3. Shadows and light - Kara's Journal.

Shadows and light - Kara's Journal.


  • Moruss

    _We're starting to fall in droves now….one here, two there. Each visit from the little lady sees more and more death, with our options shrinking with each fight. The worst battle had to be outside the shrine of Kelemvor, where she brought out her forces enmass because we hadn't gotten on holy ground fast enough.

    It was the worst battle that we have seen yet, with both Natanya, two paladins from the shrine and myself falling in battle to those dreaded Bodaks....Gods above, I hate those things...their screech is horrible. One moment of weakness brought on another...I should never have taken that offer. They all knew what had happened..roland very nearly removed me from the order for it, although cool heads prevailed. That I am shamed with the reminder of my actions is enough in his eyes, I would wager.

    It is too late to let it get to me now. We have our tasks to get to, gates to prepare to enter. It is all we can do.

    A little bit of hope though...we have learned of an ancient trial by combat that would allow us to challenge the little lady and her champions....if we won, she would be banished on a permenant basis.

    I just hope we can manage to call it._


  • The little lady of infernus

    _I recall our first meeting outside jiyyd so long ago and I stood defiantly infront of her, refusing to play her games….to deal with that I had promised and sworn to destroy without question. Yet...

    She was different.

    She wasn't just undead...she was emotion...she was hatred, fear and rage. They all fed her and increased her power. Every time someone struck her, whether it was in hatred or a sense of righteousness. She picked her target well, there is nothing Kelemvor hates more than the walking dead and by proxy, me.

    She had been harrasing us for quite some time now...on and off until we came to the gates to the abyss..or the halls as we called them. We became less of a nuisance and more of a credible threat to her. Up until now, she had merely send some undead...enough to be stopped in short order without any kind of group..

    Then the running battles started.

    Waves upon waves of undead marked with dark energy. When the first attack upon jiyyd came, wild magic from the stolen orb was still a major issue. Casting spells at all was a severe problem. The attack upon a settlement marked her starting a 'serious' resistance to hamper our efforts to destroy her. Apparently she knew of Syne and the bonding in the halls...how I do not know, just that she knows.

    So now we struggle each night to prevent attack after attack on our own selves and settlements themselves.....it has gotten to the point where we are separating ourselves from the region at large come nightfall and hiding in hallowed grounds. It does NOT feel right, but it is the only option we have. By day, we try and warn people of what they face and the dangers of taking her as harmless.

    A way to defeat her was discovered though...positive energy disrupts her presence on this plane and stems the assault each night. It is rare we see her twice in one night after her 'body' has been destroyed.

    At the same time we endure her attacks, the halluncenations and violent emotion changes keep becoming more frequent...at least twice now, I've been murderously angry at absolutely nothing...I think a cup fell and shattered...I felt so much rage.

    We are truely in the dark here, with no guide._


  • Enduring

    _As we learn more about the prediciment we're in…the more I am certain that we have made a rash mistake in opening and passing through the gates. Every night this tenday, I have been waking up sobbing at the nightmares that come to me.

    The first one showed the south of narfell entirely aflame, fallen and butchered by the enslaught of demons that had preceeded the warnings we had been given. The City, once a mighty bastion of civilization and hope was now a shadow of what it was...

    ...yet it still stood.

    I saw the order all die, one after the other to the advancing demon horde. All through the eyes of her....

    ..when I finally woke, the sheets were soaked with sweat.

    I feel so dirty. So violated.

    And there is nothing I can do except bare it._

    (this entry appears to have been written and rewritten several times, with blotchy smudging on some of the page that suggests the ink was still a bit wet when it was written)


  • The following pages are full of designs for different suits of armour and forged blades

    Although there is a clear lack of skill, the drawings are at least legible and make sense.

    Following that is a small entry.

    _Creation and design always makes me feel calm for some odd reason. I don't know why, but it is how these suits of armour were conceived. I wish I knew where Aelthas was because at this very moment..

    With all the order under pressure from the shadow of the halls…there is noone I can talk with. Natanya is probably the only one I can sit down and just speak of worry with because she understands.

    She is more or less the sister I never had._


  • Oaths

    Is it true what they say,
    Are we too blind to find a way?
    Fear of the unknown cloud our hearts today.
    Come into my world,
    See through my eyes.
    Try to understand,
    Don't want to lose what we have

    I spoke with Daisy shortly after bringing the others back from the bathhouse and the halls of pride….she explained a little of our plight and well...I did not enjoy the news.

    She asked that I swear never to use the power over the order that I had and I agreed. I would never wish to use it in the first place...these are the people I care the most for...regardless of what may happen between us.

