Post by Bluestorm on Jan 21, 2018 18:37:57 GMT
The Great Serpent
The following is a curious account from a sheet of the now seldom used papyrus written with a rarely seen hand in an antiquated ink not made commercially for years. It is also anonymous – unusual for an account from Deverinn’s History. It mentions also, oddly enough, the fact that its own provenance ought to be brought into question. There has so far been no explanation for this entry. No footnote from Deverrin can be found.
“I fear this may be one of the few events that I’m not entirely sure I can chronicle properly, so use your heads and learn more about history by searching for it yourselves and not making my mistakes. For I was there on Haravanne, and not just there to see but there: I interfered. Allowed my emotion to cloud my history. For in my long years few places and few people have I loved more than those on barren Haravanne, when it used to be a green and beautiful mountain belt rich with forest life – in the days of my youth, of course – and again after the grief of the breaking of the Isle during the War had ceased to plague me just enough to allow me to return, when I travelled there to warn of the terrible dangers of Vimeni artefacts to those who would abuse their power. I found an eclectic group of stubborn Elven historians and the determined migrant volunteers who threw normal life to the wind to join them.
I learned from them as they learned from me: they had been tending to the shattered land and compiling knowledge of the mineralogy morphed and twisted by heat, and they had somehow found beauty in the crystals made of war. As a reward I showed them a little of the project I had been working on. They were amazed, and for the briefest of moments this purpose of mine was worth enough suffering even in this place. And then as happiness overshadowed melancholy, darkness blotted out the sun. The serpent described was a Serpens Dirius Rex, with the rare Ferroan gene mutation that leads to gigantism and gunmetal grey scales, and was seeking easy prey across the shore. It found myself and the camp of researchers studying fossils for signs of ancient radiation affecting fauna, and was in itself a living example bent on killing us: there is irony there. Measuring a godsawful 100 metres in length, its musculature indicated a premature death from skeletal complications common in Ferroan Serpents. It had time enough to shatter the entire base camp, slaughtering dozens with each snap of its jaws, and although I know rationally that the creature may have simply been lacking another food source due to ocean currents at the time but it is difficult not to imagine malice in its eyes. Revenge, for a feud began by our ancestors long ago.
How I escaped its fangs was sheer luck - with a pinch of the old Alchemy and Physik to brew a blinding powder. But afterwards I ran blindly myself, as a young man with the pains of great age forgotten, and when I looked back all was lost. We who were left sat looking at the blood staining the spot where there used to be research tents, or half-chewed entrails slung over the sand, and in that moment I, who have seen quite enough of war over the years, suffered wounds to the heart as if the old ones had never scarred. This was the second massacre this Isle had witnessed. It would not witness a third. As a young man I learned myself in the arts of warfare whensoever I grieved, and although I held firm to my promise to bury the unhallowed designs of the old weapons in the past I informed my fellow historians with trinkets: the poisoning of a spear, the careful observation of a Serpent’s hunting patterns, the laying of scented bait and the hardening of the heart, a trick I that had discovered at painful experience it was better to learn early. But the death of the serpent and the recovery of vital information from its dissection and the reestablishment of the camp did nothing to return the historians who had perished, their potential and brilliance lost forever, and so I left that island grieving for a second time. Upon being asked the reason for my pain by the boatswain I sailed with I replied: “and so we learn from history that when new brilliance dies and old bitterness lingers, it is the end of an age.” He did not know what I meant. Judging from the political climate’s upheaval in recent years and the contents of this account, you do."