On the nature of divinity:

I once met a man, skin like ochre and a voice most melodious and veritably subterranean in its depths. He walked with an erect posture and hunters eyes scanning the horizon, for what I do not know.

Our paths crossed at night, the sun scorched earth still hot despite the hour due to the scouring of times previous. He had approached my fire, a spectre materializing as if woven from the thread of the darkness before my, now wide, eyes.

His were wild, darting left and right with the reckless motion of a loosed arrow. I offered him seat and succour and yet he accepted neither, choosing instead to keep a gait most transient as he wavered at my campfire’s penumbra.

I asked him from where he hailed and at once those orbs of dizzying rotation latched onto my gaze, they blazed with the reflected light my camp and yet more. Hinted at within their hazel entirety was a fire independent of this material plane, as if burning in spite of creation itself, a fire Io himself couldn’t snuff.

He held my gaze for a long while, his stare as unbroken as the pregnant pause which reigned over my once sedate and quaint place of rest.

He broke both with haste soon after the above thought for while turning to look at the waning, viciously pointed moon, his face rapt with an expression of deprived melancholy, he parsed out an exchange I would not soon forget. It was carried softly on the weak, beleaguered back of a sigh and it spoke thusly:

“I will be gone soon.” Equal parts laconic and archaic, as a young scholar searching for mystery I was intrigued.

“Where?” I asked, the light and youthful notes of my voice entirely inadequate for the unknown weightiness of the discussion unfolding.

“Nowhere… Elsewhere, anywhere and yet never here. Not again.”

“Why?” His eyes shot to mine with force and yet in them was not a single trace of malice, no red tinge was there to be found, only the forlorn moistening of an unknowable burden.

“Because I’m finished. I won; I’m done. I develop no more. But a stagnation of pleasant contentedness isn’t enough for them.” He looked away again and his eyes pressed closed, as if attempting to retreat into his skull. If he cried next I know not for he had by now began walking away from the fire. Barely but a shadow was he, silhouetted against the desert void when I called to him:

“Who?” He paused for a time in his retreat, he did not turn nor return, only paused, then spoke.

“A piece of advice from an old man. Don’t succeed, it’s the worst thing that can happen to one of us. They act as though they want to see it until they do. Then all they feel is boredom.” Soon after he was gone, vanished into the silver and pitiful light of the moon.

I have thought long and hard about this encounter from my youth. I was never sure why but the experience was forever burned into my mind, branded onto the underside of my eyelids, there to taunt my with its unresolvedness when I lay for rest. Yet as I have aged and gained wisdom to go with those years it has unravelled itself to me, its hidden depths painstakingly spelunked with a passion nothing short of obsessive and now, as I fade much like that stranger into the night, I believe I may have finally cracked it, seen all the awesome and terrible majesty there was to see. I shall now attempt to recount it to you in the below pages.

(Yet another fragment of a work, this time from Loremaster Po’Fomal. My king, perhaps if you let me in on the finer details of this search rather then sending me like a dog to attack the stacks and archives for the half-remembered ramblings of senile old men this search would progress faster. Yours Loyally, Loremaster Siam’Siak.)