robe, which had been rolled up and tied around my hips. Standing and turning, I saw the wraith of a man approach. As I intend to record every detail of these accounts in the event that even one should prove useful, the fluidity of his movements should be noted.
He walked smoothly, staying level, nearly floating along the ground. In fact, if it were not for his swaying coat and raised hand, I might have thought him a ghost. The sunlight, however meek, did little to compliment his mottled and oddly-toned skin, but his eyes basked in it, bringing a bit of life to the dull setting around him. Over all, I was not threatened by his presence, if a little uneased. I was certainly confused. Travelers do not usually seek a particular sister for company—they would only do so if they sought knowledge in which a certain sister was rich, or if they had a particular taste that one sister matched. One can imagine, then, my disbelief that someone had sought me out specifically, given the nature of my research, and my rather plain features.
As he moved closer, I was able to see more details of his face, which did little service to the amicability of the whole. He wore a dire expression that his golden eyes betrayed—a façade or a duality, I cannot say.
As he approached, he removed his hat and swept it back, the motion flowing into a slight bow, which I returned. Following, he rolled up his sleeves, one after the other, revealing his origins as an Atherian—though he did not look the part. I did the same, if only to be respectful, but in truth it was a bit unnecessary. It is used as a disarming gesture—rolling up one’s sleeves would reveal oneself as a sorcerer, but there is very little magic to be found east of the Malkans, or indeed out of Atheria itself.
Regardless, he greeted me politely and only spoke once I nodded towards him, myself being accustomed (admittedly only academically) to the culture which he must, assumedly, call his own. He greeted me as “Miss Daldien”, which even as I write upsets my calm. It is possible that I, at the time, may have even laughed at such a formality before correcting him to “Sister Ishaara”. However, the formality would remain. It is apparently against his nature to reduce to pleasantries.
At my nod, he asked if he might have a word with me regarding my studies, which caught me off-guard, the request being, as I have said, nearly unheard-of in my academic field. Quickly though I recovered; he seemed to note my discomfort, as he asked if we might sit down somewhere. Looking about, I came to the conclusion that there is scarce elsewhere I might find more comfort. I beckoned him forward and sat back down in the sand, granting him a seat beside me. He smiled, I believe, and in short time his coat was removed and folded neatly beside him, hat resting on top. He came down gingerly next to me, his exotic scent permeating the air around us.
His next words I remember very clearly; they cut as deeply into my soul as a razor into fatted meat, and chilled me to my core. Words I never thought I would hear spoken at all, much less directed at me. In hindsight, it is unfortunate that I was at the lake that day, for if I were in any less of a calm, I might have ousted him from my presence immediately, never to speak with him again. But as fate would have it, his next words sealed my involvement in his quest, and quite possibly the nearing end of my life.
What do you know, he said, of the Ul’mleth Llo?
Perhaps the most disconcerting part of his question, and most probably the cause of my near-immediate dizziness, was the clarity with which the words were spoken. He spoke Llogodh in a way that I had never heard before; such that it slithered down his tongue and wriggled through my ear and into my brain, where it sat and festered. Llogodh is a dead language, and though the written word can and has been translated, it had never before been spoken like that in my presence.
Spoken fluently.
The River of Souls
To define so foreign a concept, dear reader, in simple language—a concept so deeply rooted in the context of my study, and one so apart from time and space as both are known today, is a monumental undertaking.
Thus, I must first describe the table on which this subject rests, and describe the floor beneath it. I must describe the room in which we are standing and describe the air that we are breathing.
The Ul’mleth Llo is a strictly Llogodh concept. Its like has never been found in surrounding cultures and belief structures, nor has any other worldly writing mentioned the phenomena that the Llogodhs must have experienced in order to name such a concept. This said, a deeper understanding of the Ul’mleth Llo brings one to a much deeper understanding of the Llogodhs as a whole. It is my firm belief that once we witness the “River of Souls,” as I have taken to calling it, we will understand, for better or worse, everything about the Llogodh culture—my colleagues at the University do not agree. However, they concede to my efforts, as I have gotten closer than most; the River of Souls being my area of particular expertise. I will recount what I have found through my own translations, both linguistic and contextual.
My theory operates on two assumptions. One, that the endless, expanding universe that we know—one composed of matter and energy and bound together in a web of aether—does not exist. We are in fact a miniscule portion of a long tube-like spacetime structure, the interior of which houses the interworkings of reality as we (Or, more specifically, the Llogodhs) know it—and outside of which there is only void.
Two, that reality is a dimension in itself, and can be manipulated—much the same as we lower beings are capable of manipulating matter, energy, and aether—by beings existing in dimensions higher than we.
One might note that the second assumption potentially denies the first. Such is the great contradiction of the Llogodh paradigm. However, I have found that if one looks closer, it can explain the first. If we assume that the River of Souls principle explains the world in which the Llogodhs existed, but not the one that exists today, much of their writings begin to make sense. They were on the cusp of something world-shattering: something localized to their culture that shifted reality around them to the point that their writings retroactively became near-incomprehensible to those of us on the outside.
It is my belief that the Llogodhs did not exist in our world at all.
“The skies shed upward, looking for truth: but the old man’s coming shows its denial. In sleep, the old man wanders, but when we knock upon the open door, our world quakes in fear.” (Llog Uluth, pg. 233, para 4)
It can be said that the River of Souls is, or was, a state of being; a universal structure that has long since been, and a way of seeing that has become irrelevant. It was within these confines that the Llogodhs changed everything; so much so that their own reality became suffocating and isolated. In this text, we see that the “old man” instigated change. They seem to have awakened something disturbing—something that made their world “quake in fear.”
So they began to expand. In a way, I suspect they were running from the changes they were making to their own reality; back to the world they thought they knew. They began to use their technological power to colonize and conquer the world beyond, though short of my previous conjecture, I cannot say exactly why; my theory suggests that they were expanding to collect resources and labor. Their final technological project, it seems, required much of what their world had to offer. In the Codex Gluth, we find another reference to the “old man”:
“The old man comes, and with him a tide of twisted screams. The skies are stone unhewn, and it will tear the fabric beneath. Exodus then; will bring us the truth.” (pg. 496, para 2)
It is, in light of my detailed study, probable that whatever they were trying to build was in relation to the “River of Souls”. Whether it was meant to preserve, destroy, or enhance, I cannot say—but it is my firm belief that this “old man” was at the center of it all.
I believe that this “old man” is in fact the same as Ul’mong, a figure that is believed by most conventional academics to be their god. I find their literary likenesses too keen, and their references, to one such as myself—one used to deciphering the madness—too similar. In the same Codex Gluth, we later fin
d the old man described as “an unquenched hunger” and that he “must be put to rest again” (Gluth, pg 522, para 3)
If we compare these references to the Codex Ul’mong, a work composed entirely of a single, scribbled phrase repeated for near two hundred pages:
“Ul’mong cannot rest in what eternal eyes have wrought;
the river sheds upon us, and we are lost.”
We find that he was not a deity at all. I believe that Ul’mong, whatever exactly it was, caused the vanishing of the entire Llogodh race. This, in relation to the River of Souls, forms a blurred picture in which these power-hungry peoples shifted, even ascended their reality to such a degree that they awakened a sleeping giant.
A giant that was capable of erasing them from our reality, in effect retroactively turning all of their writings into nonsensical drivel.
Stargazing
Gabriel and I sat under the stars for uncounted hours. What began as a simple question became something of an inquisition, as he countered every decidedly vague answer that I produced with an even more specific, more troubling question. I began to feel as if I was being tested; as if I was being prodded and pushed to reveal knowledge that he knew I possessed. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as the