could use to even attempt to illuminate the headstone. I did find a little dark humour in the irony, really. For all the good I was as an instrument of war, I was absolutely fucking useless in peacetime.

Fuck it. I didn’t have time to be wondering what to do. I needed to get there, and get to work.

I furiously finished throwing some personal items into a hide satchel, and carefully wrapped my translations from the night before inside another piece of stitched leather. I hoped to the gods that it would give my script adequate protection from the rain. I hoped that I would have enough light to be able to translate the symbols when I got there. With everything tucked away in its proper place, I grabbed my white overcoat from the brass peg, opened and then locked the door behind me, and faced the moored Slepnir.

“It's not going to be a good day today.” I said as I filled out his saddlebags, trying to stow as much of my gear as possible so that my body would offer some shelter to the rain. “Mostly because your master is a paranoid idiot who thinks the bogeyman's going to somehow get him from beyond the grave.”

Slepnir looked up, almost in concurrence. I couldn’t blame him.

“You’re not supposed to agree, asshole.” I patted him on the side of his chalk white neck, and set off into a canter. As the beast’s mighty hooves stomped and powered through the swill of the surface water, I looked beyond the edge of the village to see the white walled perimeter of the graveyard on the very fringes of my sight.

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

As we reached the familiar crest of the hill overlooking both Tylmerande and the cemetery, I slowed Slepnir’s galloping to a canter with the reins, and then gently teased the stallion to a full stop. As he snorted and reared a little in the rain, my eyes tried to focus through the murky dawn and swerved to the left of the town’s perimeter, towards the large wooded area that had been boxed off with that white concrete wall. You could never tell what the squared area contained beyond the trees that shrouded the rest of the place, but I could sense nothing living down there, at least for now.

I nodded, indicating forwards with the reins once more, and Slepnir obliged us with a gallop across the rolling field. The last time we had come here, the weather was dry and the ride felt like gliding across grass. This time, however, the field was sodden and bog-like, and each powerful stride reverberated up my back like a flogging stroke. The cold wind hit my face, stinging it, as I let my mind wander for a moment.

One thought occurred more than most. What if I’ve been wasting my time, chasing answers to a riddle that only existed in my head? The question made me realise the scale of the damage Arius had done to my once secure little world. I’d seen him defy physics and logic in ways no mortal should have been able to. I’d watched him hurl Storm Veritas us to the farthest corners of Althanas for the sheer laugh of it, before he sent me to Alerar. Then, at the end, we barely managed to put him down. Because of all of this and more, I have to second guess everything that involves him, forcing myself to look at every small thing to the point of forensic obsession. The box in my room, for example, could have been a nothing more than a coffin for a family pet, or a case containing family heirloom belonging to someone absolutely unrelated to any of this. But to me, the moment he started looking for it (if he indeed was looking for it), was the moment it had to become the absolute focal point of my existence. For Arius to concern himself with an item like this above all else, to put himself in the open for even a minute more than usual, meant that it had to be important to him.

That was bad for everyone.

I wanted to be absolutely sure he was never coming back, and that nothing left behind after his death had any way of harming anyone I cared about. The only way to do that was to find out what this box contained, what all these inscriptions meant, what everything lead to and ultimately how it all fit together in the big picture.

I finally turned Slepnir’s nose away from the approaching treeline, finding our familiar spot for him to be berthed, and dismounted. From there, it was all on foot, past the iron gate (still contorted horribly from Storm’s electromagnetic powers) and into the woodland before me. A brief walk down the stone path that carved this greenery in two would have me at the grave again shortly.

My mind flashed back to the day we killed him, again, as I re-traced my steps. I remember my eyes sweeping the path, beyond the final row of trees to the tombstones. I remember across those neat lines of headstones, Arius was there, alone, walking about one hundred feet away. He paced in a very deliberate manner, weaving between the spent candles, generic floral tributes and portraits of loved ones. As I think about it now, the pre-occupation takes me aback for a man so obsessed with caution. At the time, it didn’t matter whether he was searching for something or not, but now it did. The more I thought about his behaviour, the more I was convinced I wasn’t just making this up in my head.

Eventually, I snapped back to the cold, damp reality of today. I was at the lip of the grave of interest now, again, able to just make out where I had disturbed the fresh earth the day before.

It was time to get to work.

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

Or not.

No matter how long I stared at the parchment, or from which direction I decoded the symbols, I could not get a single character on the headstone to match anything in my homemade cipher.

For a moment, I sat and pushed my back up against the headstone, bending my knees toward me and clasping my hands around them. There were a couple of easy “go-to” explanations, and the first one that came into my head was the most simple, and probably the most likely – the unknown characters were numbers. Of course, I had no tradespeak translation for numbers, as I only had the message on the brass plate of the box to use as my starting point, all of which were letters. It was then I started to realise that the importance of the headstone was probably overstated, but in any case I had no way to be sure. Graves share a common feature in that they have dates of birth, and dates of death inscribed on them. It would obviously be a point of contention that there was no body buried here, so the numbers on the headstone could have been a reference to something else, but there was no way of translating them anyway. For now, this was a dead end.

I quickly got back to my feet, copied the symbols from the white headstone onto the back of my parchment with a pencil in case I needed to revisit this later, and started to head back to where I had moored Slepnir. All I had to go off was the apparently unopenable box that was sat on my desk in Tylmerande. With no other clue or lead, I’d have to start with that.

***

I walked through my front door, throwing my coat on the wall mounted peg in the corridor and dragging my satchel behind me. A quick walk took me through the hall and into my study and, as I entered, a little glimmer caught my eye. The brass plate atop the box had caught the morning light that had broken through the cloud’s chokehold on Tylmerande. With investigative curiosity once again flowing through my veins, I sat down at the table and placed my hands around it, the little object wrestling free from the paper wreckage around it and floating harmlessly up into my eyeline.