    None of them know that I met Syne and Maya in that final room. At least...I believe they don't know...they looked too zombified at the time to even register anything. We spoke for a time, Syne and myself and he was surprised that Roland or Natanya wasn't the one before him. Was it all a trick? I watched them all die...I...I even killed Roland. That he asked is besides the point.

    I've killed someone that I swore an oath to protect, because he asked...because none of us wished to choose who would die in that accursed place.

    Worst still.

    His voice reaches me even in the sanctuary of Tyr. He wished to talk....I should have said no, but I could not help the feeling that speaking with him and dismissing his heretic ideas would give me at least a few marks peace. Noone could see him. Not even daisy could and she was standing infront of him!

    What trickery is this?!

    Nonetheless, there is a certain irony that he was the first to speak plainly of our situation in many days now. He did explain that 'his knights' were going on to do glorious deeds with him....I am not his knight and I never will be.

    Yet, I cannot escape it...at every turn, his servants are there just at the corner of your eye....yet never fully there. I feel their presence more and more now. They would offer comfort where the order gives none...though I would have none of it.

    Gods help us all...I do not know if there is a way out of this..


  • Solitude

    For the first time in years…I cried myself to sleep last night. The realisation of what has been done to us has finally dawned and the weight that I now carry is mine alone. Were the halls meant to merely strip weak emotions such as sacrifice? Shannon was the first...he would have died to save any of us.

    I feel more alone now than ever before.

    My dreams are plagued by visions of a supposed future and I am hounded by devils who want to 'protect' the scion. Why?

    I cannot tell the others...yet...I think they all know the damage it is doing to us. They couldn't understand. They were not the ones who soul bound their own friends and loved ones to themselves. They weren't the ones who had to endure giving them orders because they were bound to a single will.

    I don't want this...but at the same time, there is no going back.

    I feel so alone.


  • Gathering shadow

    Something is amiss in the temple…everyone can see that, feel that..An air of ice fills the lower levels ; no longer providing the serene comfort it once did to us in our time away from the halls and all of this madness...

    I worry for the others along with myself....I..am already starting to see things...my emotions running unpredicably wild. Just today...I broke down into a fit of tears.

    ...

    It has been years since I have weeped...it is NOT my doing.

    I'll endure this...Stay strong for the others because we must. Too many innocents city in this city to slip. I've kept myself relatively sane so far...how? Syne appears, we talk and I dismiss his ideas out of hand...that is what I'm bound to do. He can't be right...Can he..?

    I have to stay strong for them.


  • I can see what you see not,
    Vision milky then eyes rot.
    When you turn they will be gone,
    Whispering their hidden song.
    Then you see what cannot be,
    Shadows move where light should be.
    Out of darkness, out of mind,
    Cast down into the halls of the blind

    Meetings
    Ever since our return from the halls, I hear him in my head…I see him where others do not. Why?! have I been damned to an eternity with a devil? He spoke of alot of things, yet I refused to listen...I struggled against him rather than heed his warnings, his 'advice'

    He claims us as his knights, that we will do great and glorious things together, starting with destroying the little lady of infernus. We had encountered her before the halls, though we could do nothing besides weather her assaults at the time. He spoke of the bond...things we would experience ; Powerful emotion that would oft hit us unexpectedly. I did not believe him at first, though how did he manage to pass the wards in the temple?

    Soon after, I blacked out for no reason...it was all so sudden..I found myself laying face down on the library floor when I came to...

    Just what is happening to us?!


  • Pride - The halls of Madness
    Overriding Virtue : Humility

    To say that we were not ready was an understatement. We carried our pride with us into this hall and it nearly destroyed every one of us. We thought the halls of madness like the others, Simply enter, find the source and destroy it. This hall was different…older somehow. When the song was sung and madness rushed to meet us, we were trapped in that instant, we just did not realise it yet.

    When we arrived in the halls, we assumed that we would only fight what we brought with us. How wrong we were...

    We were faced with eight doors, each requiring an answer to a puzzle. Each time we got the puzzle wrong, we would be surrounded, or some would say swamped with ghosts. In the course of the halls, Eluriel and Natanya were almost killed, numerous times.

    We spent what felt like days...trying to puzzle out these eight riddles. With each riddle and room solved though, there would have to be a sacrifice...the first room, the first sacrifice...Shannon.

    The second to fall was Roland...he gave himself to bring Natanya back..I...my own hands are stained with his blood...it was my dagger that plunged into his heart when the others refused to..

