AC:DM CD Lore/Frore Texts/Frore Journal

From the AC:DM CD Lore

Frore Journal

Found on the corpse of a Gelidite Lord of Frore. Translated by Kuyiza bint Fuda of the Zaikhal Arcanum.

It has been a month since the first of the barbarians assaulted the gates. A month of constant assaults and combat, with but a few hours of respite before the next wave throws itself at us. Most are berserkers, attacking with none of the finesse shown even by the Yalain, our old oppressors. They have little knowledge of magic beyond brute force. Yet, many have shown the cunning and persistence of the rats that live in the tunnels below the city.

After a thousand years of work – ten thousand years of exile – we are finished. The Council of Three, Blessed Fenngar, Ferundi, and Frisander, have been slain. Their bodies lie at the upper gates, battered and blistered to a final death by the barbarians. The outlanders swept through the tunnels, and Frore below, killing all the Initiates and Acolytes who dared oppose them, rubbling our golem servants. The squares and passages are littered with corpses. Those of us who remain are a pitiful remnant.

The body of Frisirth, the mighty enchanter who wrought most of what we have achieved here, lies frozen on the floor of Work's room. Despite the queer connection he had with the Work, his obsession with it and unsettling devotion to its safety, he remained a mighty and loyal servant of the Council. He and his thrall Tremblant fell, after a valiant struggle, at the room's very doors. The assistance of the Lords and their golem guards could not save him. The barbarians prevailed, and rushed the room.

There spun the Great Work, a project of centuries. So many years we spent, weaving our spells around it, bending it to our needs. It was working. It was finally working. The heat of the deep earth was being drawn into it, contained. The world had cooled. Snow covered the deserts. Soon it would be a frozen wasteland. Only ourselves, with our superb adaptation to the cold, would be able to survive. With all our enemies in death, we could finally return to Gelid. The Old Lords which revile us, the barbarians, the Olthoi... that idiot boy of Yalain sitting smug and aloof in his lofty fortress… all would have passed into ice and memory.

The Work was assaulted. To our own surprise it stuck back as a living creature might, casting flame spells of incredible strength. It slew many, drove them back again and again, regenerating with astonishing speed. In the end, it was overwhelmed. By ten, a dozen, twenty? I do not know. It matters not. The Great Work of Frore lies in shattered pieces on the floor, bleeding its warmth back into the undeserving earth.

There is a darkness now where the Work fell. No matter how much light we place in the room, that spot remains dim and strange. I cannot explain it. Perhaps Frisirth, with his intuitive understanding of the Work, could have.

I do not understand. The ancient prophesies of the Falatacot said the Fourth Sending would begin in a city of Dericost named Frore. We were the nobility of High Gelid, the royal province of Dericost. We founded Frore to fulfill prophesy. Yet, we are broken, and the world recovers from our near-success. For this end we fled the lands of the Yalain? For this we prostituted ourselves to the dark rituals of the Old Lords, buying time to complete the prophesy with rotting flesh?

We have thought ourselves our own gods. Perhaps the old gods have brought us low to teach us humility again. I mean the gods of the swamp and the deep earth, the true gods, who live in ageless splendor, and are of terrible aspect.

These walls of stone and marble have long seemed to me an enclosing womb, protecting us from the unearned enemies we have suffered for millennia. We came here to build a holy city, from which we might return home in triumph after our long exile. Now, I look at the walls, and can only think of them cracking and crumbling, collapsing inward, burying us in the vault of eternity into which so many of the Old Lords were thrown.

I rest uneasy, when rest can be had. I feel cold.