“What are you?” I asked, as my eyes soaked in the details of the container. It was a magnificent artifact - fashioned from some sort of black polished obsidian-like material, decorated with notes of gold leaf and perfectly rugged and straight edged in its construction. Narrow-eyed, I looked at every single side, edge, joint and bevel that comprised the box to find some sort of method of opening it. There wasn’t a catch, a lock, a seal or anything that indicated that the box was actually intended to be opened, yet the rattling of the contents did enough talking.

The inclination was to simply break the box open. The risk that I would damage the contents was high, especially with my magic being more lethal than ever these days, and this would render my efforts to find out what was going on utterly meaningless. But, it was a risk that had to be taken. Storm had said this once before, and he was right; “there was but one task in the world, and that was the killing of this great evil”. While Arius was undeniably dead, there was no way to verify for sure that his machinations weren’t, and those included items and artifacts of interest to him before his death. Unless, of course, I saw for myself.

Another thing Storm had been right about was that “strong and stupid was a strategy which had proven terrible.” But today, he wasn’t here to argue the toss with me, and I probably wouldn’t have listened to him anyway.

So, I took the box into my dining area, and placed it onto the stone floor. There wasn’t really a policy for using destructive magic inside the house to open artifacts of great importance, but I figured that the room was wide, tall and well-built enough to withstand a small, concentrated dark matter charge. If it wasn’t, then I guess it was time to refurbish the kitchen, or move house.

I moved the dining room table to the far end of the room, and stowed away any loose crockery on the side. Distancing myself about five feet away, I raised a finger and allowed a very small, very focused amount of dark matter to flow to the tip. It loosed at the speed of a bullet with a thunderous crack, smashing into the box with such force that the sarcophagus exploded into a cloud of shrapnel. Jagged fragments of obsidian scattered and buried themselves into the plasterwork, the kitchen cupboards, the table and the ceiling.

Fuck, I’ve overdone it. was my first thought, but when the smoke cleared I could clearly see a couple of objects piled up in the centre of the cracked stone floor amongst a chalk like substance. I knelt, wiping away the residue, and picked up three egg-like objects.

The first and second eggs were about the size of a chicken egg, one made from what looked like platinum and the other one yellow gold. They were smooth, and had a small but varying inscription on each, again in the ancient typeface. I recognised some of the letters already, but would need to translate the rest of them in the study. The third egg was larger than the other two, made from what looked like polished bronze, and was split in the middle. A quick twist revealed an inner compartment that contained a fragile, folded note. Once again, all of the text was in the ancient script.

This was more like it. Without really giving another thought to the destruction in the kitchen, I went back to my study and set the objects and note down, and began translating on a fresh piece of parchment.

Platinum Egg – “The Eye of ...rovidence”

Golden Egg – “Reflected Diamond”

C.D,

I trust this letter finds you well, brother, and must offer my a..ologies for the long period of reticence on my ...art. Matters of secrecy have ke..t me in thrall of late. The ...ower of the knowledge I am obliged to kee... and ...reser...e weighs hea...ily on my conscience. I fear that, soon, those in my circle whom I have entrusted with my life and darkest thoughts will start to succumb. The shadows linger, and now the ...illars of the faith are far from the beacons they were intended to be, consumed by greed. I am concerned that my life may end unnaturally.

The remaining clans are ...uarrelling, and the watchers are gone. No one other than me is left to guard our sanctuary, and I fear that one has betrayed us all. I am certain that Caligstro’s ...yramid is his goal. My friend, I have no moral right to ask this of you, but for the sake of all I must. There is no other whom I would ...lace the trust of our eternal duty. In the case that my sus...icions reveal themselves to be true, I im...lore of you to shoulder my burden. The ...ower of Caligstro’s ...yramid must never be the tool of a sole bearer. Yet, its e...istence must not fall out of knowledge. It is a dire legacy I beg of you to carry, but for the sake of our ...rogeny, it must be done.

There are few alive now who know of its location. The s...oken word will die with time, so only there, at the Lindenhurst Library, will you find what you are looking for. It is the core of our society.

I ...ray for your safety, and that “he” does not succeed where many others failed.

Eresu Kunukkum Atu. Far away lands, in the future, empower our flesh.

Yours always,
G...

Without a word, I pulled the note back towards me, staring into the abyss as I tried to absorb its message. If I'd really been paying attention, I probably could have filled in the missing letters "P" and "Q" in my cipher, but my mind wandered to fresh questions.

What was Caligstro's Pyramid, and was this what Arius was looking for? Who was "G?" Who was the "betrayer" in the note? When was all this written? What and where was Lidenhurst Library?

As I sat back in my chair and chewed the end of my pencil, I realised that I was in danger of being overwhelmed by all of this new information. I had gone from no leads to about five in a few minutes, after all. But now was the time to start digesting and focusing on individual topics of interest. So, I cleared my mind, and slid yet another sheet of clean parchment from across my desk to make notes.

Lindenhurst Library - What and where? Surveyance maps of Corone? Check Radasanth.
Caligstro's Pyramid - Never heard of. Information in Lindenhurst? Sounds dangerous.
Platinum and Gold Eggs - Eye of Providence, Reflected Diamond. Meaning? Purpose?
Dating of letter? Find professional / historian.
Who is the betrayer? Associate of Arius, ect?
Who is "G?" and "C.D."? - no further information.
Check any of this with Storm?
Clean Kitchen.

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

Rewards:

Shinsou Vaan Osiris receives 55 GP and 910 EXP