    Eluriel was third..cut down when we faced Maya in that place. She tried to stop us going any further and to be honest...I think we should have taken her offer. We would not be in this mess now. At the time, we declined..Then we fought. Without any form of healing, it was always going to be a close battle..Maya eventually fell before us, after she felled Eluriel and almost Natanya.

    Natanya was the fourth to fall..she fell from the protective circle around us and I could not get to her in time...her screams will always echo in my mind as a tale of horror...Three left that particular room. Mariston, Meril and myself.

    The last room was the hardest. We were forced to choose one to go ahead and carry the hopes of us all. Mariston would not accept the burden and Meril didn't wish it....I did not wish this, but noone else did either. With our Scion chosen, Mariston and Meril both fell to darkness and the door swung open before me.

    Finally, I came to a long rectangular room, with arcane markings and manicles running all along the room. As I moved further in, I found two familiar faces. Syne and Maya. We spoke for some time until I was asked if I accepted the sacrifices of my friends...if I did not, they would remain there as wraiths..

    I chose the only option open to me.

    We were all bound. Eight of us. The shield and...Syne to me? He mentioned that but did not elaborate.

    We were not prepared for that truth.


  • Herald

    I think back to the halls we've faced, the demons we've slain…the tricks we were led into and I wonder...Was it truely Syne's doing, or our own? The halls were shown to us, True...We were not however dragged and thrown in. We entered those places of our own accord to do 'the right thing' by keeping them closed to the populace of the city.

    We were saved in the halls of rage by three celestials....they sacrificed themselves for our freedom. Who are we to warrent such selflessness? They would have been forever trapped and damned to countless years of torture, had Maya and Natanya not returned to rescue them alone.

    They succeeded.

    Weeks past until we finally learned of the third gate. We thought it was the final one, but in reality it was not. It was cautioned that we should not go lightly. We did not listen at the time, heading out to seek out the key to get into those halls.

    Instead? We found Syne...affected by the madness of the very place we saught to enter. As it turned out, the key was not infact a key...it was a song. Hearing this song had driven him to the brink of madness until he could finally break himself free after passing it on to Natanya.

    I don't recall how long we stayed by her side until she recovered...it must have taken incredible will power to survive through that madness without losing a part of yourself.

    With that, we were prepared to take on the halls of Madness, as we believed them to be.


  • Scion

    It is worth recording this, in the event that others follow in our footsteps…perhaps they will learn from the mistakes we made and avoid our fate, along with the Nephilim.

    Gluttony - the halls of Hunger
    I was not here for the the hall of hunger, though I have heard horror stories from the others of what they saw…what they had been forced to endure. Was it this hall that my brothers were forced to kill each other? They left those halls possesed.

    As I understand, they were succesful in closing the gate to the prime material plane in Peltarch, I will never open it, regardless if the scion can....there are some horrors this world does not deserve to suffer.

    Perhaps they did the same? We found that using the contrary virtue in a specific hall worked to some extent. Hunger would have been temperance.

    Wrath - The halls of Rage
    I journied on the second visit to this hall and when I arrived…I was shocked what I saw. Countless bodies thrust onto pikes and left to dangle, to die a slow and painful death on the end of cruel barbed spears. This particular hall was so full of anger..it looked like a battlefield of poor souls and their hosts.

    This particular hall had been travelled once before by different members of our order and they had failed to close it...indeed, they spent a century there as 'guests'...I can only imagine the suffering they must all have went through to survive.

    None the less, we fought on through this particular nightmare, slicing down demons left and right until they lay at our feet , smouldering bloody corpses everywhere. In the end, we were met by our host, making demands on one of our fallen. We did not give and so we fought, although we could not win.

    In the end, it took the sacrifice of three angels to save our lives from that particular hall. As a note, Compassion is the counter for Anger.

    The sun is rising...I will write more later, I need to get some rest before the morrow.


  • "We are all bound by our duty..we are very similar, just serve different lords."

    How long has it been since I last wrote in this journal? too long I think. Years have passed and believe me, I spent more time than you would believe wiping the dust off of this. I wish I could say that all this time, I have had a peaceful existance, along with peace for others…

    The realms has a different idea.

    Peace is the notion we all hope will appear one day after a lifetime of carnage and bloody battles, be it on the plains of some country, or around a table. Imagine if the noble who saught to claim more land for himself realised it was all for nothing? Just another patch of land you leave behind when you finally die.

    Will anything we do in this life be remembered I wonder?

    I would have far too much to write if I tried to fill in everything that has happened since the last journal entry, though I will attempt to describe my latest worry.

    Our curse, Nephilim.

    They say he was the son of gods, a champion of all that was good and right. He fought for the light along with six companions. I wager he learned of the gates just as we did....he made the same decision we did ; they had to be closed to save the lives of those near to them. It was the halls of pride....it always was.

