Weight of Primal Utterances

My body screams with pain—muscles strained, skin sticky with sweat and blood. The burning rage coursing through my body like a wildfire—that fire is the only thing keeping me standing. Before us, the Lord Marshal steps forward to finish us off. My axe feels so heavy…

My mind flashes back to the Grove. The elder has invited me to meet him for the first time in all the months since I was brought here. He speaks his first words to me, no courtesy or preamble: “Sanasha… you will begin training to be a guardian tomorrow.” I take a breath… the memory fades back to the present moment. The Lord Marshal sunk into the ground, out of reach. I stand ready to attack, on instinct alone. He re-emerges, transformed back into the form of a dragon with sparkling sapphire scales. The melee continues. I stand on the back of the dragon, holding his neck and warning him to stop while he still has time. But he doesn’t listen… they never listen. As Diablo finishes the dragon, the Lord Marshal’s final words are filled with malice: “This tower will consume you.”

The dragon’s body dissolves into the floor. My mind cools; the rage fades. We are faced with a puzzle to determine a combination of the schools of magic to open the door. I draw a breath as blood continues to seep from my wounds, and I focus on the puzzle. As I study a book on conjuration, my memories shift back. Mama is looking down at me, her clear blue eyes severe: “Sanasha… this is a basic tome. You need to focus.” I fight back tears. I understand the words… but the spark isn’t there. She doesn’t understand. “Try harder… study harder. You need to strengthen more than your muscles.” My memory fades… Emelyne begins to speak, and I focus. We complete the puzzle and are released back into the antechamber of the tower.

We rest. I drink greedily from my waterskin while I try my best to staunch the bleeding. While we rest, Emelyne begins to study the other statues. The scales demand a sacrifice; the mirror demands you speak a truth about yourself; the book demands an ultimatum from you cannot turn back from; the hourglass warns that should you proceed to read it, the trial will begin immediately. We discuss how we will proceed… at which point Diablo makes his oath to the book. He swears to find a way to harness the power of the spear that killed a god to split the sky over the Sanguisian Empire. The chain slips from the book and slides into his body. I look at him and can feel his pain… I reach for my chest, feeling the memories of the chains constricting my heart. I hear Contras laughing in my mind—a remnant of our connection. We are pulled inside, standing in a black void behind podiums Below us are Mr. Brightvain, Baron Blackshire, and Contras trapped in crystals prisons. A voice speaks, giving us a choice to have one die, while the others will be allowed to live untouched. If we can’t decide, all three go free. The debate pushes on. Who will we choose?

My mind slips again. I’m standing in the tower in Qyradell. Naoki is performing acrobatic feats while I teleport him to wow the crowd. I’m letting the rage take hold, but it’s not a burning inferno—it’s more like a burning passion. I feel every moment: the look of wonder in the eyes of those watching us, the joy of the performance. I trust Naoki in this moment… I let myself forget what we’re doing as Percy skulks into a secured chamber to steal the eye. My blood races as the crowd cheers…

I blink… and Contras is trying to make his case, arguing that Angus Blackshire, as an immortal vampire, is the greater threat.

I blink again… King Mozerag is coming for us, resplendent in the frame of a gold dragon. I call for Contras… and he appears.

I blink, and Diablo is threatening the Baron through his loved ones.

Blink—Mozerag is being twisted into a sword in the hands of the god of deception.

As I blink, rage begins to build as Contras taunts me in the trial.

Then the next moment… I go back again. Gods are clashing. Casmir, Revalor, and Torrah are trying to fight Contras… trying and losing.

Blink… we are deliberating. The moments begin to blend. I see burning towers… demons swarming. One vote for Contras. People are dying… we are trying to save who we can. Three votes for Contras. The glowing form of Revalor crashes through a building, golden blood pooling where he falls. Five votes for Contras.

I blink again, and we are in the antechamber once more. I remember the conversations… but they’re not important. We stand before the mirror, debating who will speak our truth first. Blink—I'm training to protect the Grove, chopping parts off the training blocks with my axe while the others show me the best way to make a man bleed.

I blink again… I’m resisting a truth. I’m a young girl failing to understand magic… I’m a young woman wanting to be an adventurer… I’m a woman training to be a guardian of the Grove.

I blink again… I see bodies on the ground, fire-scorched, blood pooling. I look at myself in the mirror; I see all of these faces. The little girl, the young woman, the guardian. Their hands are all dripping red. I see what I need to say: “I guess I’m just a murderer.”

