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Sep 21, 2015 - 10:28 PM |
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Recovered Journals of Esme von Brandt: The Long March |
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Compiler's note: In the Year of the Boundary 175, Esme von Brandt and a small army of mercenaries left the protected confines of the Core to explore the inhospitable regions beyond the Boundary.
Von Brandt expended the entirety of her immense personal fortune on this venture, leaving her penniless when she returned 10 years later to a city even more xenophobic than the one she had left. Her remaining years were spent in poverty and disrepute, and her extensive journals of the expedition were banned from publication (and until recently thought destroyed). As a further insult, von Brandt was posthumously branded a murderer as an official explanation for the massive casualties under her banner (of the 544 personnel who left the Core with von Brandt, less than a dozen returned with her; most, lacking even the flimsy protection of her tarnished family name, fared even worse than she upon their homecoming).
In the wake of these events, the Boundary was further tightened and no exploration attempt of any comparable scale has been made in the two centuries since. Parties of 5 or 10 slip through from time to time and neither they nor any news return to the Core. They are all presumed dead.
These recovered journals are not distributed with the intention of encouraging anyone else to venture beyond the Boundary. The Council assures us that the Boundary is for our own protection, and von Brandt's findings assure us that this protection is sorely needed. Our only intention is to inform, for the Boundary cannot stand forever if we remain ignorant of the forces that hope to breach it.
The book you are holding is illegal to possess. Keep it hidden. Tell no one what you have read; tell no one where you found it. There will come a time when the people of the Core are in a position to demand the truth, but that time is not now.
Dusk season, 8th week 8th day (estimated)
Precious little to report these last weeks; there may be wonders out here but the unbroken darkness and bitter cold hide them all. Enough thermal goggles to outfit 1 in 10 of us and most of our scouts are blindsighted; the rest must remain on their tethers and stumble blindly forward. A handful have coped poorly with the effective loss of their sight, cutting their ropes and fleeing in random directions. Without fire magi, even the ones who correctly guessed at a southeast heading froze solid before they were out of earshot.
Even the goggles don't help much, honestly. The cold is so deep and so uniform this far north that even through the goggles everything is the same unbroken shade of pale blue. The mechanists are in consultation with the wind shamans to try to cobble together a sonar-based approach.
Last.... night? Whatever night means out here, but the chrono said 23 hours. Been warned that the cold might actually be slowing down the chronos, though. Spotted something interesting on the horizon, still pale blue but perhaps a few degrees warmer. Huge. As we approached we realized it was moving, albeit very slowly. We stopped the procession; anything that big that can survive out here is nothing to engage with unprepared.
When the scouts came back, we decided not to engage with it at all. Corpses, thousands of them. Maybe tens of thousands. Walking, walking so slowly that their tracks vanish under the new snow before they take another step. Men, women, bears and horses, donkeys and oxen. Every kind of beast that can walk and pull a rope. And pull they do, each of them tied to the corpse on their right, on the left, and the corpse behind. And each carrying another length of rope for any new friends they might find. They found one of the scouts after some thin ice dropped him into a gully and shattered his legs. The rest of the party tried to reach him, but he bled out. The scouts returned but I ordered them to keep watching. We had to know. Hours later, the marchers finally closed the few yards of distance to the edge of the gully. The rope dangled in front of him; his dead hand clutched it and he was pulled into the ranks. He walks a little clumsily, but I don't think it bothers him.
We're going to try to go around them, but the march extends for miles in every direction. Already the rumors are spreading that there is no "around"; that the marchers block all further northwest progress and we'll need to turn back. The undead are always bad for morale.
Dusk season, 9th week 3rd day (estimated)
Turns out the rumors were true, more or less. Everything in front of us is either a narrow pass choked with the march, or a cliff face of sheer ice. The marchers don't pour heedlessly over the cliffs, which suggests more self-preservation than the undead usually muster. Either we'll turn back or we'll go straight up the cliffs; neither is ideal.
Addendum Du.s 9 3
Up the cliffs it is; the sonar project will have to wait as each and every one of us queues up to the shamans for featherfall charms. I intend to know what drives this legion forward, or at least to know that they are driven by nothing. Not sure which would be worse.
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