The Dimming Light
- The last words of Thelonius the Scribe
I am Brother Thelonius, last Keeper of Hidden Light, of the Scriptorium of Lunthyr. By the time these words are read, my bones shall lie dust-bound, and this world may no longer resemble the one I knew. I write by candlelight while the earth quakes and the skies groan, during what we now call the Great Cataclysm. The ground shudders with each passing day, and the heavens have turned their face from us.
This chronicle is not sanctioned by the Papacy. Were I younger, they might burn me for it. But their fires are dying, and so too is their grip on truth. They rewrote history in their own image, erased voices, shattered scrolls, and silenced those who remembered. Yet memory is resilient, and ink, though fragile, can outlast even empires.
Last eve, as I lay coughing in this crumbling stone cell, I was visited by a Fay. Not a vision. Not a dream. A presence as real as the stone beneath my back. I felt as though I stood before a storm, not wind nor rain, but something vaster, a force of nature wrapped in grace and sorrow. It knelt beside me and spoke not in words, but in truths.
"Keep hope, Thelonius," it said, "Demira's dream has not faded. Her sacrifice was not the end, it was the waiting seed."
And as it turned to leave, it paused, the light from its form casting no shadow. "Next time we meet," it said, "it will be your last day in this Creation, and the beginning of the era of the Scions."
And so I write, not for myself, but for them, for you, Scion. May these pages be the lantern that enlightens your path.
—Thelonius the Scribe Last Keeper of Hidden Light From the Scriptorium of Lunthyr, veiled in fog and silence, where the dead still dream
Written in the Winter of the Year 3999
The Great Cataclysm (~3900–present)