We are thrust inside the next room. My mind is empty as I approach a reflective gateway. My reflection shifts in front of me; I see glimmers of an Orcish woman I’ve only seen in dreams. She speaks something to me, but I don’t hear it. My reflection coalesces into me as I am now.. She steps forward, a dark shadow. Before us are five shadows—one a mirror of each of us. My heart is chilled, until my shadow steps forward and buries her axe in my shoulder. Chaos erupts as I lunge—not at my doppleganger,  but at the shadow of Naoki. I bury my axe into the shadow, feeling resistance. The rage takes hold. We fight… we hurt, we get hurt. We kill our shadows, one by one. The rage fills me with an unexpected thrill, as if I’ve unchained something. I struggle to breathe as we are pulled back into the antechamber.

I’m a killer… not a hero… not a guardian of the Grove.

I see that Orcish reflection in my mind again—that other woman. I hear her words this time, a whisper: “You are more than a weapon.”

This tome was placed directly into the party's hands by Allura herself, in the Empty Vault at the

heart of her Tower, once all five trials had been completed. It did not need to be found — it was

given, deliberately, by the one being who could have simply answered every question herself

and chose instead to hand over someone else's testimony. The vellum is old beyond dating by

conventional means. The hand is not mortal.

ON THAT WHICH WAS BEFORE, AND WHAT WAS DONE

ABOUT IT

Being a testimony, set down by one who watched

I do not write this to be believed. I write it because someone, someday, will need it to be true,

and I would rather it be waiting for them than not.

I am not permitted to give my name in full. Call me Witness, if you must call me anything. I

stood at the edge of the first war creation ever fought, and I did not fight in it — I only watched,

and I only survived because watching was all that was asked of me. That is a shame I have

carried longer than your world has had a shape to carry shame 

in

.

I. Before the Word "Before" Meant Anything

You have been taught, I imagine, that the gods made the world. This is true, but it is not the

whole of the truth, and the part that is missing is the part I am here to give back to you.

The gods did not build upon nothing. They built upon a wound.

Before order — before Time counted anything, before Death kept a throne, before Magic

answered a single plea, before Fate wrote a single thread — there was only 

hunger, occupying a dark that had no edges. I will not tell you it was evil. Evil requires a choice, and there was nothing there yet capable of choosing. It simply was, the way weather is, the way hunger itself is, and it consumed because consuming was the only verb that existed. Five such hungers, if "five" is even a number that applies to things that predate counting. The

gods — young, then, and unproven, no older themselves than the flame that had only just

birthed them — went to war against them anyway. Zolna led it, still new enough to her own

light that she had not yet learned to fear losing it, and her brother Skaad stood beside her —

the only war either of them is remembered fighting on the same side of. They had no armies

yet. They barely had names of their own, let alone stewards to lend them. But the alternative

was to let a nursery of infant order be swallowed before it ever drew a first breath.

I watched that war. I am still not certain I understand what I watched. I have had longer than

your histories to try, and I have made my peace with failing.

II. What the War Cost

The gods won. I want you to hold onto that, because what follows will make it easy to forget.

They won, but they could not kill what they fought — you cannot kill a thing that predates the

concept of an ending. What they could do, and did, was push it out. Four of the five were

driven beyond the furthest edge of the made world, into the raw absence that still exists past

the borders of everything — mortals who have gone looking call it many things; I will call it, as

the gods did, the Great Beyond, for lack of a truer word. It is not a place, precisely. It is what

"place" hadn't been invented to describe yet. The fifth would not be driven anywhere. I will return to that.Here is the part your kind was never told, and the part I consider my true purpose in setting down this record: the victory was not free, and you are still paying for it, every day, without knowing it.The gods could not simply lock a door and walk away. Something that ancient does not respect a lock unless the lock is woven into the very thing it hungers for. So the victorious gods took a piece of what they had just barely survived, and they grafted it into everything that draws breath.

That prickle at the back of your neck in an empty room. That sudden certainty, climbing a dark

stair, that something is one step behind you. The dread that grips a creature that has stood still

too long, has been alone too long, has wasted too much of a short life waiting for a happiness it

fears will never arrive. None of that is superstition. None of that is your own mind being

foolish.

That is scar tissue. That is the last living fragment of the first war, inherited into every mortal,

every beast, every small crawling thing that has ever flinched at a sound it could not place. The

gods could not destroy what they fought, so instead they made certain that everything that

has ever lived since would carry, in its very instinct, the memory of what it felt like to be

hunted by it — as a kind of ancient inoculation, so that if the door were ever forced again, the

world would not walk into it blind.

