22 November 1747
The dawn found Ryuu running, creatures on his heels. Gimli was not in sight. The city began to shift, stones and buildings grinding as if sliding into defensive positions. Then time… frayed. It stretched thin as a thread under tension.
I created a mental bond with Ulrich and noticed that the bond was created effortlessly, the area and myself was full of Acamantia. That was when the monolith appeared, hundreds of meters high.
Not just an object, a presence. Ryuu felt it too, a consciousness looming behind the stone. We attempted to approach it and felt as if we ourselves were being stretched thin, drawn to the monolith.
Then time snapped back.
The creatures were gone. But so was the city as we knew it.
Where there had been houses of timber and stone, now there were tents. Heavy canvas and hide, arranged in the same footprints as the vanished buildings. The streets were the same, but the world was not. The air smelled of old smoke and damp wool. No one else seemed to notice. The citizen walked past the monolith, between the tents, their faces blank with unseeing acceptance. As if this had always been the shape of their home.
Only the three of us, Ryuu, Ulrich and I saw the substitution. It felt to me as if the Pattern had a whole section of the weave been ripped out and replaced with an older, faded thread.
We sought clarity from Edras Kael. The keeper of the core confirmed the date: still 1747. Time, on paper, was holding. But reality was now a palimpsest. Ulrich, shuffling through papers that seemed more real to him than the tents, mentioned a name: Edrin.
We found Edrin in his house, across the river. This house felt on the inside, like a house too large for its boundaries. He was surrounded by his books, these physical echoes of his mind, and seemed more terrified than ever when I attempted examine the books. An important book written by him was missing from the collection. Eventually we coaxed the information out of him, his latest diary, the one that spoke of The Pulse, events that rewrite Vasthun itself. One had happened the previous summer.
His eyes darted to the canvas ceiling, wide with a confusion that was not his own. “It’s… it’s happening,” he whispered, not to us, but to the contradiction in his own head. “The Pulse. The monolith is… it has always been there. On the platform since I can remember. But it’s also… new. Just now. It wants us to know both things. It wants us to see that it is editing itself.”
The only way to get him to leave was for Ulrich to promise returning something to Edrin. As a protective measure I decided that I’d become him. I wore his face and touched his crumbling mind to open a conduit. It was not a single mind, but a collapsed tenement of personalities. Echoes and stolen memories bled into me, visions of invaders, a familiar stranger from Valdrus wearing clothes that felt strangely familiar. What a strange cacophony of thought.
Back at the monolith, the air hummed with Acamantia. The monolith itself felt as if it were bleeding the energy in to the atmosphere. It called to the hollow hunger in me. Ulrich left briefly and returned with a stack of papers, perhaps a book, which he thrust into Edrin’s shaking hands.
Ryuu touched the monolith and went very still, receiving some silent instruction. The ground shook again when Ulrich touched it.
When I reached out to touch the cold stone, memories that were not mine rushed in to my mind. And beneath it, that deep, resonant ping from far below, in the direction of the sea. A summons. Or a warning.
Now we descend toward the water. I feel as if the Pattern is unravelling on its own, rewriting itself around us. And I must see who, or what, is pulling the thread.