The Undying Emperor [Grand Conquest Fantasy]

Appeal to myself.

I write this now as a reminder and as a means of meditation. I was never of a disposition for meditation, but I understood its use. All of life is a continual turmoil of small affairs, such that it is like trying to watch a play from the back of the hall and all the other patrons jump from their seats. One must eliminate the trifling thoughts to focus on what is important.

The Wanderer has shown me things I never imagined. He has, through pure self-interest on his own part, revealed to me secrets of the world that remind me of when I was a child. Not that these are things of whimsy, but to see with my own eyes these things draws out that fossilized emotion all adults grow distant from. I never imagined there was so much more to this world to so easily see and do.

I do not mean this in the trivial sense of travel, of culture. Food and dance, song and drink. That every person around oneself is a life unto themselves, each of us a primordial god of experience not quite like any other. No, let the poets have those delights. Let the skalds sing of love and fancy to fill their caps with coin.

The Wanderer showed me an entire world of ideas, all while in but a stone pit that was supposed to be my prison, my death sentence. I have never been more free in all my life. Even as a young man I was, in a sense, enslaved by the needs of my flesh. But, within this pit there is no sun to mark the passing of days. I spend my waking hours working and when my body tires I sleep upon the stone. Fatigue makes even stone soft. I find that I forget to eat, even though food is brought to this den of science. Only the less clean needs of the body pull me away and when that happens I explore the myriad tunnels that brought the Wanderer to this place.

It is hard to describe my work. Not all of it has been explained to me and more than I realize I have intuited rather than analyzed. I do not even know the full extent of the Wanderer's designs. He does not share his objective with me, nor do I ask. My inquiries are only for the mechanisms.

Regularly, he appears dragging in corpses of strange monsters. Lion Wyrms are the most common, but he has also appeared with a creature he calls a Stone Panda. We did not work on that one, but spitted it over a fire and ate it. The experience was something like biting into the flesh of a fat and well-sated house cat that long ago lost the desire to hunt.

Why I make such an abhorrent analogy I am not sure. It is the Wanderer's influence I think. More than once he has brought in a creature even he cannot identify. When this happens, he spends hours dissecting the creature and making crude remarks as he stains the stones with blood.

From the stomachs of the Lion Wyrms we collect the humors of their stomach. I must be very careful to not touch the substance, but I'm never careful enough. My hands have burned again and again until the skin fused together in callouses. I find that I must take a knife to my joints and carve out the dead flesh lest I be unable to bend my joints. The things you can do with it though! Wires are connected to the pots we fill, linking with similar jars made with a solution which I think is derived from charcoal lye.

As if from nothing, not even the magic of the gods, lightning is manifested from these wires of a strength I never achieved. Had I only dared! I can hardly believe that I was arrested for such paltry child's play compared to what I now do.

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And, to my infinite amusement, the enigmatic Wanderer is of a kindred spirit as me. By which I mean one of discovery. He is no god of nature. He is but a man, a most human man. Though not as often, he too suffers the jolts and shocks of a stray touch as he devises more intricate machines. He is not satisfied to merely make sparks of light but tinkers and toils with all manner of switches and bulbs. I hear him cursing names I do not recognize as he sucks his fingers and glowers at the natural arcane.

But, for all this work, I can tell there is something foul about his aims. The memory rises now and then that the floor we work upon is an amalgam of corpses, my fellow inmates mortar for stone. The more I come to understand the voltaic principles, the more I see an echo in these defiled graves.

And there are far more than one. What eases my spirit and lets me delude my own thoughts is that only the one was made of humans. The rest are the compacted victuals of these monsters he brings. But they have their own manner of linking. There is their own method of transference, of cause and effect.

And there is one thing I must not touch.

I have seen it only from a distance. It sits upon one of the intricate runes the Wanderer carved, at the heart of the most desecrated pit. It appears to me as a temple made miniature, akin to the ornamental nesting homes some put up for birds. A net of heavy chains is wrapped about it, tied together by a rusted padlock.

The Wanderer stares at it with a diabolic smile and at times I have heard the chains rustle. He tells me he has kept it secret for nearly a decade and it seems to be the focus of all his endeavors. What it is for he will not share.

Though I can't say it has done anything of note, it has taken residence within my mind. While I might be occupied with tasks at hand, it remains patiently to remind me that this unknowable thing is the crux of my work. That I learn the mysteries of the world is incidental to this object's purpose. In a way, that stone box is somehow more important than myself. Perhaps more important than all the lives in the mine. All the prisoners and guards and the value of the ore.

While the work intrudes upon the domain of the dragon god, I find myself wondering if this is the seduction of Sapphira's teachings. The western goddess is truly enigmatic. The mother of serpents, the caller of storms, but most easily forgotten the lady of mysteries. She is the one holding dominion over the unknown. Truly, are these caves not the very definition of the unknown? I could walk and walk and descend below the very ocean floor if the Wanderer is to be believed.

Had life been different, I might have become a citizen of their kingdom. Perhaps I would have had to launder my identity through one of the central kingdoms, but I could have found scholarly sanctuary among their clergy. For that their goddess has dominion over mysteries, the priests of the water goddess seem ever in a war with her, prying away the shadows of the unknown and all with the blessing of their angel.

At least Sapphira offers her people something.

What has Roma ever given the people of Skaldheim? Light in the night? We can make our own light. We live in a bitter chill beneath a wan lantern, the lesser celestial, while the true sun of this world passes by through the south. She has given us eternal war against the seasonal tides to harden us. She claims to be the god of warriors, of valor and honor and so many other things but when the tribes of trolls marched south all the temples gave us was songs to sing for the dead.

The Wanderer has shown me how to make lightning from nothing but natural essences. It is feeble and fleeting, but it is light and it is power. Through his teachings he truly has made me a blasphemer. But the gods are gone. One is dead and the others do not speak. It is their memory which holds the strings of men's hearts while we must contend with what is before us.