case may be, I did not possess most of the knowledge that he sought. I was, however, able to act as a sounding board, and something of an interpreter for knowledge that he possessed but could not define, which did some good in easing his intensity regarding the subject.
As I have written previously, his first question was of the Ul’mleth Llo, though the clarity of his Llogodh speech made it far more than a question. When the shock subsided, I replied with a question of my own, spoken in the same language, but with far less surety of syntax. Roughly, what I asked can be translated to “What do you know of the Old Man?”
The silence that followed was tense; unsure. In this moment it felt as though we were both children, cold and scared of what might come next. That we two were stolen, and placed against our will a world in which we both were foreign. In this moment I felt that I had known him for a very long time.
He broke the silence with words sounding alien from his lips—the words of Atheria, the words of my people, and yet as they left his lips I felt as though I was being pulled back to this foreign world—pulled back into the woman by the lake, next to him, and outside of her cloister in the Malkans. “The river sheds once more, Miss Daldien.”
We had much to discuss. Following that cold moment he began his inquisition. What I told him of the River of Souls was too vague for his purposes; however, he proceeded to ask questions regarding the state of the Llogodh (un)reality. I reluctantly explained what I could in layman’s terms, himself being apparently unfamiliar with the specifics of my theory—a curious contradiction to his insight.
Gabriel’s line of questioning seemed to revolve around something that I, nor my peers, have ever truly considered—for he presupposed an idea that most academics of my field would find absurd. The way that Gabriel spoke of The River of Souls theory seemed to imply that the universal state which I have previously described became, at the collapse of the Llogodh empire, some sort of traversable space. As if what once was all of existence, rather than simply ceasing to be, was now a body of time and space that connected worlds beyond, and worlds behind, to that which spilled over after their existential catastrophe. Namely, our world. Among others.
This directly contradicts my running theory—that the River was a universal state that has long since existed. Even my admittedly fringe theory regarding Ul’mong pales to the suggestion that multiple realities can exist, on top of one another, with what he seemed to describe as a thread piercing through them and connecting them. Surely any other of my field if met with such nonsense would have ousted this fool from their presence immediately, scoffing at their misinterpretation of the material available to them. I, however, have always been open-minded to a fault, and felt a sense of surety in him that bid him to continue. Even so, I am nothing if not a woman of science, and I begged that he prove his theory, or at least to give credibility to his claims before I entertained him further.
At my request, he took a deep breath, and let it out slowly before rising to his feet and gazing out over the lake, which now reflected softly the twinkling stars above. “Miss Daldien,” he began, speaking with the same soft patience as a professor about to lecture his class. “You fish at this lake, yet I see your line is not baited. Am I right in assuming that there are no fish within its depths?”
I told him that there were not, and that the reasons for my choice in activity were purely therapeutic. He nodded and reached out, motioning questioningly for my rolled-up fishing pole, which still sat next to me on the shore. Curious, I picked up the pole and handed it to him. He took the rod, then turned around and walked just to the edge of the sandy shore, where soil and wet sand mingled to produce a kind of thick mud. He scraped at the medium for a minute or so before finding a worm, which he pierced through the hook at the end of my line, where it wriggled uncomfortably. Turning around, he walked back to where I sat, speaking just as softly.
“What if this lake is, and is not devoid of fish? What if in a world just beyond us, this lake is teeming with life, having had a different set of ecological circumstances surrounding its development?”
I responded as intelligently as I could with respect to his theories, saying that it is possible, if his theory were correct, that there were countless lakes, all stacked above and below ours—beyond and before us, all intangible and inaccessible to anyone except those standing by their version of it.
He seemed pleased with my response, perhaps relieved that I was giving him a chance. He nodded knowingly, and continued: “What if I told you, Miss Daldien, that those other lakes are not inaccessible to us? That in fact, accessing them only requires a trained mind and a small catalyst to bridge the gap?”
My expression darkened at this notion, aggravated at his matter-of-fact assertion of a theory that I had only just entertained, and one which most of my colleagues would not. Before I could respond, he pulled out something small and spherical from his pants pocket, no larger than a marble and looking to be of shifting silver, and held it in the open palm of his right hand. It sat inert for a few moments. The silence would have been awkward for me were Gabriel not entranced in his own thoughts. After perhaps fifteen seconds, the marble-like orb began to shift and shimmer: Gabriel cast the line into the lake, palming the orb and dropping it back into his pocket. Mere seconds after he had done so, the line began to tug, and to my shock, he began to reel the line in, fighting some force unseen. I became uncomfortable, knowing full well that this lake was uninhabitable. I had learned quite some time ago that the levels of natural arsenic in the murky depths of these waters was far too high to support any kind of life. It was not simply that no one had ever caught any fish: it was that the lake was too toxic to support them.
But still, he reeled. I began to shift, and my chest was cold again. My head began to spin. Thoughts cascaded upon each other as I tried to make sense of the spectacle before me. I shook my head, collecting my wits. I needed to be able to act and think calmly. I took a deep breath, and as I had finished letting it out, he pulled something from the lake, wriggling on the end of my line. It was, if I am to use the term loosely, a fish.
I looked as closely as I dared at the animal before me, hung over the sand between the two of us. It very quickly stopped moving, presumably because it was dead. Looking at it hanging stiffly on my line, my mind began to convulse as I took in its strange measurements and unnatural characteristics. It had no dorsal fin, or indeed any fins at all, though it had a torso somewhat scaled and a tail that jutted out in sharp bony spikes, with some kind of fleshy webbing between them. If it had eyes at all, I could not make them out, but there was a strip of flesh wrapped around the near top of its torso that was of a lighter color, which I now suspect to contain rudimentary optics. Extending from its torso at all angles and at staggered intervals were six long, seemingly muscled tentacles that were covered in some kind of light, hairlike tendrils, the number of which being too great to count.
It hung stiffly from the hook at the end of the line by its small, circular mouth, the inside of which housed twenty-eight razor-sharp, but small, inward-pointing needle-like quills.
I think that I knew, at the time, that this was nothing of my world. However, my nature is one of facts, not of intuition. Before I jumped to any conclusions, I had to consult with one of my sisters.
Crossroads
To my ever-increasing dread, Sister Lira confirmed my suspicions regarding the “fish” that Gabriel had pulled from the lake. It was very real, and it was nothing that could have existed on our world.
Were this a matter of worldly origin—a mundane inquiry of an invasive, but known species, I would not have been surprised by her confirmation. After all, until my discovery of the Llogodh writings, I was something of a generalist and I never doubted my mental catalogue of the surrounding fauna. Were this a matter of worldly origin, I would likely not have gone to Sister Lira at all.
Alas, the matter at hand was otherworldly, and not the least dire. I was not willing to speculate further upon Gabriel’s theory, and
his performance, until I could be certain that it was not a hoax.
When first Sister Lira looked upon the specimen, it was with awe. Her passion for life in all its obscure and revolting forms got the better of her, and it was only with great mental fortitude that she calmed herself, said her prayer to Chrom, and implored me to bring the specimen to her lab so that it could be identified.
We delivered the eldritch beast and, though we were not permitted entry to her laboratory while her analysis was underway, she kept me informed of her progress via private messages delivered to my door every evening. Gabriel waited patiently in one of the guest rooms. For five consecutive days she studied the animal, and over the course of those days she approached it as objectively as she could, from as many fields and schools of thought as was required. Even so, all her attempts to classify it failed. She became exasperated with the strange fish, but this only seemed to goad her further. To the scientist, it seems, there is a difference between studying something that did not exist before its discovery and studying something that, in a sense, cannot exist.
In her efforts to make sense of it, she was unable to group it to any known class