I do not know if this was mercy or theft. I have had an eternity to decide, and I no longer trust

myself to judge it.

III. On the Four, Named at Last

I once believed withholding their names was itself a kind of ward — that a name is a door with

a handle on it, and a door unnamed is simply a door fewer hands can find. I held to that belief

for longer than your kind has had a word for "long."

I no longer hold to it. I have reason to believe the fifth — the one I will come to shortly — no

longer sleeps where it was left. A world that must already reckon with one loose Terror

deserves better than my silence about the other four. If a door somewhere is already open, a

name will not pry it open further. It may, instead, help someone recognize what has already

walked through it wearing a stranger's face.

So. Their names, and what they are, because I suspect — I fear — you may already be meeting

them, one at a time, without knowing what you were speaking to.

Vashkorreth, the Swallowing Dark, is the reason the dark past the firelight has always felt

occupied, long before anyone told you monsters lived in it.

Kaszrivoth, the Stillness Beneath, is the reason stillness can feel like drowning — the dread of

a life, or a moment, that has simply stopped moving and shows no sign of ever moving again.

Ith'vaureth, the Left Behind, is the reason the worst thing your kind can imagine is not death,

but being 

left

 — forgotten, uninvited, alone in a way that no company will ever quite undo.

Ssorevanth, the Empty Hourglass, is the reason the old weep at what they never got around to

doing, and the young lie awake certain they are running out of time to matter.

Each of these is sealed in the Great Beyond, bound to the concept it most inverts, tethered by

an anchor left somewhere in the made world — a shrine, a throne, a lock. Which anchor

belongs to which Terror, I will not say; that much caution I have not yet surrendered, and I

doubt I ever will. Someone kept those anchors. Some order, some bloodline, some quiet vigil

that has likely long since forgotten 

why

 it still lights that candle or guards that door. If such a

place still stands, it is doing more good than it knows, and it does not know it needs thanking.

I will make one exception to my silence, because I judge the danger of speaking it smaller than

the danger of not.

Not every piece of every Terror went where it was sent. One of the four — the one who mourns

being left, the one who wants nothing more than to never let go of anyone again — fought its

own banishment harder than the others, and in the end the gods could not pull all of it through

at once without losing what little ground the war had bought them. So they took what they

could, and what would not come, they cut away and buried instead: a single limb, vast and

segmented, sealed beneath stone in a place that had no name yet and would not for an age still

to come. I am told dwarves live atop it now, and have for longer than they know, and have never

once been told what their foundations were built to hold down.

I do not know how well that stone has kept its promise. Old things fail quietly before they fail

loudly. If you go looking, go looking for the small signs first — a neighbor who no longer minds

being alone, a household that has stopped locking its doors and cannot say why, a child who

insists they saw someone's face made of something that moved wrong, low to the ground, in

threes and fours and then in hundreds. It will not announce itself with violence. The violence,

when it comes, will already be the second thing it did, not the first — the first will have been an

act of what it believes, with total sincerity, to be love.

IV. The Fifth

The fifth was never bound to the Great Beyond, because the fifth was never entirely 

of

 it to

begin with. It is older even than the hunger the others share — old enough that the gods found

no concept large enough to leash it to, no anchor strong enough to hold what refuses to be

defined by anything except its own patience.

Its name, I will give you, because it is the only one that has ever bothered to introduce itself to a

mortal and let them live long enough to write it down: Ugannokolthul.

It was not driven out. It could not be. What the gods managed, in the end, was closer to a

bargain than a victory — they folded it small, folded it patient, folded it into a shape harmless

enough that the world could bear to have it nearby without knowing what it was holding. I am

told the vessel chosen was deliberately humble — something a mortal home would take in

without a second thought, something that would watch from a windowsill and be thought no

stranger than any other quiet, watchful thing kept for company.

I confess this was the seal I trusted least, of all five, and the years have not made me regret that

instinct. A cage built from a joke is still a joke, even when it holds.

V. A Closing, From One Who Would Rather Not Have Written This

I do not know who will read this. I do not know if the anchors still hold, or if one has already

slipped, quietly, in some village too small to be noticed by anyone but the thing that noticed it

first.

I know only this: the fear you have carried your whole life without explanation is not a flaw in

you. It is a gift, bought at a price none of you were asked to agree to, from a war none of you

were alive to fight. Do not be ashamed of it. Listen to it. It has kept faithful watch far longer

than I have.

If you have found this page, something has already led you to ask the right question. I would

tell you to stop asking. I know better than to expect that you will.

Be careful all the same.

— Witness