honestly recount the trouble surrounding this book if one neglects to mention the netherlings. I never saw one alive, but unless they change colour when they die, they appear to be very powerful, very purple women. All muscle and iron, I’m told by my less fortunate companions who fought them, that they fight like demented rams and follow short, effeminate men in dresses.
As bad as things got, however, it’s all behind us now. Despite the fact that the Deepshriek escaped with two of its heads, despite the fact that the netherlings’ commander, a rather massive woman with sword to match escaped, despite the fact that we are currently becalmed with one day left until the man sent to pick us up from the middle of the sea decides we’re dead and leaves and we really die shortly after and our corpses rot in the noonday sun as gulls form polite conversation over whether my eyeballs or my stones are the more tasty part of me …
One moment, I’m not quite sure where I intended to go with that statement.
I wish I could be at ease, really I do. But it’s not quite that easy. The adventurer’s constant woe is that the adventure never ends with the corpse and the loot. After the blood is spilled and the deed is done, there’s always people coming for revenge, all manner of diseases acquired and the fact that a rich adventurer is only a particularly talented and temporarily wealthy kind of scum.
Still … that’s not what plagues me. Not to the extent of the voice in my head, at least.
I tried to ignore it, at first. I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t speaking in my head, that it was only high exhaustion and low morale wearing on my mind. I tried to tell myself that …
And it told me otherwise.
It’s getting worse now. I hear it all the time. It hears me all the time. What I think, it knows. What I know, it casts doubt on. It tells me all sorts of horrible things, tells me to do worse things, commands me to hurt, to kill, to strike back. It gets so loud, so loud lately that I want to … that I just—
Pardon.
The issue is that I can make the voice stop. I can get a few moments respite from it … but only by opening the tome.
Miron told me not to. Common sense told me again. But I did it, anyway. The book is more awful than I could imagine. At first, it didn’t even seem to say anything: its pages were just filled with nonsensical symbols and pages of people being eviscerated, decapitated, manipulated and masticated at the hands, minds and jaws of various creatures too awful to re-create in my journal.
As I read on, however … it began to make more sense. I could read the words, understand what they were saying, what they were suggesting. And when I flip back to the pages I couldn’t read before, I can see them all over again. The images are no less awful, but the voice … the voice stops. It no longer tells me things. It no longer commands me.
It doesn’t just make sense grammatically, but philosophically as well. It doesn’t speak of evisceration, horrific sin or demonic incursion like it’s supposed to, despite the illustrations. Rather, it speaks of freedom, of self-reliance, of life without a need to kneel. It’s really more of a treatise, but I suppose ‘Manifesto of the Undergates’ just doesn’t have the same ring.
I open the book only late at night. I can’t do it in front of my companions. During the day, I sit on it to make sure that they can’t snatch a glimpse at its words. To my great relief, none of them have tried so far, apparently far more bothered by other matters.
To be honest, it’s a bit of a relief to see them all so agitated and uncomfortable. Gariath, especially, since his preferred method of stress release usually involves roaring, gnashing and stomping with me having to get a mop at the end of it. Lately, however, he just sits at the rear of our little boat, holding the rudder, staring out at sea. He’s so far unmoved by anything, ignoring us completely.
Not that such a thing stops other people from trying.
Denaos is the only one in good spirits, so far. Considering, it seems odd that he should be alone in this. After all, he points out,