An Ink-Stained Journal

[The Broken Sword]

What follows are excerpts of John's research journal, and various letters sent through the rumbling pass, but likely never delivered to their intended recipients.


Quarantine.

It always starts with a quarantine. You've got to herd all the cattle together. Doesn't much matter if they've taken to the sickness or not. All that matters is that there's no chance it makes it beyond the perimeter. Shoot to kill. There's no room for mercy here. That's how you end up in a hole. Doesn't matter if you're one of the good guys, the reaper doesnt discriminate, hole's a hole.

Sometimes, though, you get a clean hook. The living ones are best. Thrashing about as the fever takes them. They're good as dead, no harm in doing what we have to do, you know?

Sickness is in the blood. That's the anchor of the soul. And thats where we will find the answer... in the blood.


- J. Ashton

[The Broken Sword]

Titan's Hollow, a small enclave of like-minded souls within the shadows of Roenhelm's Valley, was a long way from the First Province. It was here that the earliest generations of the Ashton family had settled, following in the footsteps of Decusian pilgrims hundreds of years before them. And, though it was secluded from the world within the maze-like crags and hollows of the region, they were no stranger to the ravages of the Torment.



It's not the disease that worries me. It's the fear and desperation of a father trying to protect his family, and what such a man, like others in this cold and cruel world, might do to avoid it. You're more like to see a man cut down his neighbor for a loaf of bread then that same man lend a hand to protecting the fields and harvesting the bounty. Fear changes you, it courses through your veins like a serpent's venom. It is a whisper in the dark, twisting good folk in the worst ways. Yet, you convince yourself just this once... just this one time... you'll do a little evil for the greater of goods. After all, the ends justify the means, right? And, perhaps you feel a little remorseful afterward, but you manage to put that away, locking it in some secret place, because you managed to survive one more dreadful night in this forsaken place. Soon, you're doing it again, and it takes less convincing -- you feel less guilty. It's you or them, and you've friends and family who need you. So you do what needs to be done, and the inky tenebrous ichor, born of ill-deeds, stains your very soul, diminishing what fragile light may have remained. In time, you no longer hesitate when the choice comes, you slaughter those you do not know, judging them for the sin of being foreign to you, for looking and speaking differently than you, for having differing ideologies, or because they too, are like you, fighting for what little life is left in this crumbling world -- and all the while, the truth goes unheeded, as the countless lives you considered meaningless, join the legions of tormented souls, clawing and howling as the fever takes them and changes them forever. And, their voices pierce the night in a shrilling call, striking a chord in your very hearts which sings of the sins that you committed just to stay alive -- and then you realize, the very disease you were hoping to avoid, has come calling at your door, a chilling harbinger of the darkness that now dwells in your own heart, waiting to transform you into one of them.

If the disease should ever come to mine own door, I hope my friends have enough sense to put a bit of metal through my head. That's a far more merciful death than any such as we deserve.

- J. Ashton