Entry 317 – Within
What happened after the battle at the gates remains, even in my time, a matter of uncertainty.
The records we possess are contradictory, fragmentary, and often outright impossible.
All that can be said with confidence is this: after the flesh golems of the Irath fell and the outer gate was breached, the Kalandir command ordered a smaller strike force into the palace itself.
The official Kalandir war ledger simply states:
"Four hundred entered the palace in the morning. They did not return."
But this is not entirely true.
We know at least four did return.
The first was Dread Mage Vellichor, without his staff, an object thought to be very powerful, and robbed of his satchel, full of unidentifiable objects, none of which have been accounted for since. Those who saw him that day swore his shadow no longer matched his body.
The second was Blackbird Sonder, her hair and robes streaked with black ash that no washing could remove.
The last two were two unidentified Kalandir elves.
Once immortal. Once beautiful.
They emerged pale, scarred, and aged, visibly aged, with hair turned white and the light gone from their eyes. Whatever they had endured had torn their immortality from them, leaving them mortal; that is certain, as since then, all Kalandir elves, and those close to them, age.
The records note that the other Kalandir present at the siege wept openly upon seeing them, for their kind had already been dwindling then. This was not merely the loss of two warriors; it was the dimming of their people's flame.
What befell the four hundred inside remains the great unanswered question of the Eighth Age.
None spoke of it, not even Vellichor, the most likely to divulge the story.
Even in the years after, when the war against the Irath became a distant memory.
No army ever set foot within it again. Those who argued for its destruction by spell or siege were silenced, often violently, and in more than one infamous case, permanently.
The mystery of the palace has given rise to more speculation than perhaps any other single event of the age. Conspiracy, myth, and faith all take their share.