    The Crucible they called it, a hall far older than the others, far more primordial. It's only purpose was to strip someone of all their sins and leave a pure being. Intent mattered in the halls. We did not realise just as he did not realise.

    Nephilim approached the halls all wrong...he went to close them, he did not go to purify himself, so when the halls demanded a sacrifice ; Six fell and one was chosen, the Scion. Yet..they were tricked. I suspect an eighth was bound to the scion. We went as he did, with his tokens.

    We made the same mistakes. We did not purge our sins and for our troubles, we were left tainted...cursed. Six bound to me...I was chosen as the scion as nephilim had been..only, we were tricked. An eighth was bound to myself, Syne.


  • Day 3 - Yes, I guessed it. Still in Ormpur.
    Naught but collecting more firewood to tend to this day, and then the rest of the time is mine. So I got to writing, and..well..it's not much to say the least. I am no scribe, that much is for certain.

    Anyway…

    "From the darkness, I walk into the light
    From the day, I walk into the night
    From the shadows, I will appear
    With a message for all, who will hear

    For the weak of heart, I will be strong
    To the defenders of faith, I will belong
    To the last of us, fight till we die
    Let the call of courage be clear"
    ~ The litany of courage.

    The tracing of a rough rose follows the verses, marked with detail carefully, in black ink. Her handwriting is surprisingly neat for writing on a rock, and the journal is in prime condition.

    _It is just as well noone will ever see this journal. I am no Poet.

    As calm as this place is, I would rather stand with my friends, and trusted companions….perhaps it is time to find a way home._


  • Day 2 - Still stuck in Ormpur.
    _I think I'm enjoying the slowdown in pace, for a change…It's an odd feeling to have your sole concern be, when you will rise and repair the barn. I have my duties, true...but I cannot perform them there, and there is no way to garner a path across the pass....not without being slain. So for now, I assist these people and help their ways. More people should take the oppertunity to just sit with these people and learn what it is we're all fighting to protect.

    Their way of life, the peace...the satisfaction of doing a hard work's day and knowing that it's all yours. I repaired a barn today...and gods did it feel good to be able to help them....one less worry for them to worry about.

    Serene feelings aside, I have concerns about Norwick and the faithful of Kelemvor. When the problems within Norwick fade, another power struggle is going to take place, and not because of foes. I wished no part in this, but intervention was needed....we cannot stand in division, while our foe grows in strength. The title of High cleric will be held in check, until there is a measure of peace to properly annoint such.

    Enough thoughts for the day...it is time I took up a guard position for the night._


  • Day 1 - Stuck in Ormpur.
    _DAMNIT Gabriel…why do you have to be so careless...willful, and like -him-? I couldn't get to him in time...the when the cry came out, I started running towards where it came from...had to quaff both of those potions from the blue mage to get there alive...there was a vertiable horde of Wolves, and at least four larger ones...a return journey wouldn't be possible. I knew this as I moved past....yet, somehow the worgs knew. Their senses are not that good...HOW? It became a rather side point, as I was set upon by ten of the beasts.. I moved to grab the body, and his things and withdraw to Ormpur. Only. there was no body...

    Had he been claimed already? the gods work in mysterious ways...I know this...but, could a body disappear so quickly? I wish I knew....He was a friend....and I do not give up on friends. Ever.

    In the mean time, I am now stuck in Ormpur, bearing a heavy load in Gabriel's abandoned equipment, and trapped behind a wall of wolves...earlier in the day, the ground began to shake sutbly too....I suspect the giants have come down from the mountains into the pass, Futher hampering any chances I may have had of being able to sprint through the straights.

    Who am I kidding? I was never a sprinter. Especially in my armour._

    At the side of the page, there is a rough doodle of what looks to be a hand and a half in origin, with a drawn glow to it

    _So, here I am. Stuck in Ormpur. It isn't too bad I suppose…there is a noticable kind of peace out here...the world keeps ticking over in it's madness, and still this little village remains untouched...it is a pleasant surprise in a way. Murick, the little boy lives carefree, considering where the village is, and the threat of wolves...still, I find it odd that the wolves dare not approach the town...I know there has been rumours of Lycanthropes out here...as well as Master Weshly's..odd accent. Similar to Tindra's...similar in nature I wonder?

    It would explain a few things. Nevertheless, I have been keeping busy around the village, assisting in day to day chores, where they will permit it...today consisted of gathering firewood for the coming storm over the pass...it is due in a tenday. Tomorrow will consist of repairing the barn, near the back of the village.

    That's all for today, back to work._